Inclubabu Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

Infamousta brilliant actors, brilliant editing

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Usamah Harvey The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

gudpaljoey-78582 How can critics snub this great movie? Maybe they didn't want to be associated with empathy for the Germans in 1948. Maybe they were nervous about showing politicians for what they are. Maybe they just don't like Marlene. This is one of the best movies of all time. Great acting. Great story. Great production. And of course, great direction. The use of songs and music throughout the picture that hold together with the story is marvelous. So many great funny lines. I don't know why John Lund didn't find more work in comedy. He demonstrated how good he is in this one. Love this film back when and now.

calvinnme post war occupied Germany! Jean Arthur is a U.S. congresswoman from Iowa - and I mean straight-laced right out of the "Two Grecian Urns" scene in The Music Man - and has flown over along with other congresspersons to occupied Germany to report on conditions there. Her character's last name of Frost is very descriptive. Frost's first drive through the American sector, supervised by Col. Plummer (Millard Mitchell) is hilarious. She sees American soldiers fraternizing everywhere and the topper is a woman pushing a baby carriage sporting an American flag! Jean Arthur's expressions are priceless. The congresswoman's frost is uncomfortably melting. And the whole experience leaves her shocked yet somewhat sexually curious, as though she was a teenager.Marlene Deitrich plays a German nightclub singer, Erika, who lives in the ruins of Berlin, and you'd be surprised what's important when your city and country are in complete ruins - soap, toothpaste and toothbrush, and shampoo become of vital importance. Erika is a smart woman who knows how to use her sex appeal to get what she wants. Her target - American captain John Pringle played by John Lund. You can forgive Erika for doing what she did - trying to survive. But Lund's Pringle plays this like a complete dope. You'd have to believe American casualties were very high for him to rise through the ranks to the level that he is, seeing that he doesn't seem to get that Erika may like him, but she is basically using him and his rank to survive.Well, Frost does some digging and realizes that Deitrich's character is an ex-Nazi who is being protected by some American officer - she doesn't just know who yet. Unfortunately she confides in Captain Pringle. Somehow he must distract her from her mission. Now some of what I've told you is true and some isn't actually what it seems to be. I'll let you watch and find out.This is almost a perfect movie - I love that the two female leads are in their 40's and are playing romantic leads, not grandmas. And Deitrich still has that Blue Angel charm and magnetism when she sings her numbers at the rundown bombed out nightclub. What I don't love - and maybe it was necessary to get it past the censors considering the rest of the material - was Millard Mitchell's character pontificating when leading the entourage of congresspersons on the tour of Berlin. The theme went something like - If only we could get these people to love hamburgers and hot dogs and get the kids to start playing baseball something like the Third Reich could never happen again. Billy Wilder wrote and directed this one, so I know he knew it was more complex than that, but sometimes you had to make concessions to get script approval in the age of the production code, and I think that is probably what that was all about.I highly recommend this one. It's another example of Billy Wilder taking a slice of the past that is long gone and making it timelessly funny and witty.

jarrodmcdonald-1 This is not Billy Wilder's best film, and it occurs between greater classics like The Lost Weekend and Sunset Boulevard. At times, it seems as if the writer-director is going through the motions here, with another one of those ideas that work more like an extended gag (a two-minute joke stretched out to feature film length). But there are some silly moments in A Foreign Affair, and that makes it worth seeing. The humor resonates well.Also, the picture is fascinating to watch because of its two very different lead actresses. Perhaps no other film has such a unique mishmash of performance styles. As she exhibits in so many of her pictures, Jean Arthur has an unnatural way of delivering a natural performance. Then, there's Marlene Dietrich (and volumes have been written about her). Dietrich has a natural way of delivering a very unnatural performance.

rhoda-9 Though the plot of A Foreign Affair is lightweight and has seen service in many other movies (wholesome woman and sexy woman pursuing the same man; man pretends to fall for woman and then really does), the backdrop is deadly serious, compelling, and unusual. We are in the American Zone of Berlin after the war, a sector that, with the British and French zones, would soon become West Berlin, a magnet for many who would struggle to escape to this tiny outpost of the West in what would become Communist East Germany, many of them dying in the attempt. The Berlin Wall would be built to separate West from East Berlin. The Germans in the movie have had their world destroyed, don't know what is going on in the present, and can only wait with helpless terror for the future.Though we are shown houses pulverised by Allied bombing and people living amongst the ruins, there is a lighthearted aspect to it all--the usual wartime stuff of GI's trading chocolate or stockings for kisses from pretty girls. In reality, however, it was more likely that they would be traded for sex from women desperate to feed themselves and their children, by soldiers reveling in a power they never had in civilian life and oblivious to the disgust and humiliation of the women. Marlene Dietrich says that, when the Russian troops invaded Berlin, "it was hard for the women." That's the understatement of the century! The Russians raped, and gang-raped, any women they could find--women died from being literally raped to death. It is understandable that Billy Wilder did not want to make the milieu too bleak in order to dampen the comedy, but keep in mind that matters were far more brutal and squalid than portrayed here.It is a rather dark joke that Dietrich is cast in the role of a German woman who has had Nazi lovers and still feels loyal to Hitler. In fact, Dietrich became an American citizen in 1939 and extensively toured US military bases, sometimes at great danger, to entertain the troops. This aroused rage in Germany, and even decades after the war, as the result of protests by locals who called her a traitor, the government backed down and did not name a street in her honour. Can you beat that! An amusing footnote: When Dietrich tries her wiles on an officer, he says, Don't be silly, I've just become a grandfather. I don't know whether this was coincidence or intentional, but at the time the movie was made, Dietrich became a grandmother--an event that gave her a label that was very popular, but which she hated, "world's most glamorous grandmother."