I returned to the Film Forum for more Essential Wilder and tonight it was A Foreign Affair, a fluffy comedy about the shenanigans of U.S. occupation troops in post-war Germany and the congressional delegate on a mission to expose any conduct unbecoming. Critics in 1948 were miffed that Wilder would find comedy in the bombed-to-hell city of a vanquished enemy so soon after the war’s close, not to mention visual jokes involving Hitler and swastikas (which actually are funny).
As the story goes, Iowa Congresswoman Phoebe Frost (the prim Jean Arthur) is on a fact-finding mission to gauge the morale of the U.S. peacekeeping troops stationed in Berlin. What she finds are gleeful GIs profiteering from the black market and taking advantage of the fact that there are many suddenly unattached fräuleins living among the ruins.
We’re introduced to Marlene Dietrich, as the ex-Nazi-sympathizing nightclub singer Erika Von Schluetow, in the least-divalike way imaginable: as she brushes her teeth, then spits it playfully at her boyfriend, Captain John Pringle (John Lund), who has just traded a chocolate birthday cake from his girlfriend in the states for a mattress.
After some undercover work for which she pretends to be one of the aforementioned fräuleins, Frost suspects Pringle’s fraternizations with the enemy, so he switches sides and starts putting the moves on her instead. I got a kick out of watching him loosen her from a tense, by-the-books politico to a full-fledged showboat, peaking in her getting sauced at a bar then launching into her state’s actual unofficial song, “The Iowa Corn Song,” the chorus of which is:
We’re from I-o-way, I-o-way
State of all the land
Joy on ev’ry hand
We’re from I-o-way, I-o-way
That’s where the tall corn grows.
A Foreign Affair is stuck as a lesser entry in the Wilder oeuvre, but it’s still an entertaining one, even if it has lost some of its satirical political bite.