by Ed Sikov
Like everyone else on the production team, Edith Head and her costumers were vaulting over their original budget, but Wilder and Brackett weren’t at all concerned. It was Billy, in fact, who insisted that Head be as extravagant as possible. The gowns she designed for Joan Fontaine are gorgeous, though Fontaine later told a reporter that the low neckline on her dresses “was the only way I could steal a scene from those dratted dogs.”
On September 3 the script was finally finished. The production closed on September 20, a full twenty-eight days behind schedule and so far over budget than an entire feature film could have been made from the difference. By the time of its release, The Emperor Waltz sported the astronomical price tag of $4,070,248—nearly $1,200,000 more than Paramount had originally approved.
Many years later, long after his breakup with Wilder, Brackett called The Emperor Waltz one of the “stinkers.” “I don’t suppose I ever understood it very well,” he said. “I was sure Billy would know. After all, Vienna. And we did have Bing Crosby. I can’t imagine what went wrong. The final result was quite boring, wasn’t it?” The Emperor Waltz also created some acrimony in Billy’s relationship with Lubitsch. Billy’s friend and former mentor had been mulling over a film idea in which a dog acted as intermediary between a squabbling couple. Then Wilder invited him to a rough cut of The Emperor Waltz. Lubitsch appeared to be amused and entertained by the film—until the dogs took over. Then he was quietly enraged. He kept whispering to his wife throughout the screening, “That’s my story! That’s my story! The son of a bitch has taken my story!” Father figures sometimes require mutinies.
The Emperor Waltz is one of Wilder’s weakest films. It must have made great sense in 1946 to feature Bing Crosby yodeling in lederhosen, but the device hasn’t aged well. Willy Fritsch or Willi Forst would have been much more winning in the role, had either of them been from Newark. Crosby’s essentially solitary persona, on the other hand, doesn’t work very well in a romance. It is not coincidental that Crosby’s most popular film roles were those of a celibate priest and Bob Hope’s sidekick. In The Emperor Waltz he’s simply too self-absorbed to connect with Fontaine. To top it off, Brackett and Wilder insist on giving him the annoyingly folksy habit of calling Johanna “honey countess.”
The film still features its share of clever lines, not to mention dazzling set design and brilliant cinematography. (Wilder himself hated the way The Emperor Waltz looks. “Everything looked like it was in an ice cream parlor…. Even the dialogue sounded wrong in color.” It would be nine years before he tried color again, and he hated that film, too.)
The film’s punch comes from a few revealing characterizations, not the least of which is Johanna’s ne’er-do-well father (Roland Culver)—a mustachioed gambler, philanderer, dilettante, and failure. He is an oily embarrassment, a piece of necessary baggage. Family matters plague the family dog as well. At one point, Scheherazade suffers a nervous breakdown. Dr. Semmelgries (Sig Ruman, now Americanized with one n instead of two), the royal veterinarian, performs a familiar Viennese treatment. The dog lies on her back on a couch and fields the following question: “Now I must ask you for your earliest recollections—your father and mother. Was your home life congenial?” Scheherazade responds by squealing and writhing in distress.
The emperor, meanwhile, is just a sad old man whose only pleasure lies in the possibility of breeding his elderly poodle. (“His majesty’s dog is asking for the paw of Scheherazade!”) Franz Josef lives under the constant threat of death. The script merely alludes in passing to the assassination of his wife, the Empress Sisi, and the double suicide at Mayerling of his son, the Crown Prince Rudolf, and his seventeen-year-old lover, Maria Vetsera. (As Billy later explained, “It’s always better to go to a hunting lodge and die with a prince than go to the Riviera with some schmuck.”) But one hardly needs a history book to see that his recent life has been joyless. When the emperor’s courtiers overhear Virgil proudly declare in American slang that his gramophone “is going to kill him,” they naturally assume that Virgil is yet another of the many assassins who wish to see him dead. “Oh dear,” Franz Josef sighs, “this gets to be such a bore.”
Curiously, only one character in The Emperor Waltz speaks with a German accent—the vet. At first, his thick, harsh inflection seems designed only to reinforce the Freud joke, but when he takes the newborn mongrel puppies, puts them in a wire basket, hangs the basket methodically on the side of a sink, and proceeds to run water into the tub to drown them, one gets the sense that something deeper is being played out with this character. Wilder handles the moment in a single shot, with Dr. Semmelgries actually pulling the pups off of their mother, at which point the camera pans with him, tracks slowly forward to the sink, and then stares in for an attenuated moment as the water runs. When Virgil saves the infants, he races into the ballroom with them just as the emperor arrives to the tune of “Deutschland Über Alles.” “They’re not pure enough for you, huh?,” he shouts angrily. “Not quite your sort. Freaks! Little mongrels you wouldn’t have around. So what are you going to do? You’re going to shake them off that great big noble family tree of yours. And let them rot, as if nothing had happened.” Wilder doesn’t relate much to Crosby, but he clearly sees himself in the puppies. If Crosby’s acting was as rich as his voice, there would be no doubt that The Emperor Waltz is really a film about genocide.
Unlike history, though, The Emperor Waltz has a happy ending. The emperor insists on keeping the puppies, and the low-bred American man and the high-bred Viennese woman win the right to mate. More convincing, though, is an earlier scene of emotional brutality between the principals. “No hard feelings?” Virgil asks Johanna. “No feelings at all,” she answers.
The mopping up of Berlin had progressed by the spring of 1947 to the point that A Foreign Affair could proceed. Billy’s ideas for his propaganda comedy had shifted a bit. It still bore the same general story line—struggling German woman meets American GI—but now it featured an additional character: a congresswoman on a fact-finding mission. This accessory was the brainchild of screenwriters Irwin and David Shaw, who’d sold an original story of airborne congressional romance called Love in the Air to Paramount for $11,000. (Irwin Shaw went on to write best-selling novels, including The Young Lions, Two Weeks in Another Town, and the epic melodrama Rich Man, Poor Man.) The Shaws’ treatment begins: “The Second World War was not only witness to the most enormous movement of material goods in the history of the world. It also saw the greatest mass movement of lust in recorded time. Six million young and vigorous Americans leave the memories of the most gigantic pass in history.…” The Shaws’ tale concerned a randy GI named Jasper who has left a girl in every ruined port. He wants to see them all again and gets the chance to do so when he is assigned to accompany Congresswoman Kinnicutt to London, Paris, Moscow, Rome, and Sydney. He ends up proposing to the legislator as they fly into Washington, D.C.
Since Paramount owned the rights to Love in the Air, Brackett and Wilder were free to incorporate a few of the Shaws’ ideas into their own proposed comedy about postwar Germany. With the help of another screenwriter, Robert Harari, they submitted their first full treatment on May 31, 1947. It begins with this memorable description of Berlin: “The city looked like a great hunk of burned Gorgonzola cheese on which rats had been gnawing. The rats were gone, and ants had taken over, putting some neatness into the ruins, piling the crumbs of destruction into tidy piles.” The GI, now called Johnny, has received the gift of a chocolate cake from back home. He promptly trades it on the black market for the decidedly used mattress. Johnny’s thoughts on the exchange are concise: “Some hungry Kraut had a mattress and two pillows to spare—let him eat cake.” The mattress is for a loose German woman named Erika. The treatment describes two GIs’ response to Erika at a nightclub: “As far as Mike and Joe were concerned, only one thing remained to be settled: whose pig was she?” Best of all, when Johnny gives Erika the mattress, here is how he demands his payment: “How about a kis
s now, you Beast of Belsen?”
Charlie and Billy were now very much accustomed to going into production without having finished writing the screenplay. Their method allowed not only for a certain organic development as far as dialogue and action were concerned, but it also kept both the censors and the front office in the dark. A complete script for A Foreign Affair would not appear until November; by that point Richard L. Breen, a former journalist had replaced Harari as Billy and Charlie’s collaborator.
Typically, there was fuss over the title. Owing to its untoward mingling of sex and American foreign policy, A Foreign Affair made the executives nervous. They offered some suggestions: Operation Candybar, The Feeling Is Mutual, Out of Bounds, No Limit, Irresistible, The Honorable Phoebe Frost, and, most grating of all, Two Loves Have I. Brackett and Wilder considered Operation Candybar but ended up sticking with A Foreign Affair.
In July, during an intense heat wave, Billy and tout-Hollywood attended the premiere of Brecht’s Galileo at the Coronet Theater on La Cienega Boulevard. The star of the play was Charles Laughton. The crowd was an assemblage of the sort that could only make sense in Hollywood in the 1940s: Charles Chaplin was in the audience along with Ingrid Bergman, Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles Boyer, Olivia de Havilland, Igor Stravinsky, Gene Kelly, John Garfield, and of course Brecht himself. Wilder may or may not have been impressed with the highbrow playwright, but there is no question that he was fascinated and amazed by Laughton, a man of extraordinary talent and intelligence playing a man of even greater talent and intelligence. Laughton would eventually become one of Billy’s closest friends.
Soon after seeing Galileo, Billy left for Europe to supervise the location shooting of A Foreign Affair. He stopped over in London and arrived in Berlin on August 12, along with Buddy Coleman. He found the city somewhat neater than he left it, but only to the extent that the industrious German ants had swept the rottenest bits of their Gorgonzola into orderly heaps. The corpses had all been cleared away, but the results of the 363 bombing raids the Allies flew over Berlin during the war were still very much in evidence. About 500,000 of the city’s buildings had been destroyed by those raids, and that figure doesn’t even include the damage the Russians inflicted when they shelled the place in the weeks before the Nazis’ final collapse. But Berliners were resilient, tough. They were already buying and selling and bartering, rebuilding what they could, leveling the rest, and above all, surviving.
Erich Pommer had become chief of the film section at the Information Control Division in Berlin, and he greatly facilitated the production of A Foreign Affair by arranging for the reconstituted Ufa to advance all of Paramount’s expenses in German marks. Paramount did have to bring all of its own raw film stock because there wasn’t any in Berlin. Food was still scarce; the black market was thriving; there were military police everywhere. Despite the calm imposed by foreign occupation, Wilder and his crew were literally filming in a war zone. But they weren’t the first to do so. Even with all his advance planning, his schmoozing of army personnel, and his connection to Pommer, Wilder was still beaten to the punch by the crew of RKO’s Berlin Express. They’d shown up at the end of July and had already begun filming by the time he arrived.
Location shooting for A Foreign Affair in Berlin began on August 17 and lasted through September 6. Billy and his crew, including cameramen Dewey Wrigley and Kurt Schulz, made their way through the desolate city streets filming the ghastly but typical scenes of devastation they encountered. They set up their cameras at the blackened Brandenburg Gate as planned. They filmed moving camera shots following a jeep as it sped down empty, rubble-lined boulevards. Twisted girders, concrete chips, and freestanding facades were all that remained. They shot footage in the rutted Tiergarten and along the now-desolate Kurfürstendamm. In the finished film, some of this footage can be seen in rear projection behind the congressional delegation as the commanding officer gives them a tour. “That pile of stone over there was the Adlon Hotel,” he tells his fascinated guests. They pass Hitler’s New Chancellery, now in ruins: “There’s the balcony where he bet his Reich would last a thousand years. That’s the one that broke the bookies’ hearts.”
The location footage Billy and his crew shot in August also provides the film with its most sardonic joke. After Captain Johnny Pringle (John Lund) piles the ratty mattress into his jeep’s backseat and takes off to visit his glorified hooker in her hovel, Wilder’s camera follows along as he rides around Berlin’s decrepit, ghostly streets to the sweet tune of “Isn’t It Romantic?”
Billy was clearly of two minds about all of this. John Woodcock recalls a moment when Billy’s irony broke. They were in the editing room: “After viewing aerial shots of block after block of Berlin levelled to the ground, I remarked that I couldn’t help feel sorry for the Germans. With that Billy jumped to his feet and yelled, To hell with those bastards! They burned most of my family in their damned ovens! I hope they burn in hell!’”
Even with periodic bouts of bad weather, the shoot ran only three days over schedule. By September 4, Wilder had left for Paris, where Brackett met him for conferences and fun, after which they joined the vacationing Mr. and Mrs. Ray Milland on the Queen Elizabeth for passage back to the States. The chief purpose of Billy’s stopover in Paris was to convince Marlene Dietrich to take the role of Erika, the cabaret star who has a habit of sleeping with influential men of various political persuasions. Simply put, Erika is a Nazi. (“She was Goebbels’s girl, or Goering’s—one of ’em, anyway,” says one GI to another in the film.) Dietrich herself was adamantly and vocally anti-Fascist, and in fact she was the first woman to be awarded the Medal of Freedom for her passionate and tireless efforts on behalf of the Allies. Marlene’s initial response to the idea of playing a Nazi was quick and negative. Dietrich, who was living at the Hotel Georges V at the time, was willing to talk to Billy, though, and, as usual, Billy cajoled and wheedled and charmed his potential star until she caved in.
Part of the draw as far as Marlene was concerned was that Wilder had already commissioned some new songs by their mutual old friend Friedrich Holländer, now Frederick Hollander. Hollander was then under contract to RKO and had to be borrowed, but that was no problem. Even with Hollander’s songs written expressly for her, Marlene only agreed after Billy shrewdly showed her the screen tests of two American actresses he claimed to have had in mind for the role, should Marlene turn him down. It was an obvious ploy, but it worked perfectly on Dietrich. Her compensation must have proven enticing, too. She earned an initial $110,000, plus $66,000 more for additional time.
For the role of Phoebe Frost, Wilder and Brackett convinced Jean Arthur to come out of her self-imposed retirement. Arthur had grown weary of acting in high-pressure films and all the ensuing publicity demands. Her last film had been in 1944 (The Impatient Years for Columbia). So in 1947 she enrolled at Stephens College, a women’s school in Columbia, Missouri, where she took courses in philosophy, biology, and geology. As she told the press at the time, “I’ve had to work all my life, and now I want to learn.” But when A Foreign Affair came along, the forty-two-year-old actress dropped out of school with only two weeks remaining before her final exams. She, too, must have responded to the money: $175,000 with an additional $10,000 for four extra weeks.
A Foreign Affair is a political film, albeit an unconventional one. But its effectiveness as propaganda in Germany diminished as the script evolved. Erika is entirely unrepentant about her Nazi past. As written, let alone as embodied by Dietrich, Erika von Schlütow is a far cry from Billy’s initial character sketch. While Brackett and Wilder give Johnny a respectable reason for cuddling up to Erika (we learn, eventually, that he’s trying to smoke out her lover, a former Gestapo leader, now a wanted war criminal), it’s perfectly clear that his most urgent undercover mission occurs every night in her bed. Johnny’s lust for Erika is enflamed not despite the fact that she is a Nazi but because she is a Nazi. In their first scene together, he pulls her close to him, and roughly so.
He nuzzles her hair; she asks what he’s doing. “I’m wiping my face,” he explains. Dialogue follows:
JOHNNY: What you Germans need is a better conscience.
ERIKA: I have a good conscience. I have a new Führer now. You. (She raises her left arm in a Nazi salute.) Heil Johnny.
JOHNNY: You heil me once more and I’ll knock your teeth in.
(They draw together in a sticky embrace.)
ERIKA: You’d bruise your lips.
JOHNNY: I ought to choke you a little. (He places his hands around her neck.) Break you in two. Build a fire under you, you blonde witch.
(They kiss deeply and passionately.)
Beyond the creation of a beautiful, remorseless enemy lust object, Wilder gave full voice to whatever camaraderie remained between the Americans and the Soviets at the dawn of the Cold War. The lowlife Lorelei cabaret in which Erika performs is a haven of postwar cooperation, with American GIs and Russian soldiers constantly carousing, singing, and dancing the gazatsky together in harmony. (At the Lorelei, both Reds and Yanks buy drinks with packs of cigarettes. “Five packs for champagne, four packs for wine, one pack for beer,” says the waiter; “Eine kleine clip joint,” one of the GIs mutters.) Moreover, one of the visiting congressmen describes, in a comico-serious manner, his definition of a healthy leftist foreign policy. Explaining his desire to send food to the German people without engaging in what he derisively calls “dollar diplomacy,” the liberal representative says, “If you give a hungry man a loaf of bread, that’s democracy. If you leave the wrapper on, it’s imperialism!”
On the face of it, this bit of dialogue may not seem terribly dangerous. On the other hand, when the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) held its first round of hearings earlier that spring, one of the lines Dalton Trumbo had written for Ginger Rogers for the 1943 wartime melodrama Tender Comrade was cited as evidence not only of Trumbo’s own treasonous activities but of the Communist infiltration of Hollywood in general: “Share and share alike—that’s democracy.” Charles Brackett’s impeccable Republican credentials and his well-known conservative politics, not to mention his new position as vice president of the Academy, protected him from ever having to explain what he meant by “democracy” and “imperialism,” and they also appear to have been enough to prevent any shadow of suspicion from falling upon his liberal writing partner.