Virgil meets Countess Johanna at the palace; she gives him the brush-off, just as the emperor did. By contrast, her French poodle, Scheherazade, takes a fancy to Virgil’s mongrel Buttons. In the end, the palace guard gives Virgil, who is only a common drummer, and his pooch the heave-ho.
Johanna is officially informed that “his Majesty’s dog is asking for the paw of Scheherazade.” She hopes that her pedigreed poodle will mate with the emperor’s black poodle, Louis. But Scheherazade suffers a nervous breakdown, and Johanna takes her to be examined by the royal veterinarian, Dr. Zwieback. After hearing about the high-bred poodle’s regard for Virgil’s low-bred terrier, Zwieback decides that Scheherazade is pining for Buttons. He states that the two dogs must be allowed to become friends. Virgil and Johanna likewise strike up a relationship; Virgil melts her icy coolness gradually, and their friendship ripens into love. Princess Bitotska smirks in her narration that Johanna is going to the dogs.
But the emperor tells Virgil regretfully that he cannot give his consent to the union of Johanna and Virgil. He explains that Johanna would never survive as a housewife married to a commoner in Newark, New Jersey. The extended flashback ends, and we are back at the gala. Virgil soon learns that Scheherazade is about to give birth. He rushes to the imperial stables, where he discovers that Scheherazade has brought forth three white puppies. That signals that Buttons, not Louis, sired the pups. Virgil snatches up the basket of puppies and takes them to the ballroom. He presents them to Franz Josef, who dotes on the cute, scrappy pups and decides to keep them as his own.
Virgil bluntly tells Franz Josef that, if Buttons and Scheherazade can overcome class barriers, he and Johanna can transcend the conventions of her tradition-oriented homeland and wed. The emperor gives their marriage his blessing and makes this telling remark to Virgil: “You Americans are simple; you are stronger than us. Ultimately the world will be yours.” The cocky Virgil responds, without batting an eyelash, “You bet it will!”
Meanwhile, since the subject of marriage has been raised, the aging Princess Bitotska turns to the impoverished aristocrat who wants to marry her for her money and inquires cynically, “How does the richest woman in Austria look to you?” The gold digger replies obsequiously, “Ravishing!” She has bought herself a younger man with whom she can have one last fling. So much for the decadent Austrian aristocracy. The orchestra strikes up “The Emperor Waltz,” and Virgil invites Johanna to waltz with him as he sings the lyrics for Strauss’s waltz written especially for the movie.
When Wilder and Brackett looked at the rough cut, both were rather disappointed. “I can’t imagine what went wrong,” Brackett said afterward; “we did have Bing Crosby. The final result was quite dull.”16 Wilder said, “I can’t get it into my head that people break into song” in an operetta, “but they do.” He concluded, “I was handicapped; I was not up to making a musical.”17
Because Wilder had intended The Emperor Waltz to be an homage to Lubitsch, he had a private screening of the rough cut for Lubitsch and his wife. Some time back Lubitsch had told Wilder that one day he hoped to make a movie about a squabbling couple who are reduced to utilizing their dog as a go-between. As The Emperor Waltz began unreeling, Lubitsch saw how the two dogs brought their owners together, and he said to his wife in a stage whisper, “The son-of-a-bitch has taken my story!”18 Otto Preminger, who was part of the German film colony in Hollywood, thought that Lubitsch overreacted by accusing Wilder of plagiarism. “Lubitsch had been demoralized by a severe heart attack,” said Preminger, “and continually worried about his heart condition.” So he really was not himself. “At another time he would not have made such a fuss.”19
Withal, Wilder remained friends with his mentor until Lubitsch’s untimely death at fifty-five, on Sunday, November 30, 1947. Lubitsch was in the middle of filming an operetta with Betty Grable, That Lady in Ermine (1948). (Preminger finished the picture.) Lubitsch had spent the afternoon with a call girl, suffered a postcoital heart attack, and died before a doctor could reach him. He was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park on December 5, 1947, with Billy Wilder acting as a pallbearer and Charles Brackett delivering the eulogy. Lubitsch’s death was a blow to Wilder. William Wyler said that, when he and Wilder left Forest Lawn after the funeral, Wilder said to him, “No more Ernst Lubitsch.” Wyler responded, “Worse than that: no more Lubitsch pictures.”20
When Wilder screened the final cut of The Emperor Waltz for the Paramount executives in the fall of 1946, they judged the lavish production “only moderately and spasmodically amusing.”21 They thought it would be a hard sell for the publicity department and decided to postpone its release until the marketers could come up with a suitable ad campaign. Frank Freeman employed the same logic to delay the release of The Emperor Waltz that he had used to shelve The Lost Weekend for months. The Emperor Waltz, he reminded the other executives, had cost more than $4 million to make, so why spend an additional $2 million on prints and advertising for a movie the studio did not have much faith in?
The delay in releasing the picture stretched to nearly two years. Once again Barney Balaban finally insisted, as he had about The Lost Weekend, that Paramount did not make pictures just to have them languish in the studio vault. The studio finally got around to arranging for the movie’s world premiere at the Paramount Hollywood Theatre on May 26, 1948, about a month before the general release. Fearing critical brickbats for the picture, Wilder did not attend the premiere but took off for a European vacation instead.
When the movie opened across the country in July, it received mixed reviews, but none were hostile. Some reviewers felt that the movie was an entertaining piece of strudel whose witty dialogue and tuneful score compensated for its hokey plot. One critic found the movie mildly diverting but hazarded that “The Emperor Waltz was entrusted to Wilder because of his birth certificate, rather than his sensibility.”22 James Agee’s notice straddled the fence, with both positive and negative observations: “At its best this semi-musical is amusing and well-shaped, because Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder have learned a fair amount from the comedies of Ernst Lubitsch.” Agee could not resist ending with a sly vulgarity: “At its worst, it yaps and embraces every unguarded leg in sight.”23 Other reviews were decidedly positive. The Hollywood trade papers observed that “Bing was never better than in The Emperor Waltz and not as good since Going My Way,” and “Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder get better with every picture.”24
Indeed, The Emperor Waltz has some virtues that are frequently overlooked. One cannot deny that the film entrances the eye. The visual richness of the movie is reflected in the way Wilder skillfully shot the rugged, beautiful Canadian landscapes that stood in for the Tyrolean Alps, with roseate dawns and dusks. His shooting style is fluid and imaginative throughout. He shot individual sequences, like the ballroom scenes, with great flair.
The Emperor Waltz is frequently referred to as a financial failure, but it was not. It attracted a fairly large audience and turned a modest profit. After all, Crosby’s loyal fans, who bought his recordings by the millions, could be counted on to see a Crosby picture.
Although Wilder always maintained that the less said about the movie, the better, he made a veiled reference to it in Stalag 17 a few years later. In a sly dig, Wilder has Sefton, an American soldier in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, don an Alpine hat similar to the one worn by Crosby in The Emperor Waltz and quip, “I’d look pretty stupid in this, yodeling my way across the Alps.”
What is fascinating about the movie today, says Cameron Crowe, is how un-Wilder it is—all waltzing couples, sumptuous ballrooms, and glittering candelabra. “For that reason it stands alone and apart from his other work,” and it is frequently ignored by commentators on his films.25
Wilder began preparing a movie that would “cure the whipped-cream hangover of The Emperor Waltz.”26 He decided to make the movie about postwar Berlin that he had envisioned while working in the U.S. Army’s Psychological Warfare Division in Germany. Wilder wro
te about the bombed-out cities he visited during his tour of duty, “The destruction is unbelievable; . . . the people are still living in this rubble, in the cellars, in ruins with just two walls standing.”27 Wilder later filmed exteriors for the film, A Foreign Affair (1948), on location in Berlin. It was the first film Wilder had been associated with that was shot in Berlin since Menschen am Sonntag.
In his last memo to the OWI before leaving Germany, Wilder outlined the feature film he planned to make back in Hollywood. “I have spent two weeks in Berlin,” he wrote. “I found the town mad, depraved, starving—fascinating as background for a movie. My notebooks are filled with hot research stuff. . . . I have lived with some GIs and put down their lingo.”28 Wilder was confident that he had more than enough material to serve as the basis of a screenplay.
Even though Wilder had made a misstep with The Emperor Waltz, he was still the Paramount director par excellence. He had outlasted Preston Sturges, whose career had declined, and he had outlived Ernst Lubitsch.
A Foreign Affair (1948)
While Wilder was mulling over some preliminary ideas for the screenplay, Brackett ran across the sketch for a proposed film titled “Love in the Air” in the stockpile of the studio’s unproduced scripts; it was credited to David Shaw. It told the story of an officer in the U.S. Air Force who accompanies a congresswoman on a tour of American army installations in postwar Europe. He falls in love with her en route and proposes to her on the return flight to Washington. Shaw’s seventy-two-page screen treatment begins with this preamble: “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.”29 Since Shaw’s synopsis was the property of Paramount’s story department, Wilder and Brackett were free to incorporate elements from it into the script of A Foreign Affair. But Wilder added a romance between an American officer and a German siren to pep up the story line.
Wilder and Brackett finished a forty-three-page treatment of the movie by May 31, 1947. Paramount assigned Richard Breen (no relation to Joseph Breen), a junior writer in the story department, to assist them in composing a full screenplay. The front office was uncomfortable with the movie’s working title, A Foreign Affair, since it suggested hanky-panky between American soldiers in Berlin and German women. They proposed a substitute title, “Operation Candybar”; this was a reference to the manner in which GIs ingratiated themselves with fräuleins by offering them American chocolate bars and other hard-to-get items. Wilder and Brackett scoffed at the proposed title, just as they had earlier refused to consider “Rommel’s Last Stand” as a title for Five Graves to Cairo.
As Wilder and Brackett worked on the screenplay, Brackett became extremely uneasy about the film’s problematic portrayal of American GIs in Berlin. He and Wilder had several serious disagreements while they were constructing the screenplay for this movie. One of the first sequences that Brackett took exception to begins with U.S. Army captain John Pringle, a wheeler-dealer and a cad, trading a dozen candy bars for nylon stockings at the black market near the Brandenburg Gate. Then he jumps into his jeep and drives through the rubble-strewn streets to the digs of his German mistress, Erika von Schluetow, who lives in a bombed-out apartment building. Along the way he whistles “Isn’t It Romantic?” which, given the movie’s grim backdrop, lends an ironic twist to the scene. As Pringle enters Erika’s ramshackle flat, she is standing at the bathroom mirror, wearing a bathrobe, and rinsing her mouth with mouthwash. She turns to Pringle and playfully squirts him full in the face with mouthwash. Pringle responds by wiping his face in her hair; then he hands her the nylons.
Brackett protested that it was revolting to show “a woman spitting lovingly in a man’s face.” He fumed, “Hell, it offends me beyond words, Billy.”30 Wilder responded, “Charlie, that’s just how a broad is, if she really likes the guy. We show how close they are—physically.” Brackett replied, “You’re sick, Billy! Sick!” as he hurled the Los Angeles telephone book at Wilder’s head, just missing his target.31 But the scene stayed in the script. Like Erich von Stroheim, Wilder was ahead of his time when it came to portraying sexual relationships on the screen frankly.
Wilder was becoming fed up with Brackett’s squeamish attitude toward the material he wanted to film. When he recalled their frequent, vociferous quarrels over their previous screenplays in the course of their increasingly stormy professional relationship, he began to consider breaking off their creative association for good.
But their feuding was never reflected in their screenplays. The crackling dialogue they wrote for A Foreign Affair is pure backroom Wilder and Brackett. For example, Colonel Rufus J. Plummer, who is in charge of the twelve thousand American troops in Berlin, comments at one point about the GIs’ getting involved in the seamier side of Berlin by openly dealing with the venal, tawdry black market: “This isn’t a Boy Scout camp. Some of the boys do go overboard once in a while. But you can’t pin sergeant’s stripes on an archangel.”
Wilder and Brackett completed the bulk of the screenplay at the beginning of August 1947, but they continued revising it off and on until the end of November, right before shooting started. All the time he was writing the script, Wilder had Marlene Dietrich in mind for the role of Erika, the sultry chanteuse at the Club Lorelei and the mistress of Captain Pringle. “I had known Marlene from Germany before I came to this country, when I was a newspaperman in Berlin,” Wilder said, “and we were very friendly.”32 When Wilder offered her the part of Erika, however, Dietrich declined. Erika hobnobbed with Nazis, and Dietrich was afraid that her longtime anti-Nazi stance would be tarnished by playing the role. Wilder ran the screen test by June Havoc (Gentleman’s Agreement) for Dietrich. He cleverly persuaded her that no American actress could play Erika convincingly. Dietrich concurred and accepted the role. She writes in her autobiography that she learned that “you can’t refuse Billy Wilder.” Moreover, she had a high regard and trust for him as an artist. In addition, quite frankly, she needed the money.33
Dietrich’s daughter, Maria Riva, writes in her biography of her mother that Dietrich’s credentials as an anti-Nazi were confirmed when the U.S. government selected her to receive the Medal of Freedom—the highest honor the nation could bestow on a civilian—for her bravery in entertaining the troops at the front throughout World War II. As Wilder put it, “She was at the front more than Eisenhower.” Dietrich, the first woman to be so honored, proudly accepted the award in November 1947, shortly before filming started at Paramount on A Foreign Affair.34
Dietrich was not pleased with her costars, John Lund, who was to play Pringle, and Jean Arthur, who was to play Phoebe Frost, the straitlaced congresswoman investigating the morale and the morals of the American army of occupation. Dietrich referred to Lund as a “petrified piece of wood” and dismissed Arthur as that “funny little woman with that terrible American twang.”35 Dietrich’s assessments of Lund and Arthur were hardly fair. Lund was not a matinee idol by any means, but he had given a creditable performance in his first picture, Leisen’s To Each His Own (1946), opposite Olivia de Havilland. And Arthur’s midwestern accent was just right for her to play a congresswoman from Iowa. She had been in films since 1923 and was always appealing as the girl next door. She had excelled in screwball comedies in the 1930s and more recently had appeared in George Stevens’s The More the Merrier (1943). She would receive top billing in A Foreign Affair.
Furthermore, Arthur was being paid more than Dietrich. Arthur’s salary was $175,000; Dietrich’s was $110,000. Wilder’s take-home pay now exceeded that of his stars; he was allotted $116,000 for directing the picture and $89,000 for coauthoring the screenplay. Brackett’s paycheck for producing the picture and coauthoring the script was $135,000 total.
Wilder chose Marlene Dietrich to play the key role of Erika von Schluetow, “the Berlin bombshell,” because her appearance in the film “helped to give the movie a more authentic atmosphere. There was a natural sim
ilarity between Lola, the café singer that she portrayed in von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel [Der blaue Engel, 1930], and the Berlin nightclub singer she played in my film.” Dietrich’s songs in A Foreign Affair were composed by Frederick Hollander, the German composer who had written the songs for The Blue Angel. “That made the connection between Dietrich’s two roles even closer,” Wilder added.
Most critics of A Foreign Affair assume that Wilder commissioned Hollander to write the songs expressly for this movie. Actually, Hollander composed them for the Tingeltangel Club, his failed attempt to establish a bistro in Hollywood “recreating a disenchanted Berlin cabaret.” When the club closed, Wilder arranged to have Paramount purchase the screen rights to the songs for Dietrich to warble as the torch singer of the decadent Lorelei Club in A Foreign Affair. The songs are sardonic and mockingly sentimental; Dietrich, said Wilder, “sold a song very well.”36 The three cabaret songs Hollander composed evoke the disenchanted mood of a devastated, defeated people. In one of the musical numbers, “Black Market,” the lyrics describe how “salami and soap . . . are traded for black lingerie.” In another, “Illusions,” Erika sings of her “broken-down ideals” and her illusions, which are “slightly used, secondhand, and for sale.” One journalist noted that, given the collaboration of Wilder, Dietrich, and Hollander, the picture has such an authentic atmosphere of Berlin that one expects to see the logo of Ufa, not Paramount, on the movie. Wilder replied that it was really Dietrich who brought the authentic atmosphere of Berlin to the movie: “Marlene is Berlin incarnate!”37
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