Some Like It Wilder

by Gene D. Phillips

  Wilder secured Charles Lang as his director of photography. Lang, who had photographed Midnight, which Wilder cowrote for Leisen, was, along with John Seitz, one of the best cinematographers for black-and-white movies in Hollywood. Lang gave A Foreign Affair a documentary-like quality with his spare cinematography. He adroitly captured the jagged edges of the Berlin cityscape. “The cinematography of A Foreign Affair by Charles Lang is a masterplay of shadow and light among the grey ruins,” writes Robert Dassanowsky-Harris.38 This was the first of four Wilder films that Lang photographed, culminating in Some Like It Hot in 1959.

  The opening credits state that “a large part of this film was photographed in Berlin,” but that is not precisely true. Wilder and his camera crew did spend three weeks in Berlin, photographing actual locations, but most of the film was shot at Paramount Studios in Hollywood. German film historian Oliver Kuch, the principal expert on this film, writes that “Wilder’s familiarity with Berlin shines through the picture, as bombed-out images of the city come together with studio sequences so seamlessly that the entire movie looks as if it had been shot on location.”39 The skillful meshing of the location footage with the studio material is, of course, the handiwork of Wilder’s longtime editor Doane Harrison.

  Location filming lasted from August 17 through September 6, 1947, prior to the start of principal photography in Hollywood. Erich Pommer, who was studio chief at Ufa when Wilder was a tyro screenwriter there, had joined the exodus to Hollywood before the war. Pommer returned to Germany in 1946 and was now head of the film unit of PsyWar, with which Wilder had been associated immediately after the war in 1945. Pommer was charged with revitalizing the German film industry. He helped facilitate Wilder’s obtaining official permission from the U.S. army of occupation to film in Berlin. Wilder filmed the movie’s opening shots of Berlin from a plane. “It was absolute ashes, Berlin; rubble,” he recalled.40 Wilder’s cameras captured the black market at the Brandenburg Gate and the GIs flirting with the fräuleins near the rutted Tiergarten (zoo). As Wilder had feared, some Berliners objected to an American film crew invading downtown Berlin and disrupting traffic. But, Steven Bach writes, “Wilder cut them down to size in his acidic, Austrian-spiced German.”41

  While Wilder was shooting in the ruins of Berlin, he wanted to “reconnect with the Berlin” he had once known. He remembered filming Menschen am Sonntag there in 1929, when Berlin was, he said, “the most beautiful and the fastest city on earth.”42 After Wilder returned home, he collaborated with Harrison in editing the location footage together, with a view to integrating it into the studio material.

  The only time Wilder expressed his deep-seated hatred of the Nazis while making this picture came in the editing room. After running the aerial shots of the widespread devastation in Berlin, an assistant editor noted how the Allied bombings had destroyed the city. Wilder jumped up and shouted that the Allies were not responsible for the destruction of Berlin; ultimately the Nazis were. “To hell with those bastards!” he exclaimed. “They burned most of my family in their damned ovens! I hope they burn in hell!”43 After that outburst, Wilder never mentioned the fate of his family again during the making of this picture.

  Wilder and Brackett had finished the revised version of the script after taking into consideration the industry censor’s objections to the screenplay. Joseph Breen reminded Wilder that the U.S. Army and the members of Congress were not to be ridiculed. He pointed to the Production Code: “The just rights, history, and feelings of any nation are entitled to consideration and respectful treatment.”44 Breen accordingly required that certain offensive lines of dialogue be eliminated from the script, such as the description of Congress as “a bunch of boobs that flunked out of law school.” The writing team complied. Breen also complained about “the over-emphasis on illicit sex that seems to run through most of the picture.”45 Wilder and Brackett removed a few blatantly offensive lines of dialogue. But these were merely token gestures to make Breen favorably disposed to approving their screenplay, which he finally did.

  Principal photography began at Paramount on December 1, 1947. Dietrich had to shoot a simulated newsreel that showed Erika socializing with the Nazi high command at the opera. Dietrich glared at Wilder while filming this scene and said, “Only you, Billy, could make me play a part like this.” He replied, “Relax! It’s only a movie.”46

  Wilder invited Dietrich, his Berlin buddy of old, to move into his house for the duration of the shoot. During her stay, Dietrich regaled Wilder, at his prompting, with stories about her multiple love affairs with directors like Sternberg and costars like Gary Cooper. She acknowledged that she had had liaisons with members of both sexes, which was an open secret in film circles.47

  Jean Arthur saw Wilder’s inviting Dietrich to be his houseguest during filming as an example of his favoritism toward Dietrich, a complaint that she would register often during the shoot. She was jealous of the bond between Dietrich and Wilder, and it unnerved her when the two joked in German on the set. Moreover, Dietrich would invite Wilder to lunch in her dressing room, where she would cook German dishes for him, while Arthur retreated to her dressing room in tears. Arthur was an insecure and skittish actress, although it never showed in her performances on the screen. “During the making of A Foreign Affair her nervousness . . . and natural timidity made her finicky and difficult about how well she was being filmed, which caused Marlene to detest her,” writes Ean Wood.48 Arthur resented Dietrich’s line of dialogue, which she thought Dietrich delivered with too much relish, in which Erika describes the prim, plain-looking Phoebe (Arthur) as having a face “like a well-scrubbed kitchen floor.” Arthur had convinced herself that Wilder would allow Dietrich to upstage her in every scene they played together and that ultimately Dietrich’s performance would eclipse her own.

  Wilder was aware that Dietrich was somewhat narcissistic and possessed a frank fascination with her own glamour and beauty. Sternberg, Dietrich’s mentor, had taught her to check the lighting of a scene before the cameras turned. “This spotlight,” she would say to the camera crew, “is not in the right place” to illuminate her face properly. “Could you put it over there?” When the crew ignored her orders, she would say to Wilder, “Billy, tell the lighting crew they should change the lights.” Wilder would respond that the lighting of a scene was up to the director of photography; “leave me out of it.”49 He exclaimed, “What a picture; one dame who’s afraid to look in a mirror, and one who can’t stop!”

  Wilder admired Arthur as an actress, but he grew impatient with her paranoia. Things came to a head in the middle of shooting. One night Wilder’s doorbell rang after midnight; there was Arthur in a frenzy, with her eyes bulging. Her husband, producer Frank Ross, was standing behind her on the porch for moral support. “What is it, Jean?” Wilder asked. She answered, “What did you do with my close-up? The one where I look so beautiful!” Wilder asked her what she meant. “You burned it,” she replied; “Marlene told you to burn that close-up; she does not want me to look good.” Wilder responded, “This is madness; that I should destroy something.” The next morning he took Arthur to the editing suite and had Harrison show her her close-up, still intact. “This is typical,” he commented wryly. A movie set “is a little insane asylum,” and the actors “are all inmates.”50

  Over the years, various commentators on A Foreign Affair have taken Wilder to task for the way he handled Jean Arthur in this movie. Richard Corliss, in his book Talking Pictures, asserts that Arthur looks far from her best in this film. Wilder photographed her, he continued, “with all of the gentleness of a mug shot.”51 The most outspoken of Wilder’s detractors on this subject is Andrew Sarris. In his 1968 book The American Cinema, Sarris denounces Wilder for his thoughtlessly “brutalizing a charming actress like Jean Arthur in A Foreign Affair.”52 Yet in his 1977 essay “Billy Wilder, Closet Romanticist,” Sarris reassesses his harsh judgment: “Am I blaming Wilder too much and the devastating Dietrich too little for what happened to Miss Arthu
r in A Foreign Affair? After all, Hitchcock once told me that Jane Wyman burst into tears when she saw how she looked next to Dietrich in Stage Fright [1950]; and yet I never condemned Hitch for his cruelty.”53

  Perhaps the most salient defense of Wilder in this regard comes from Dassanowsky-Harris, who emphasizes that Arthur’s Phoebe Frost is the dowdy, stridently prudish congresswoman only for the first half of the picture. When she gradually becomes enamored with Captain John Pringle in the second half of the movie, “Arthur’s shy, lovely beauty eventually surfaces in her portrayal; she becomes relaxed and even girlish.”54

  Moreover, Arthur herself ultimately changed her tune about Wilder’s treatment of her on this picture. Some forty years later, in 1989, Arthur phoned Wilder to say that she had finally seen A Foreign Affair on TV. Karasek writes that she declared, “It was a wonderful film, and even the close-ups were wonderful!” Arthur asked Wilder to forgive her for her behavior while making the picture. Wilder gallantly answered that there was nothing to forgive.55

  The shooting of A Foreign Affair wrapped on February 12, 1948. Harrison had a rough cut ready in two weeks. Hollander, who wrote Dietrich’s songs, also supplied the background music for the film; he wove throughout his score the themes of the three cabaret songs that Dietrich sang.

  The film opens impressively with the aerial shots of the bombed-out city of Berlin. The devastation reflects the desolate lives of the German civilians, who inhabit a world of disillusionment and cynicism. The plane flying overhead is carrying some members of Congress, including the prim, puritanical Phoebe Frost. She and her colleagues are members of a fact-finding committee charged with investigating the “moral malaria” that seems to be infecting the soldiers attached to the American occupation forces in Berlin. She is determined to “fumigate Berlin with all the insecticides at our disposal.”

  Congresswoman Frost is shocked to discover that the American troops are openly trading with civilians on the black market and “fraternizing” with the fräuleins. She is further upset to learn that Erika von Schluetow, the former mistress of a high-ranking Nazi, Hans Birgel, is singing at the Lorelei, an off-limits café frequented by American GIs. To make matters worse, Erika is now rumored to be the mistress of an American officer. Phoebe enlists the help of Captain John Pringle in her effort to smoke out Erika’s American lover. Little does she know that the officer she is trying to identify is Captain Pringle himself.

  Erika explains away her opportunism by observing sardonically, “A woman picks out whatever is in fashion, and changes it with the seasons, like wearing a spring hat after winter.” Wilder does not appoint the audience Erika’s hanging judge, however. “Erika is the film’s most problematic character,” writes Dassanowsky-Harris, because she has learned to cultivate “the survival spirit.” She is a worldly-wise and war-weary individual who knows how to survive by making the best of a bad situation.56

  To distract Phoebe from her official mission, randy John Pringle woos her. He accompanies her to the army intelligence file room, where she plans to investigate Erika’s records. John makes advances toward her, and she resists his blandishments by opening one file drawer after another between them. But John closes every drawer that she opens; he finally traps her in a corner between two drawers and kisses her. “You are out of order!” Phoebe blurts out. “Objection overruled,” replies John.

  Phoebe becomes romantically inclined toward John, but she vows to sever their relationship when she finally discovers that he is Erika’s lover. John seeks to mollify Phoebe by telling her that he pursues his affair with Erika only to smoke out Birgel, who is still at large. Erika is indeed being used by the American military police as bait for the trap to snare her jealous, most-wanted Nazi lover. He eventually takes the bait and shows up at the Lorelei in disguise, looking for Erika. But the military police are lying in wait for him, and he is killed in an exchange of gunfire. Erika is slated for a labor camp because she is tainted by her Nazi affiliations. Unrepentant to the last, she gives a seductive wink to the two young MPs assigned to escort her to prison. She hikes up her skirt to her knees and asks coyly, “Is it still raining? If there are any puddles, you’ll carry me, won’t you, boys?”

  Hence the filmgoer infers that the incorrigible Erika will most likely slip away from the two bedazzled soldiers and never see the inside of the prison camp. Farber is probably right when he writes, “Wilder cannot quite abandon such a bewitching character to her fate without a hint of possible reprieve.”57 Perhaps only a Hollywood filmmaker who grew up in Europe amid the privations of World War I and experienced the decadence of Berlin between the wars could have presented Erika as a somewhat sympathetic character to the viewer. As John Russell Taylor puts it, Wilder “had become an American filmmaker, though with continental trimmings.”58

  As for the frigid Phoebe Frost, once Erika is out of the picture, she thaws out and warms up to Pringle once again. “Wilder’s choice of ending has Capt. Pringle selecting Phoebe over Erika,” writes Malene Sheppard Skaerved, “but would any man really have chosen Arthur over Dietrich?”59 Actually, Pringle does not have a choice between the two women: Erika is gone for good at the film’s end, whatever may become of her, and Phoebe alone is left to him.

  With A Foreign Affair, Wilder was denounced on the floor of the U.S. Senate for making a movie in which “our occupation forces appear undisciplined and ill-behaved.”60 Certain members of the Department of Defense also criticized the film, specifically because some of the American GIs were depicted as taking advantage of the citizenry of Berlin whenever they got the chance.

  Stuart Schulberg, who was involved with the Motion Picture Export Association of America, determined whether or not American films could be exhibited in Germany. He banned A Foreign Affair from being released in Germany. “Our initial disappointment with the picture later escalated to outrage and disgust,” he subsequently wrote in an essay defending his decision. “We could not excuse a director who played the ruins for laughs and cast Military Government officers as comics.” He condemned the picture as “crude and superficial. . . . Berlin’s trials and tribulations are not the stuff of cheap comedy.”61 (Oliver Kuch notes that A Foreign Affair “was first shown in West Germany as a successful television special in 1977, and only hit the German big screen in 1991,” when it was a smash hit.)62

  Wilder’s response to the film’s detractors at the time of its release was to point out that he put into the movie what he had himself observed during his German tour of duty in the summer of 1945. He was not criticizing the American occupation forces alone, he continued; “every occupying, victorious army . . . plunders, steals. That is a rule that goes way back to the Persians.”63

  At all events, A Foreign Affair had its American premiere at the Paramount Theatre in New York on July 1, 1948, a scant two months after the long-delayed premiere of The Emperor Waltz. The picture collected a sheaf of mostly favorable reviews. Critics pointed out that, even in a landscape of ruins, “Billy Wilder sets off a firework display of witty dialogue.” Still Wilder’s masterly control of the plot ensures that “this movie is anything but a formless string of gags” or a mere sideshow. Nevertheless, some reviewers expressed reservations about the movie, saying that it was too soon after the war to joke about a tragedy of this magnitude.64

  Because of the hostile reaction to the movie in official circles, Paramount is said to have discreetly withdrawn A Foreign Affair from distribution. Actually, the studio delayed doing so until the movie had fulfilled most of its dates across the country. So Paramount’s action seems a token gesture, since the film certainly was exhibited long enough to make money.65

  The movie ultimately weathered the storm that had brewed in Washington at its original release. What is more, it has come to be regarded as a sophisticated dark comedy, distinguished by Wilder’s astringent, cynical wit. Wilder himself said, “A Foreign Affair I regard as one of my better pictures.” Set in the still-smoky ruins of postwar Berlin, the picture leaves a bitter afterta
ste of defeated hopes and soiled illusions. A warts-and-all account of U.S. military corruption in Berlin after World War II, the movie riffs on themes of deception and moral relativism. Yet the caustic bite of the dialogue does not keep the film from being entertaining. It is a warmly acted, briskly paced movie. Jean Arthur came in for her share of critical praise for her performance; with her apple-pie features and no-nonsense air, she is well cast as Phoebe. The movie was a personal triumph for Marlene Dietrich. As Erika, Dietrich sports a succession of attractive costumes, which the camera caresses. She exudes a wry, world-weary dignity.

  Charles Brackett maintained that he endured working on A Foreign Affair, although he disapproved of its satire on the U.S. military officialdom in Berlin, because Wilder promised that their next film would be more to his liking. It would be about a silent film star who attempts a comeback twenty years later. This was a concept that Brackett had suggested to Wilder more than once. The picture would be a comedy with perhaps some dark undertones, but a comedy nonetheless, thought Brackett. He was anxious to give it a whirl.

  7

  Dark Windows

  Sunset Boulevard

  You don’t know what it means to stand in front of a camera again. This picture will put me right back where I was.

  —Bette Davis as Margaret Elliot in the film The Star

  “I was working with Mr. Brackett, and he had the idea of doing a picture with a Hollywood background,” Wilder recalled. “Once we got hold of the character of the silent picture star, whose career is finished with the advent of the talkies, . . . we started rolling.”1 It was the comeback story, he concluded, that appealed to them, so they tackled it.

  Wilder had a staunch belief in having a resourceful cowriter on every picture. During the story conferences, he said, “there is no muse coming through the window and kissing our brows. We just sit together and discuss, . . . and we fight it out.” Then too the collaborator comes in handy “when you’re arguing with the front office,” he added. “You need somebody there, preferably with a machine gun on his shoulder.”2 The aim of the writers was to make the screenplay as airtight as possible, to forestall having to improvise dialogue on the set. “Sometimes, if a scene does not work during shooting,” Wilder explained, “we withdraw into a corner and rewrite it . . . during lunchtime.” But, he emphasized, this was quite different from shooting off the cuff. They would not just “sit down and slap it together. No, never.”3