Synopsis
A Foreign Affair (1948) is Billy Wilder's comedy, and you can watch it online on iFILM. The setting is bombed-out postwar Berlin, where GIs, the black market and buried pasts all tangle in the rubble.
A prim congresswoman from Iowa arrives with a committee to inspect army morale and runs straight into a cabaret singer with a Nazi past. Caught between the two women is an army captain juggling both affairs and lying through his teeth. Jean Arthur plays the buttoned-up official slowly losing her composure; Marlene Dietrich is the cynical beauty with nothing left to lose.
Wilder shot in the actual ruins of Berlin, and the film's sharp jokes sit right next to ash — it mocks victors and defeated alike. Dietrich's songs came from Friedrich Hollaender, her old collaborator from the Weimar cabaret days. A biting, faintly scandalous satire for its era, where the romance carries a whiff of smoke. Stream A Foreign Affair (1948) online on iFILM.
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