This has the Wilder stamp all over it; cynical, trenchant, classy, stylish. It was common practice for Hollywood studios to use music associated with a given studio as background in subsequent films yet who but Wilder would select Isn't It Romantic as a background to sleaze and squalor, love among the ruins indeed. Jean Arthur excels as uptight Congresswoman Phoebe Frost, carefully finishing off a report before taking a look at Berlin from the air - reminding us of a previous character written by Wilder, Garbo's Ninotchka, who failed to be impressed by Paris initially. Frost is bringing a chocolate cake on behalf of one of her constituants in Iowa to Captain John Pringle, John Lund, and Arthur's performance is truly the frosting on this particular cake. The menage a trois is completed by Marlene Dietrich as Erica Von Shutelow who sings in a shady club called the Lorelei and was the mistress of a high-ranking Nazi currently in hiding. The only false note is the fact that with all the austerity on view - and not even owning a decent mattress til Lund trades his cake for one - Dietrich is able to boast three different expensive dresses, one for each of the three numbers she performs, accompanied, incidentally, by the uncredited Frederick Hollander, who composed all three. Even weakest link Lund, wooden at the best of times and not helped by having to utter such lines as 'you blonde flame-thrower', can't bring this down to less than nine out of ten. It was Wilder's last film of the forties and stands beside Double Indemnity and The Lost Weekend as the very cream of his output - not that The Major And The Minor or Five Graves To Cairo were chopped liver if anyone asks you, but this was just the right note with which to follow the disappointing The Emporer Waltz.
Review of A Foreign Affair
