Billy Wilder was a German-Jewish exile who cast a cold eye on both his adopted countrymen and the country he fled. This movie's premise is that the American victors of all ranks are contentedly plundering defeated Germany. While the Red Army had simply raped and looted, the Yanks are more effectively using the free market system to buy sex and black market valuables with PX cigarettes, candy bars, and other goodies, all the while telling themselves that they're teaching the Germans democracy. The Germans, meanwhile, are servile but silently unrepentant, doing the best they can to get along while telling the conquerors what they want to hear. Wilder agrees with Churchill's dictum that the Germans are always either at your throat or at your feet. He would return to this cynical take on Germany with more humor and greater emotional distance in 1960's One Two Three, but in 1947 he's still nakedly angry at the people who would have sent him to the gas chamber if they could and contemptuous of the Americans who brag about the destruction they've wrought but don't seem to get the point of it at all.
Against this background we have Jean Arthur's Iowa Congresswoman Phoebe Frost, on a junket to investigate the "morale," i.e. morals, of the occupiers. Tightly repressed, she seems to view Nazism, promiscuity and the black market as part of an undifferentiated mass of European evil from which innocent American GIs must be protected. Her target and (unknowingly) rival for the affections of the same American officer, Captain Pringle, is Dietrich's Erika von Schluetter, former aristocrat, now cabaret chanteuse, whose worldly wisdom is that regimes change but men don't. Men have all the power, and a smart woman gets along by leading powerful men around by the genitals and the ego. So we get the schoolmarm and the courtesan.
Captain Pringle, a formerly nice Iowa boy who has adapted enthusiastically to postwar realities, is the aide to a senior officer, Colonel Plummer. He is using his position to protect Schluetter from the authorities, who are interested in her background as the one time mistress of a senior SS officer. Plummer has his own worldly wisdom about what his men are doing but presses on with the mission.
Of course Schluetter gives Frost a few European lessons in feminine wiles, a cliché as old as Wings, Frost thaws out sexually, literally letting her hair down, and Plummer eventually uses Pringle as bait to catch Schluetter's Nazi lover, but the Frost-Pringle-Schluetter love triangle doesn't really matter because John Lund plays Pringle as a straight cad instead of a lovable rogue, and you don't see what Frost would see in him except sex.
The plot is nothing, the atmosphere is everything, and the atmosphere managed to offend a good many American critics, politicians and the U.S. Army at the time. Worth a look as an interesting and enjoyable period piece by a man outside the American mainstream.
Against this background we have Jean Arthur's Iowa Congresswoman Phoebe Frost, on a junket to investigate the "morale," i.e. morals, of the occupiers. Tightly repressed, she seems to view Nazism, promiscuity and the black market as part of an undifferentiated mass of European evil from which innocent American GIs must be protected. Her target and (unknowingly) rival for the affections of the same American officer, Captain Pringle, is Dietrich's Erika von Schluetter, former aristocrat, now cabaret chanteuse, whose worldly wisdom is that regimes change but men don't. Men have all the power, and a smart woman gets along by leading powerful men around by the genitals and the ego. So we get the schoolmarm and the courtesan.
Captain Pringle, a formerly nice Iowa boy who has adapted enthusiastically to postwar realities, is the aide to a senior officer, Colonel Plummer. He is using his position to protect Schluetter from the authorities, who are interested in her background as the one time mistress of a senior SS officer. Plummer has his own worldly wisdom about what his men are doing but presses on with the mission.
Of course Schluetter gives Frost a few European lessons in feminine wiles, a cliché as old as Wings, Frost thaws out sexually, literally letting her hair down, and Plummer eventually uses Pringle as bait to catch Schluetter's Nazi lover, but the Frost-Pringle-Schluetter love triangle doesn't really matter because John Lund plays Pringle as a straight cad instead of a lovable rogue, and you don't see what Frost would see in him except sex.
The plot is nothing, the atmosphere is everything, and the atmosphere managed to offend a good many American critics, politicians and the U.S. Army at the time. Worth a look as an interesting and enjoyable period piece by a man outside the American mainstream.