A FOREIGN AFFAIR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 501, 28 January 1949, Page 24

A FOREIGN AFFAIR

(Paramount) HAVE no doubt that if you slip your brain into neutral and just let your eyes idle along it is possible to be amused by A Foreign Affair. The ruins of Berlin, among them Miss Marlene Dietrich, photograph well in ceriain lights and if one is sufficiently insensitive or unimaginative there is probably an elementary satisfaction to be derived from the sight of the new herrenvolk jeeping round the chipped arches of the Brandenburger Gate., I will grant that it is even possible to be amused, in a case-hardened sort of way, by the indul-: gent boys-will-be-boys attitude which the film adopts towards the American Occupation Forces-as it sees them. But I didn’t find it funny. In one sense the film is an outrage. I don’t want to waste time discussing it on the ethical level-we’re riot considering The Film and Scciety this weekbut as an example of vulgar bad taste this production earns iiself an unenviable dis‘inction. It must be conceded that a Congressional investigation of the morale of American troops in Germany is a reasonable subject. for humorous treatment-there seems to be a strong element of comedy in most. Congressional Committees-and there is also scope for wry humour, no doubt, in the Berliners, current struggle for existence. But there should be nothing funny in Berlin’s plight from our point of view. Berlin Express, reviewed on this page some time ago (Listener, 22/10/48) offended me slightly by the way in which it presented a phony Hollywood thriller story against a shockingly genuine background, but Berlin Express at | least did not import low comedy and | slaps.ick into the ruins, and its lapse | from good taste might easily have been an involuntary aberration. One can’t make any such excuse for A Foreign | Affair, which sets out deliberately to make comic capital out of such problems as ‘fraternisation" and the black | market, and contrives to suggest that the United States soldiery stationed in Berlin are a bunch of amiably irresponsible spivs. The principal spiv appears to be an Army captain (John Lund) who has so -far forgotten the girl he left behind that he trades the birthday cake she sends him to buy comforts for an exotic ex-Nazi_ nightclub singer (Marlene Dietrich) with whom he is frate-nising ardently. This littte post-war idyll is progressing smoothly to its conclusion (if it has not already reached it) when Congresswoman Jean Arthur appears on the scene, intent on making a uni'ateral investigation of Captain Lund’s morale. Ire.itably. she, too, becomes involved in the bleck market and inevitably she falls for the. handsome if uninhibited captain, Rather belatedly it transpires (there is no other word for it) that the captain’s affair with the nightclub singer was strictly in the line of duty, end was aimed at luring her former Nazi léver out of hiding, but this development comes so late in the piece and is so clumsily handled that it does little to correct one’s original impression of the

captain as a loose-living Lothario. For that matier, when last seen he had switched his attentions to the Congresswoman. Millard Mitchell, who played Lund’s commanding officer, was the only member of the cast who earned my sympathetic attention. He had a few good lines, but the one I remember best was directed at Marlene Dietrich when she tried to fraternise with him. "Madame," he said, "I became a grandfather today; let’s not be foolish." Remembering Miss Dietrich’s own mature marital status, it was perhaps an unnecessarily unkind wisecrack-one, in fact, which might more profitably have been re-phrased and addressed to the director and the scriptwriters.