Uneasy Victors - Pt 3 - "The Big Lift" -1950

“The Big Lift” (1950) straddles the period of our role as occupiers in Berlin, and as “combatants” in a new kind of war, a Cold War. Geopolitical past and future fused together in the awkward present of 1948 Berlin.

This is our third entry in the series on Uneasy Victors. Have a look at the intro here, and at last week’s post on “A Foreign Affair” (1948) here.

The movie has a documentary feel to it, yet there are elements of humor, adventure, and intrigue. Though the backdrop is highly political, the conflicts faced by the characters are not really political in nature. They are personal.

Montgomery Clift, in his fourth film, (he’d just finished “The Heiress” which we discussed here) is the opened-hearted, open-minded youth, an enlisted man in the Air Force who works as part of the ground crew. We don’t know about his past or if he has plans for the future; he’s very much a here and now kind of guy, living for the moment. His thin, handsome face is a strange cross between rugged and fragile, and we could take that as a metaphor for much in this troubled actor’s life.

Paul Douglas, also in his fourth feature film, but who always seemed to move and sound like a veteran, plays another man in Clift’s outfit, a radar operator. He is older, and wiser in the sense he is more cynical. He has been in the service many years, and we can see he will spend his career here. Both are stationed at Hickham Field in Hawaii.

These opening moments of the film are evocative of World War II and the place where disaster struck, the bombing of this base and Pearl Harbor, that brought the US into the war. We see a newsreel at the very start that tells us the Russians are blockading Berlin, which was divided among the victorious Allies into the French, British, American, and Russian sectors, from getting supplies overland. All roads, railroads, and canals are blocked, leaving the British, French, and American sectors of the city isolated. The Russians want to force those nations out.

Then the camera pans back and we see we are in a small auditorium where American servicemen are watching the movies. Suddenly a loudspeaker announcement calls a particular unit to report for duty, and Clift and Douglas rise from their seats with a groan.

The map is a little off - Chicopee is not in central Mass.; it's on the Connecticut River in the west.

It’s a fast way to set the story. In a few moments, their unit will be on a cargo plane bound for the mainland. The map takes us across the Pacific, and then across the continent to Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts and Westover Air Force Base. We see a glimpse of the base, the huge runway, the hangars, and a sign in the foreground telling us where we are.

Where we are is the largest air force base on the east coast, which in the new Cold War, became an important point of embarkation, supply line, (and eventual line of first defense in the nuclear age), and the jump-off point to the boys’ final destination -- Berlin. They are going to help ferry food and fuel to the stranded Berliners in a remarkable mission called Operation Vittles, and would be known as the Berlin Air Lift.

Stop by my New England Travels blog tomorrow for a post on a unique side operation of this mission, “Operation Little Vittles” in which Chicopee, Massachusetts packs tons of candy, ties them to handkerchiefs to be used for parachutes, and turns them over to Westover Field so that the men flying these missions can drop candy to the kids in the ruins of Berlin.

The documentary style of the movie is evident in how patient director George Seaton is, letting us experience the mission as it unfolds. The men’s ignorance on what the mission is to be. The long flights. The arrival at Rein-Main field in Germany, and then the final, nerve-wracking hop into Templehof and Berlin. The large transport planes, because of the restriction on fly space the Russians have put on them, have to navigate a very narrow strip, and because the landing field is set in very close proximity to the five-story brick buildings of the neighborhood, the planes must literally skirt the rooftops. In one shot we see a plane land from a side view, and as it dips below the line of roofs, the tail of the plane looks like a shark’s dorsal fin slicing the ocean waves.

“Just like landing in the Rose Bowl.”

The planes land with their cargo, unload, and then take off again every few minutes. It is an exhausting, round-the-clock mission that will last for months. It was our first response to a belligerent Soviet Union testing its influence. It kept the Berliners alive. It was one of the proudest achievements of the United States Air Force.

Just as we saw the American congressmen marvel at the ruins in Berlin as their plane arrives in “A Foreign Affair”, so are Paul Douglas and Montgomery Clift amazed at the devastation.

“Boy, this place sure caught it, didn’t it?” one of the men exclaims.

“Not enough. This is where they should have used the A-bomb,” Paul Douglas says.

This movie takes up where “A Foreign Affair” left off. We are a little farther along in our jobs as occupiers, and there is still the conflict between offering mercy and wanting revenge, between punishing the enemy and building friendships. Paul Douglas acts like the Ugly American, being as rude as he can to the German laborers employed at the landing field. He is dismissive and bullying to the Berliners he meets in town.

“Don’t start feeling sorry for them. They hate our guts. If the situation was reversed, they’d kick your teeth in twice a day.”

Paul Douglas is more than just the voice of vengeance and disgust with the vanquished enemy. He has a deeply personal reason for hating the Germans.

He was once abused as a POW in a German prison camp. While in Berlin, he will discover the prison guard who beat him. In a brutal scene, both men catch up with their destiny.

The movie has a nice mix of comedy that is kind of like blowing off steam at intervals between these dramatic moments. Some of the humor is macabre, like when the men have “fingers crossed” as part of their landing checklist. When Douglas, whose “schatzi”, played by Bruni Löbel (who had a long career in German film and television), wants him to define “democracy” because she is curious, he becomes an irate, frustrated, inarticulate teacher. He has no idea how to explain it, and tells her repeatedly to just shut up.

The best he can come up with is, “It’s a kind of feeling, a way of looking at things.” He explains that America is run by the people, and a light bulb goes on and she thinks it must be like the Soviet Union, which is also said to be run by “the people”. Douglas nearly has a stroke.

Another funny moment is when the men first land and find themselves dragged into a welcoming ceremony. The flight crew is paraded down a long aisle of Berlin guardsmen, under an arch of rifles, to the sound of a band. Montgomery Clift, voice shaking, nervously remarks,

“I feel just as if you and I were getting married, Lieutenant.”

At the welcoming ceremony, an old man, a young boy, and pretty woman who represent grateful citizens of Berlin, present speeches and gifts to the servicemen. They are dignified, proper, speak carefully-intoned English and display the requisite amount of humility for the newsreel cameras. The picture of the defeated enemy as possible friends.

Clift hooks up with the pretty woman, played very naturally by Cornell Borchers (who made only a handful of films in the 1950s, most of them German), and his Berlin romance begins. Her husband was killed in the war by the Russians. Her father stood up against the Nazis. Both tragedies make her a sympathetic heroine and worthy object for Monty’s affections.

He gets a pass and sees her in Berlin. When he gets paint on his uniform and must walk the streets in ragged clothes she has borrowed for him, Clift’s whirlwind escapade among the ruins in Berlin is where Jean Arthur’s ended. In parts it is just as wild and funny, and in parts more insightful and morose. This is a Berlin Americans don’t get to see on the newsreels cameras, the jostling for food, the enforced labor at shoveling rubble, the checkpoints and identity papers, the cold days and colder nights.

Because Clift is without his uniform and his identity card, he is a man without a country, and in danger from all sides, from straying into the Russian Sector, and from his own American MPs. At one point, they duck into a tavern, not too unlike the cabaret we went to in “A Foreign Affair”, where in an effort to escape the MPs, Monty hops on stage and stumbles through “The Chattanooga Choo-Choo” with a German quartet. When they start a verse in German, his panic, and his solution, are very funny.

Clift’s romance with his Berlin girlfriend is progressing. She is very pretty, and quite brave in facing the hardships of the post-war world. She accepts German defeat even though she bears no responsibility for the Nazi regime. When Clift, still without his uniform which is locked up in a tailor’s shop, spends the night, they embrace in a darkened apartment in front of a window. Behind them are the lights of the runway, and a huge transport plane flies right towards them.

The script and direction seem to take turns between using brief but stunning images like this to tell the story through metaphor, and alternatively trying to back it up with a wordy primer on German-American relations. It feels like propaganda at times, but it is probably useful for the American audiences watching the film at the time. For us today, it is a window on an era.

Both men and both girlfriends get together for a gemutlich little party with the neighbors, one of whom once traveled the US as an actor.  Today, he is a spy for the Russians, who pay him to count the American planes.  He gives them false numbers because they won't believe anything he reports anyway.

Gerde asks him, “What did you like best about America?”

He replies, “The way the Americans didn’t like it.”

Paul Douglas smiles. He directs Gerde with a glance to pay attention. He understands what the actor is trying to say.

“I mean, what they used to say about the government!”

They all laugh, and Gerde tries to understand a puzzling country where criticizing the government is okay.

Gerde works in one of the food service wagons on base. On another day, still brooding over this thing called democracy, she asks Paul Douglas about injustice in America. She points out that she has been reading a book, and by the description of the story, we know she is making a reference to “Gentleman’s Agreement”, which was also made into a movie by the same company, 20th Century Fox, a couple years earlier.

Gerde says that since the Americans were against Hitler for his actions against the Jews, how could it be that “in America Jews are kept out of certain hotels and schools?”

Douglas admits, “It shouldn’t be. It stinks.” And then he asks her where the book came from, and she says the PX. Ah, he says, finding a saving point. Would the Russians put out a book criticizing Russia in their stores? Being open about our prejudice is at least a point of honor, he wants to impress upon her. She is dubious.

Douglas is dubious about Clift’s romance with the Berlin beauty, and investigates her. Her husband was not killed by the Russians. Her father was not anti-Nazi. She seems tarnished now. She is less a heroine and more of Berlin enigma. Clift confronts her and she admits lying.

“When you have to live by the generosity of others, you have to make yourself pitiful and brave.” There is a nice shot of a wall behind her in the distance collapsing and crumbling to rubble, more rubble she will have to shovel.

This film is conscientious about showing us all sides. The United States, with rampant prejudice, is not as free a place as we claim. German gratitude may be false and self-serving. The only thing we can be sure about is the Russians are bad guys, when they are discussed at all. The foolish clowns from “A Foreign Affair” are absent here. The film’s main flaw is that we lose them and the question of who they are now. They have not even been replaced with a stereotype yet; they are shown only as rumor and headlines. In the early 1950s, we will come to choke on our paranoia and let it poison us.

Montgomery Clift struggles with his girlfriend’s duplicity, but decides after all, she was only a girl during the war. She cannot be held responsible for her family's involvement.  She is only trying to survive.  He wants to marry her.  Part of his desire, we may suspect, is the wish to save her.

He goes through the chain of command paperwork to get permission. One of the most interesting things about “The Big Lift” is that in various scenes we see a lot of military personnel. A lot of them. In this entire movie, only Paul Douglas and Montgomery Clift are actors playing Air Force men. Everybody else in uniform is an actual serviceman. This gives the movie that realistic documentary style. You also have to admire the acting ability of some of them. The commanding officer, Major Hetzel, who pushes through Monty’s marriage paperwork is quite funny in his scene after shouting over the phone and losing his voice.

While marriage plans are progressing, Gerde finally gets the lowdown on democracy, but not from Paul Douglas. With his bullying ways, he is a poor teacher. She got herself a government-issued pamphlet and has memorized the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Filled with enough righteous indignation to blow the roof off a New England town meeting, she hollers at Douglas and demands he stop bullying her. She calls him a stormtrooper.

Douglas is impressed, and like all bullies, backs off when she stands up to him. “Don’t let anybody push you around, not even me. That’s democracy!”

Another World War II-era metaphor is complete when she chucks a can of SPAM at him.

I won’t reveal how the relationship develops between Clift and Fraulein Borchers. It’s an 11th hour surprise, and lessons are learned by everyone.

Though the tours of duty are ending and men are being rotated home, Paul Douglas decides to stay in Berlin. He is kinder to the German laborers on the base, and even helps them out by speaking fluent German to them, which he was forced to learn in the POW camp.

“I suppose if we’re going to sell these stoops on a new way of living, you got to be a pretty good salesman.”

Then they hear over the radio that the Russian blockade of Berlin is over. The good guys have won. It is a World War II kind of patriotic moment, but the really impressive ending of the movie is the “curtain call” style end credits where we see the real-life military men who had speaking parts in this movie lined up as if for roll call.

Incidentally, the journalist who interviews Montgomery Clift and Paul Douglas when they first arrive in Berlin is Richard O’Malley, an actual journalist for the Associated Press.

Come back Thursday when we finish our series on “Uneasy Victors” with “Judgment at Nuremberg”, which takes us back full circle.  The first point of order for the occupier is to establish order and rule of law.  The second is to hold the bad guys accountable.  But it is a quickly changing world.  The political map of Europe is being altered day by day.  How do we settle accounts, so to speak, when nobody wants to live in the past anymore?  Montgomery Clift and Marlene Dietrich both return for impressive encore performances in very different roles.

Uneasy Victors - PT 2 - "A Foreign Affair" - 1948

“A Foreign Affair” (1948) is a broad send-up of American moral hypocrisy, but Jean Arthur turns it into a valentine for American sentimentality. The film is a biting accusation of German duplicity, but alluring Marlene Dietrich dares us to judge. Billy Wilder, whose cynical view peppers each scene with bold satire, still finds himself forgiving the weaker morally ambiguous Berliners for allowing the stronger and far more evil Nazis to ruin the place.

It can’t have been easy for him. In his biography of Billy Wilder, “On Sunset Boulevard - The Life and Times of Billy Wilder” (Hyperion, NY, 1998), author Ed Sikov notes that while watching footage of bombed out ruins in Berlin, after someone remarked that he could not help but feel sorry for the Germans, Wilder, “…jumped to his feet and yelled, ‘To hell with those bastards! They burned most of my family in their damned ovens! I hope they burn in hell!” (p. 272).

In our intro to this series on Uneasy Victors, posted here, we outlined the three films we’re tackling to discuss America’s post-World War II involvement in Occupied Germany. Next week we cover “The Big Lift” (1950) and “Judgment at Nuremberg” (1961).

I’m going to tread lightly on the plots of these three movies and concentrate on the images used so evocatively. The images and stories were current events when these films were made, no deep explanation was required. For background, one needed only to look at the front page of a newspaper.

“A Foreign Affair” brings prudish congresswoman Jean Arthur to Berlin on a fact-finding mission to investigate the morale of American service troops stationed in Occupied Germany. The end “E” in morale gets dropped and the question for Jean Arthur is reduced to what is “moral”.

She encounters John Lund, an Army captain with working in the de-Nazification office. His job is to examine the credibility of German civilians of being complicit in the former regime that was responsible for starting the war and the murder of millions. He must recommend them for further investigation, punishment, or rehabilitation. On those that are judged to be clean, he gets to stamp an APPROVED on their foreheads, and absolve them of further suspicion. His clients range from the precocious little boy who draws swastikas over everything with a piece of chalk, to Marlene Dietrich. He lets the kid off with a warning to his father. He APPROVES Dietrich in a big way.

John Lund has probably his best role here. He is handsome, worldly and he is a scamp. He carries on an illicit, mutually beneficial relationship with cabaret singer Marlene Dietrich. He brings her stockings and she gives him sex. He trades a birthday cake Jean Arthur ferried across the ocean as a gift from one of his old girlfriends, selling it on the black market to buy a mattress for Marlene. Never was a gift less subtle.

Director Billy Wilder shows his cynicism and his delightfully naughty side in this movie. And it is a marvel he could temper the above noted rage against the German people with an affinity for them. He was, after all, a resident of this city himself at one time back in the ‘20s when it was decadent but entirely free.

So was Dietrich a Berliner. They met here years ago. They knew their own people.

Wilder has been accused at points in his career of being something of a misogynist, showing women in a demeaning light, sexualized or mocked. Some critics took umbrage with “A Foreign Affair” for what they felt was shabby treatment of Jean Arthur, that she was brutalized by being shown in such an unflattering manner. She was dressed and coifed with a severe appearance, and her jingoistic response to how are things back in Iowa, “still 62 percent Republican, thank you” sound as if he is chastising her for being one of the so-called American moral majority and making a fool of her for looking for sin in Berlin.

While I agree that Wilder does his best to show the character of Congresswoman Frost as a comic foil, nevertheless I disagree that he used Jean Arthur in a bad way. You have only to look at Jean Arthur in this movie to see how much fun she’s having.

Just her opening scene when the congressional committee flies over the ruins of Berlin. She is making notes, and when her attention is called by the others to look out the window at their vantage point, she takes her time, meticulous in removing her reading glasses and putting them away. Screwing the cap on her fountain pen and tucking it away. Zipping, snapping, and buckling pockets of courier bag and attache. The suspense of her thorough routine builds and becomes enormously funny, as funny as a Buster Keaton slide down a mountain, but she’s just sitting there putting her stuff away.

This is a lady who knows how to control a scene.

There are many opportunities for her to take the ball and run with it. When she’s picked up by two GIs on a bicycle-built-for-two and turn it into an impromptu bicycle built for three, and most spectacularly when she sings the “Iowa Corn Song” in the cabaret (the scene is below). There is nothing Jean Arthur enjoyed more than absurdity. She saw that in this character and in this movie, and she goes to town. That that town happens to be Berlin is the perfect irony and palette for Wilder’s story.

Marlene Dietrich is a rival romantically, but also politically. Miss Dietrich shines in this role. Her cabaret singer is world-weary, street smart, sexy of course, and most of all a survivor. She needs to be a survivor to live in a nearly demolished Berlin with the old regime gone and the new regime questioning her Nazi past and her licentious present.

We see Dietrich’s run-down bombed-out apartment. When we first see her she is in the most unglamorous position of brushing her teeth. She spits her mouthful at Lund and he grabs her and wipes his face on her hair. We see there is no tenderness to their relationship; that it is all business for her, and that his desire for her is accompanied by his contempt. She plays the role of the kitten as long as she’s getting presents. They are using each other, they both know and are both happy with the arrangement.

At the cabaret Dietrich sings about “the ruins of Berlin” and she is dolled up to the nines looking glamorous and svelte and utterly in command. The smoky room is full of civilians on a night out, American servicemen and jolly Russian servicemen who all mix with equanimity.

This is before the Russian blockade of Berlin and so the Russians are not viewed as the enemy yet. We are in the last days before the Cold War. They are shown, these actual conquerors of Berlin, as silly, playful, childlike comrades who sings songs and in a moment of jubilation grab a person from the crowd and throw him into the air like some college football rally. One Russian soldier is delighted when he is sold a Mickey Mouse watch by an American soldier on the black market. He can barely contain his excitement.

This is counterbalanced by Dietrich’s chilling remark, “What do you think it was like to be a woman in this town when the Russians first swept in?”  This is Wilder's restrained reference to the fact that tens of thousands of female Berliners were raped by Soviet soldiers.

And her deft mockery of America's untouchable superiority, “Wash your hands. Wash your lips. You’ve got so much soap in the United States.”

Millard Mitchell is the wry colonel who oversees Jean Arthur’s congressional visit and oversees John Lund’s mission to de-Nazify the Berlin population. But he knows something that John Lund does not. He knows that Marlene Dietrich was the consort of Nazi officials during the war, and moved in high circles. When Lund is eventually shown a newsreel of her partying with Hitler, he is sickened. Millard Mitchell also knows that there is a high-ranking Nazi official, a former lover of Marlene Dietrich, who was in hiding, but can be drawn out into the open by using Dietrich as a decoy.

John Lund is the epitome of the American problems in Berlin, a metaphor for our conflicted attitudes. On the one hand he has a duty to perform. He must stand back objectively and judge these people. On the other hand he wants to let bygones be bygones. And get what he can for himself.

The songs Marlene sings, about “lovely illusions” and the black market, and the ruins of Berlin, are presented like a good stage musical. They are not sung for diversion; rather they further the plot and tell the back story. Never was music employed in a non-musical in such an intelligent fashion. That’s Friedrich Hollaender at the piano, who wrote these songs and was Dietrich’s long-time accompanist and composer.

Billy Wilder walks a fine line in this movie and walks it very well. There is much cynicism, much political and social accusation against American hypocrisy, and in fact this movie was condemned on the floor the House of Representatives for its satirical treatment of Congress. The military complained because it showed them in a less than flattering light. But it is satire and is meant to hold a mirror up to ourselves.

We can tell who the liberals are among the congressmen and who are the conservatives: debate on the plane about giving the starving a loaf of bread, “that’s democracy”, but if you leave the wrapper on - i.e., let them know it’s from the Good Old USA - “that’s imperialism.” We have discussion of “dollar diplomacy”, about labor versus industry that still resonates today. We are about to leave a decade-long military involvement in Iraq, with reductions of troops as well in Afghanistan. These issues raised in Occupied Germany are still with us.

Congresswoman Jean Arthur icily rebukes Dietrich: “We increased our national debt by some 350 billion dollars to win this war. I would regard it as a waste of money if we didn’t eliminate types like you.”

How timely is that? We Americans have always demanded a return on our investment.

Conversely, we are reminded of the horrific regime that ruled here when Millard Mitchell takes the congressional committee, and us, on a Jeep ride with rear-screen projection of the Reichstag, and the Brandenburg Gate, and always sobering devastation of the ruins.

Dietrich tells Arthur, “Let’s go to my apartment. It’s only a few ruins away from here.”

Wilder softened the political edge by adding silly comedy that also works as a wonderful metaphor in this movie.

Both Wilder and Dietrich were hard, cynical people who came of age in a hard and cynical Berlin. They came to America and made their careers in a United States that was and always probably will be remain unabashedly sentimental. We are a nation addicted to happy endings. Neither Wilder nor Dietrich seemed entirely comfortable with wide-eyed optimism.

Millard Mitchell brings the congressional committee to watch German kids playing sandlot baseball taught to them by American soldiers. Mitchell remarks that a local family “has already christened a kid DiMaggio Schultz. That’s when I started believing we really won the war.”

Mitchell is a kind of narrator, a Greek chorus to the story, reminding us of American good intentions that must certainly soften things for Wilder if not for the message of the movie:

“When we moved into Berlin, we found open graves and closed hearts.”

“We’ve tried to make them free men and give them some dignity.”

Added to the soup is the ingredient of American sentimentality, and that is Jean Arthur who does it better than anybody else. Yes, she is foolish. But she is also resilient and strong and brings a sense of hope to the proceedings. She is the American that the Europeans love to mock, but whom they inevitably look to as an example of success. They see her derisively, and enviously, as being in her own protective little world and nothing can really hurt her. Almost nothing.

When John Lund, trying to throw her off her investigation, begins to woo her as a diversion, she falls for him. Jean Arthur has several excellent scenes. First there is a scene in the file room where she talks about a former beau, a fellow member of Congress from the South, and when she talks about her memory of him, her chirpy voice becomes slow and soft and gentle almost with a slight hint of the southern accent. There is a sad, lovely wistfulness to her behind the officious façade she presents.

But the façade is riot. She tells fellow Iowan John Lund news from back home, “We had the lowest juvenile delinquency rate in the country until two months ago. A little boy in Des Moines took a blow torch to his grandmother…We fell clear down to 16th place. It was humiliating.”

And she notes that Main Street had its name changed to Iwo Jima Boulevard -- the kind of memorializing that happened all over the US, which Wilder mocks with his crisp script and Miss Arthur’s incomparable delivery.

“You’re so naïve, you Americans,” Marlene teases John Lund.

“So we are. What of it?”

Lund, despite himself, begins to have feelings for Jean Arthur. He doesn’t fall head over heels - such violent passion might be too much for Wilder - but he grows protective of her. There is the sweet scene when she comes down a long staircase in a too large dress she bought on the black market, (Et tu, Congresswoman Frost?), when he is to take her out on a date.

“I look just awful. It’s like a circus tent in mourning for an elephant that died.” Her trademark running a fine line between humor and pathos. Nobody does it better.

Lund fixes the dress for her, adjusting the bodice and pinning it in the back with expert fashion sense, and then wipes the excess lipstick from her mouth with his handkerchief, and then swipes an ornate table covering for her shawl. He’s like all the mice in Cinderella helping her to get ready for her night on the town.

And what a night it is.

Her political sparring with Marlene is matched by her becoming a romantic rival for John Lund’s affections. Dietrich is wonderfully bold with Jean Arthur, caging the hostility she feels for this sanctimonious American with sleek, sophisticated sarcasm. She criticizes Arthur’s appearance, and with audacity at their first meeting, notes, “Perhaps if you would change the line of your eyebrows a bit,” as she slowly swipes her door key she has tossed out into the street for Lund, as a pointer, tracing Arthur’s brow with it. The gesture is sultry and brazen.

Later, she will attempt to humiliate Jean Arthur by encouraging her to sing in front of the cabaret audience. Arthur is reticent, but she’s also a bit tipsy, and belts out her old campaign song, the “Iowa Corn Song”.

I think it was Katharine Hepburn who was said that acting is like standing up naked and turning around very slowly.

Jean Arthur’s “Iowa Corn Song” rendition is like naked comedy.

She is pathetically awful, disarmingly hilarious, and ultimately endearing. She really gives it the old college try like nobody’s business. Have a look at the scene here, beginning at 8:06. Please remember to scroll down to the bottom of the page first and mute the music so you can hear the video.



There is no reason, ever, to doubt Jean Arthur’s superior acting ability, but if you did, just compare this performance with her next film role, “Shane” which we discussed here. Night and day. You wouldn’t know it was the same woman. She really had remarkable range.

This goofy gal changes yet again later on in the evening to a bitter, and emotionally violated woman. Dietrich, who first does her a favor by getting her out of trouble when the cabaret is raided by police, mercilessly sets her up, letting Jean observe from the shadows Dietrich’s true relationship with Lund.

Dietrich’s triumph over Jean is complete. “Four hours ago you were in a position to have him court martialed and send me to a labor camp. Not now. Not anymore. You’re one of us, now.”

The hostility between Marlene Dietrich’s and Jean Arthur’s characters is a driving force in this movie. The magnetism of these two actresses makes their face-offs fascinating and almost sensual, where in the hands of two other actresses the scenes might only be shrill and without depth. There is great power to their scenes together, and I think this is due more to their unique talents as actresses, rather than the fact that they disliked each other in real life.

Which they did.

Jean Arthur’s famous insecurity made working with Dietrich, who could be openly derisive to others and had industrial-strength self confidence, a nightmare. According to author Kevin Lally, Dietrich called Arthur, "That ugly woman with that terrible twang."  Dietrich also disliked John Lund. She got along with Wilder, with whom she shared many conversations in her dressing room in German about the Berlin of the old days, but even Wilder got on her bad side when he insisted she perform the scene where she parties with the Hitler look-alike.

Dietrich was openly anti-Nazi, and had won America’s Medal of Freedom for her efforts entertaining the troops during World War II. She may have reveled playing a hardened chanteuse, but being seen hanging on “Hitler’s” arm was too much for her.  Both Berliner and naturalized American, she may be the ultimate metaphor in this film for the conflicted emotions of the uneasy victor.

Jean Arthur was almost paranoid in her jealousy of Wilder’s attention to Dietrich, and perhaps in a moment of one-upmanship, insisted that she perform her own stunt when Congresswoman Frost is shown to be tossed into the air by the jolly, drunken Russian soldiers after her song at the cabaret. That’s really Jean Arthur you see getting chucked into the air.

According to the biography on Billy Wilder, “Wilder Times - The Life of Billy Wilder” (Henry Holt and Company, NY, 1996), author Kevin Lally notes that after the take was shot, “Arthur threw back her head and gave the director a piercing look. ‘What will you require next from me, Mr. Wilder?’” The crew and extras applauded her.

For his part, Billy Wilder was exasperated with one actress who constantly looked at herself in the mirror - Dietrich, and one who self-consciously refused to look in a mirror at all - Arthur.

It is interesting to compare the two women in real life. They were born about a year apart, and died about a year apart. Arthur hated stardom and avoided it. Dietrich craved stardom and worked harder on her screen image than her acting. Just before this film was made, Jean Arthur was attending college in the Midwest. She had left Hollywood after her Oscar-nominated role in “The More the Merrier” which we discussed here, to pursue university studies. I can’t think of any other actress, particularly at the top of her game and earning power, who would do this.

But she left school to do this film which she must have realized was a golden opportunity and possibly one of her last, to do screwball comedy.

Dietrich was fighting time as well. She had just become a grandmother, which according to her daughter, she did not like at all. She turned her career to real-life cabaret work and was a success, the irony being she really did not sing well. Jean Arthur, for all her foolishness during the “Iowa Corn Song” routine, had no less singing range than Dietrich.

But Dietrich had that powerful stage personality she created from girlhood, it was her bastion, and bread and butter. 

Until old age took it from her. In their senior years, Jean Arthur returned to college, this time to teach. Dietrich’s health began to fail, and her glamour waned, and she shut herself up in her Paris apartment, bedridden, a recluse who allowed only a very few to visit. 

Jean, who was reclusive her entire life to varying degrees, enjoyed a pleasanter old age in the company of a small group of friends, young and old, her pets, and her house by the Pacific Ocean. They both lived to be 90 years old.

Dietrich, who had been eschewed by Berlin for her pro-American stance in the war, is buried in Berlin, and much of her belongings have been bought by Berlin for a museum collection.

The film “A Foreign Affair” was not seen in Germany until 1977, (in West Germany), when at last, it was appreciated by a German audience. That it took so long to be seen there may be testament to the power of Billy Wilder’s biting political mockery. Comedy can be a dangerous thing.

Come back next Monday for our next in this series on Uneasy Victors when we stay in Berlin to tackle, “The Big Lift” (1950) with Montgomery Clift and Paul Douglas.