A Foreign Affair
Director: Billy Wilder
Year Released: 1948
Rating: 2.0
The label "comedy" that keeps coming up in reviews is inappropriate - nothing at all about this picture is amusing, the images of obliterated Berlin are profoundly disturbing, and the story - which has John Lund working with Jean Arthur to find the man having an affair with Marlene Dietrich ... who just happens to be John Lund - gimmicky. Arthur's prudishness is never funny - she is constantly 'appalled' by the sexual exploits of the soldiers, and also irritatingly dimwitted, taking forever to figure out what a normal person could surmise in ten minutes (she's a senator from Iowa, which must be a slap by Wilder at American Midwestern "idiocy"). To be honest, it doesn't help that I'm not a real big fan of Arthur or Dietrich.
