A Foreign Affair
A Foreign Affair
Austrian Billy Wilder returns to Europe for this black comedy set in postwar Germany. Featuring sequences shot in the actual ruins of Berlin, this Hollywood take on the rubble film (Trümmerfilm) finds straitlaced Iowa congresswoman Jean Arthur on a fact-finding visit to the American Occupation Zone where not everything is as it seems.
Austrian Billy Wilder returns to Europe for this black comedy set in postwar Germany. Featuring sequences shot in the actual ruins of Berlin, this Hollywood take on the rubble film (Trümmerfilm) finds straitlaced Iowa congresswoman Jean Arthur on a fact-finding visit to the American Occupation Zone where not everything is as it seems. As she becomes entangled in a love triangle involving the slippery Captain John Pringle (John Lund) and his German paramour, cabaret-singer Marlene Dietrich in her classic maneater mode, Wilder creates a riotous, decadent panorama of a world caught between the past and the future.
Director: Billy Wilder. Cast: Jean Arthur, Marlene Dietrich, John Lund, Millard Mitchell. 1948. 116 min. USA. B&W. English. DCP.
All film screenings of Vienna in Hollywood: Émigrés and Exiles in the Studio System are available here.
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Vienna in Hollywood
The Influence and Impact of Austrians on the Hollywood Film Industry, 1920s–2020s
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Author Noah Isenberg and actress Monika Henreid will speak before this 35mm nitrate screening.
