I never knew the old Vienna with its Strauss music, glamour, and easy charm. I really got to know it in the classic period of the black market after the war. Vienna didn’t look any worse than Berlin—bombed out.
—Graham Greene
When Wilder returned to Hollywood from Europe in the fall of 1945, he turned his back on war-ravaged Vienna. Instead he decided to make a lush musical about pre–World War I Vienna, after the manner of the Waltz King, Johann Strauss (“The Blue Danube”), and Franz Lehar. Wilder remembered the Viennese operettas of Strauss and Lehar from his youth in Vienna. Furthermore, Wilder had collaborated with Lehar himself on a musical film in Berlin back in 1932, Es war einmal ein Walzer (Once There Was a Waltz). One of Strauss’s finest waltzes, “The Emperor Waltz,” would provide the title of Wilder’s present film and be featured in the movie’s score.
Wilder was, of course, bracketed with Brackett, his writing partner, in the film colony, and not always to his advantage. Brackett, it was whispered in industry circles, “exercised a restraining, civilizing influence on the cynical, callous, morbid tendencies of Billy Wilder.”1 Yet The Emperor Waltz was to be a fluffy Viennese musical confection, a project that obviously appealed much more to the Austrian Wilder than to the New England Brackett. “I don’t suppose I ever understood it very well,” said Brackett.2
Wilder returned to Paramount in mid-September 1945. “After cutting . . . a thirty-minute documentary about the concentration camps,” he explained, he wanted to get those images out of his mind. During a conference with the studio brass one afternoon, an executive noted that the studio did not have a suitable vehicle for Bing Crosby. Wilder picked up on the idea. Speaking on Brackett’s behalf, as well as for himself—as he always did at these meetings—Wilder ventured, “Why don’t we just do a musical?”3
At the time, making a picture with Crosby seemed like a good bet. Crosby had won an Academy Award for playing a priest in Going My Way, and his other recent pictures had been hits. In addition, Wilder had personally liked Crosby as a top vocalist ever since he had met him in Vienna in 1926, when Crosby was touring with Paul Whiteman’s band. Crosby was to play an American by the name of Virgil Smith, peddling phonographs in Austria.
Joan Fontaine excelled in playing refined heroines. She had won plaudits for playing the title role in Jane Eyre (1944) opposite Orson Welles. She was to take the part of Countess Johanna Augusta in Wilder’s film. Richard Haydn, who specialized in playing elderly types twice his age, such as Professor Oddly in Ball of Fire, was called on to take over the part of the aging Emperor Franz Josef after Wilder decided that Oscar Karlweis, who had originally been cast, was not right for the part.
The story that Wilder devised with Brackett was set at the beginning of the twentieth century in Vienna, when Wilder was himself a child; he clearly looked back on his boyhood and homeland with affection. The plot was derived from an actual incident: a Danish inventor had demonstrated a primitive talking machine to Emperor Franz Josef, who rejected it out of hand as a newfangled innovation.4 In the film, Virgil Smith endeavors to get the emperor to endorse his gramophone to spark European sales of his product. While visiting the imperial palace, Virgil’s fox terrier, Buttons, takes a fancy to the persnickety poodle of Countess Johanna Augusta, and Virgil, in turn, becomes enamored of Johanna.
Wilder had been frustrated when he collaborated on movie musicals in his Berlin days, such as the one he worked on with Franz Lehar, because the musical numbers were merely appendages to the plot. He wanted each song in The Emperor Waltz to be an extension, not an interruption, of the plot. For example, the song “Friendly Mountains” in The Emperor Waltz expresses how dazzled Virgil is when he visits the Tyrolean Alps, where he has a rendezvous with Johanna. Wilder envisioned The Emperor Waltz as an homage to Ernst Lubitsch, who had directed some delightful musical films, like his version of Lehar’s Merry Widow (1934).
When Wilder and Brackett finished the first draft of the screenplay in late May 1946, they submitted it to the industry censor. After the troubles they had encountered with Joseph Breen over Double Indemnity and The Lost Weekend, they thought their featherweight musical would pass muster with ease. Not a bit of it. Breen’s report to Wilder stated flatly that the censorship code would not tolerate the “offensive sex-suggestions inherent in a parallel between the mating of two dogs and the love affair of their respective owners.” Wilder and Brackett accordingly met with Breen and his chief assistant, Geoffrey Shurlock; the authors agreed to excise explicit references to canine mating habits. They also were willing to delete the phrase son of a bitch in reference to a male character. Wilder said he was tempted to playfully ask Breen whether he could substitute the circumlocution “If you had a mother, she would bark.” But he let that remark pass. Finally, the screenwriters agreed to delete references to the dogs’ “wetting,” because of the “vulgar connotations.”5
Once the screenplay was approved by Breen, Wilder and Brackett circulated a memo around the studio addressed “to all concerned with the production.” They began by declaring that The Emperor Waltz “is a comedy with a smattering of songs. Just because it plays in Vienna in 1906, don’t let’s have everyone talk like Herman Bing,” a German-born character actor with a thick German accent who had appeared in Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife.6 The only character in the film who speaks with a pronounced German accent is Dr. Zwieback, the court veterinarian, played by Sig Ruman (Ninotchka). Dr. Zwieback employs Freudian psychology in diagnosing the illness of Johanna’s ailing poodle Scheherazade. “Was your home life always congenial?” the doctor inquires of the whimpering poodle. Apparently Wilder never forgave Sigmund Freud for tossing him out the front door when Wilder sought to interview him for a Vienna daily.
Wilder and Brackett’s office memo about The Emperor Waltz continued, “And just because it’s in Technicolor, don’t let’s have the Emperor wear canary-yellow jaegers and a purple jock strap.” As a matter of fact, The Emperor Waltz was Wilder’s first film in color. Paramount utilized color sparingly in the 1940s, usually limiting it to lavish musicals and costume pictures—both of which criteria The Emperor Waltz met. Wilder admitted to being prejudiced against color movies. “Everything looked like it was in an ice cream parlor,” he observed; “a little raspberry, a little lemon. I was against color.”7 Despite his misgivings about Technicolor movies, Wilder went ahead. He picked George Barnes as his director of photography on The Emperor Waltz. Barnes had skillfully photographed Leisen’s Frenchman’s Creek (1944), a swashbuckler with Joan Fontaine, in Technicolor. In fact, Barnes was renowned for his color palette. He supplied rich colors for the opulent ballroom sequence and subtler, softer hues for the love scenes.
The front office allotted $2,879,000 for the budget of The Emperor Waltz—more than twice the budget allotted to The Lost Weekend. The huge budget allowed Wilder to shoot the Alpine scenes on location in the Canadian Rockies, rather than on the studio back lot. Wilder and Doane Harrison departed from Los Angeles for Jasper National Park in Alberta, in western Canada, on May 19, 1946, to scout locations. The full unit of three hundred cast and crew followed over the next two weeks. Principal photography was set to begin on June 1, and the location shooting would continue throughout June.
The breathtaking Canadian Rockies were not quite grand enough for the director. “Not that we disagreed with nature,” he said, “but Technicolor is sometimes a little harder to please.” Once he had committed himself to filming in color, Wilder became very conscious of the movie’s color scheme. He imported four thousand daisies from California, but Technicolor bleached them out. “White photographs too glaringly,” he explained. So he had all the daisies painted with a cobalt blue tinge. Furthermore, the park’s pine forest did not have enough pine trees to suit Wilder. So Paramount paid to transport several dozen pine trees from California and had them planted exactly where Wilder wanted them. The total cost of Wilder’s improvements of mother nature: $120,000.8
Word reached Hollywood about Wilder’s wholesale remodeling of the landscape. Screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz commented wryly, “It only goes to show you what God could do, if he had the money.”9 Nevertheless, in fairness to Wilder, all the money spent was displayed on the screen. Barnes’s color photography in the Alpine sequences was rapturous, making splendid use of the Canadian wilds.
There was a good deal of late-night carousing on location. Wilder posted an edict declaring, “We are here as representatives of a great American industry and a great country; and we are judged by our actions. Everyone will behave as if you were at home.” Wilder let it be known that any member of the company caught drinking or making love with one of the natives would be fired forthwith. Some members of the unit denounced Wilder as a “goddam hypocrite,” since on his previous picture he had romanced both actress Doris Dowling and bit player Audrey Young. But their grumbling never reached Wilder.10 In any case, location shooting wrapped on June 30, and the production team was back in Hollywood in July, shooting the interiors at Paramount.
Given Crosby’s screen image as Mr. Nice Guy, it is astounding to find that he was not popular with cast or crew during shooting. He comes across on film as affable and warm, but off camera he was aloof and cold to the unit—even to the director. Crosby snidely told Fontaine at one point that “he had some trouble understanding Wilder’s funny accent.” Fontaine said that Crosby, as one of the studio’s biggest box office draws, thought of himself as the emperor of Paramount. “Crosby had the power over Billy Wilder,” she said.11
With the studio’s endorsement, Crosby even brought in his own writer, Barney Dean, to revise his dialogue. Dean had been fiddling with Crosby’s lines in the pictures he made since the 1930s. Fontaine remembers Crosby showing up on the set one morning and cavalierly handing Wilder some new lines, saying, “This is what we’re going to do.” Said Fontaine, “It must have been very demeaning for Billy.”12 Dean’s emendations to the dialogue of The Emperor Waltz are not very impressive. For example, he has Virgil seek to ingratiate himself with Johanna by calling her “Honey Countess,” a cloying phrase that must have made Wilder wince. Wilder commented that “Crosby was a big star; . . . he operated for himself, not for the group or the film.”13
Filming ended on September 20, 1946, twenty-eight days over schedule. The final cost of the production was $4,070,248. Wilder, whose pictures had usually come in on budget, had some explaining to do to the front office. For a start, he pointed out, there was the unpredictable Canadian weather; heavy rains had complicated location shooting and delayed filming on several days. Wilder explained that he could not begin shooting a scene in sunshine on one day and then continue filming the scene the following day in a cloudburst.14 There were other variables, Wilder continued. When Karlweis had proved unsatisfactory in the role of the emperor, all of the emperor’s scenes that had already been shot had to be redone with his replacement, Haydn. Wilder was hoping that the picture would come together in the editing room as he worked with Harrison on the rough cut during postproduction.
To score the picture, Wilder chose Victor Young, who had been scoring Paramount films for over a decade and was De Mille’s favorite composer. Of course, Young took no part in putting together the sheaf of songs that Crosby warbled in the movie; he rather composed the incidental music for the rest of the picture. Young did a masterful job of meshing his own original melodies with excerpts from the Strauss waltzes used in the picture.
The opening credits are presented on a background of yellow brocade, as the sound track evokes old Vienna with the title waltz. There follows the kind of printed prologue that Wilder had gotten into the habit of using: “On a December night some forty years ago, His Majesty, Franz Josef, the First Emperor of Austria, . . . King of Galicia, and so forth, was giving a little clambake at his palace in Vienna.” Trust Wilder to slip in a mention of the Austrian province where he was born.
In the opening shot, Virgil Smith climbs up the terrace to the balcony of the imperial palace, smashes a window, and goes inside. He stands above the elegant ballroom, looking at the waltzing couples below, while still wearing his earmuffs. Virgil is looking down on the Austrian nobility, both literally and figuratively, as a class of people he no longer views as being above him. This implies that “Wilder’s sympathies are not with the Viennese royalty, but with the American salesman.”15
Then Virgil spies the radiant Countess Johanna Augusta waltzing in the elegant ballroom, and he impertinently cuts in on her partner to dance with her. The snobbish Princess Bitotska (Lucile Watson), an elderly gossip, recounts to her companion Isabella the events that have led up to Virgil’s brazenly gate-crashing the gala. Like Double Indemnity, this film is mostly narrated in flashback.
“This vulgar and obnoxious American is a traveling salesman from New Jersey,” Princess Bitotska begins. She describes Virgil as having only average looks, “with ears like a bat.” (It is surprising that Crosby let that line pass, since he did have protruding ears.) As the flashback begins, Virgil shows up at the imperial palace, wearing his straw hat tilted jauntily, accompanied by his fox terrier, Buttons. He hopes to coax Emperor Franz Josef into endorsing a new contraption called a phonograph, thereby increasing sales throughout the empire. The emperor is unimpressed by Virgil’s sales pitch, however. Virgil even uses his terrier to simulate the famed RCA Victor trademark: he positions Buttons in front of the gramophone and has him peer into the horn on top of the machine, just like the dog on RCA’s emblem. But it is no go.
Virgil meets Countess Johanna at the palace; she gives him the brush-off, just as the emperor did. By contrast, her French poodle, Scheherazade, takes a fancy to Virgil’s mongrel Buttons. In the end, the palace guard gives Virgil, who is only a common drummer, and his pooch the heave-ho.
Johanna is officially informed that “his Majesty’s dog is asking for the paw of Scheherazade.” She hopes that her pedigreed poodle will mate with the emperor’s black poodle, Louis. But Scheherazade suffers a nervous breakdown, and Johanna takes her to be examined by the royal veterinarian, Dr. Zwieback. After hearing about the high-bred poodle’s regard for Virgil’s low-bred terrier, Zwieback decides that Scheherazade is pining for Buttons. He states that the two dogs must be allowed to become friends. Virgil and Johanna likewise strike up a relationship; Virgil melts her icy coolness gradually, and their friendship ripens into love. Princess Bitotska smirks in her narration that Johanna is going to the dogs.
But the emperor tells Virgil regretfully that he cannot give his consent to the union of Johanna and Virgil. He explains that Johanna would never survive as a housewife married to a commoner in Newark, New Jersey. The extended flashback ends, and we are back at the gala. Virgil soon learns that Scheherazade is about to give birth. He rushes to the imperial stables, where he discovers that Scheherazade has brought forth three white puppies. That signals that Buttons, not Louis, sired the pups. Virgil snatches up the basket of puppies and takes them to the ballroom. He presents them to Franz Josef, who dotes on the cute, scrappy pups and decides to keep them as his own.
Virgil bluntly tells Franz Josef that, if Buttons and Scheherazade can overcome class barriers, he and Johanna can transcend the conventions of her tradition-oriented homeland and wed. The emperor gives their marriage his blessing and makes this telling remark to Virgil: “You Americans are simple; you are stronger than us. Ultimately the world will be yours.” The cocky Virgil responds, without batting an eyelash, “You bet it will!”
Meanwhile, since the subject of marriage has been raised, the aging Princess Bitotska turns to the impoverished aristocrat who wants to marry her for her money and inquires cynically, “How does the richest woman in Austria look to you?” The gold digger replies obsequiously, “Ravishing!” She has bought herself a younger man with whom she can have one last fling. So much for the decadent Austrian aristocracy. The orchestra strikes up “The Emperor Waltz,” and Virgil invites Johanna to waltz with him as he sings the lyrics for Strauss’s waltz written especially for the movie.
When Wilder and Brackett looked at the rough cut, both were rather disappointed. “I can’t imagine what went wrong,” Brackett said afterward; “we did have Bing Crosby. The final result was quite dull.”16 Wilder said, “I can’t get it into my head that people break into song” in an operetta, “but they do.” He concluded, “I was handicapped; I was not up to making a musical.”17
Because Wilder had intended The Emperor Waltz to be an homage to Lubitsch, he had a private screening of the rough cut for Lubitsch and his wife. Some time back Lubitsch had told Wilder that one day he hoped to make a movie about a squabbling couple who are reduced to utilizing their dog as a go-between. As The Emperor Waltz began unreeling, Lubitsch saw how the two dogs brought their owners together, and he said to his wife in a stage whisper, “The son-of-a-bitch has taken my story!”18 Otto Preminger, who was part of the German film colony in Hollywood, thought that Lubitsch overreacted by accusing Wilder of plagiarism. “Lubitsch had been demoralized by a severe heart attack,” said Preminger, “and continually worried about his heart condition.” So he really was not himself. “At another time he would not have made such a fuss.”19
Withal, Wilder remained friends with his mentor until Lubitsch’s untimely death at fifty-five, on Sunday, November 30, 1947. Lubitsch was in the middle of filming an operetta with Betty Grable, That Lady in Ermine (1948). (Preminger finished the picture.) Lubitsch had spent the afternoon with a call girl, suffered a postcoital heart attack, and died before a doctor could reach him. He was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park on December 5, 1947, with Billy Wilder acting as a pallbearer and Charles Brackett delivering the eulogy. Lubitsch’s death was a blow to Wilder. William Wyler said that, when he and Wilder left Forest Lawn after the funeral, Wilder said to him, “No more Ernst Lubitsch.” Wyler responded, “Worse than that: no more Lubitsch pictures.”20
When Wilder screened the final cut of The Emperor Waltz for the Paramount executives in the fall of 1946, they judged the lavish production “only moderately and spasmodically amusing.”21 They thought it would be a hard sell for the publicity department and decided to postpone its release until the marketers could come up with a suitable ad campaign. Frank Freeman employed the same logic to delay the release of The Emperor Waltz that he had used to shelve The Lost Weekend for months. The Emperor Waltz, he reminded the other executives, had cost more than $4 million to make, so why spend an additional $2 million on prints and advertising for a movie the studio did not have much faith in?
The delay in releasing the picture stretched to nearly two years. Once again Barney Balaban finally insisted, as he had about The Lost Weekend, that Paramount did not make pictures just to have them languish in the studio vault. The studio finally got around to arranging for the movie’s world premiere at the Paramount Hollywood Theatre on May 26, 1948, about a month before the general release. Fearing critical brickbats for the picture, Wilder did not attend the premiere but took off for a European vacation instead.
When the movie opened across the country in July, it received mixed reviews, but none were hostile. Some reviewers felt that the movie was an entertaining piece of strudel whose witty dialogue and tuneful score compensated for its hokey plot. One critic found the movie mildly diverting but hazarded that “The Emperor Waltz was entrusted to Wilder because of his birth certificate, rather than his sensibility.”22 James Agee’s notice straddled the fence, with both positive and negative observations: “At its best this semi-musical is amusing and well-shaped, because Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder have learned a fair amount from the comedies of Ernst Lubitsch.” Agee could not resist ending with a sly vulgarity: “At its worst, it yaps and embraces every unguarded leg in sight.”23 Other reviews were decidedly positive. The Hollywood trade papers observed that “Bing was never better than in The Emperor Waltz and not as good since Going My Way,” and “Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder get better with every picture.”24
Indeed, The Emperor Waltz has some virtues that are frequently overlooked. One cannot deny that the film entrances the eye. The visual richness of the movie is reflected in the way Wilder skillfully shot the rugged, beautiful Canadian landscapes that stood in for the Tyrolean Alps, with roseate dawns and dusks. His shooting style is fluid and imaginative throughout. He shot individual sequences, like the ballroom scenes, with great flair.
The Emperor Waltz is frequently referred to as a financial failure, but it was not. It attracted a fairly large audience and turned a modest profit. After all, Crosby’s loyal fans, who bought his recordings by the millions, could be counted on to see a Crosby picture.
Although Wilder always maintained that the less said about the movie, the better, he made a veiled reference to it in Stalag 17 a few years later. In a sly dig, Wilder has Sefton, an American soldier in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, don an Alpine hat similar to the one worn by Crosby in The Emperor Waltz and quip, “I’d look pretty stupid in this, yodeling my way across the Alps.”
What is fascinating about the movie today, says Cameron Crowe, is how un-Wilder it is—all waltzing couples, sumptuous ballrooms, and glittering candelabra. “For that reason it stands alone and apart from his other work,” and it is frequently ignored by commentators on his films.25
Wilder began preparing a movie that would “cure the whipped-cream hangover of The Emperor Waltz.”26 He decided to make the movie about postwar Berlin that he had envisioned while working in the U.S. Army’s Psychological Warfare Division in Germany. Wilder wrote about the bombed-out cities he visited during his tour of duty, “The destruction is unbelievable; . . . the people are still living in this rubble, in the cellars, in ruins with just two walls standing.”27 Wilder later filmed exteriors for the film, A Foreign Affair (1948), on location in Berlin. It was the first film Wilder had been associated with that was shot in Berlin since Menschen am Sonntag.
In his last memo to the OWI before leaving Germany, Wilder outlined the feature film he planned to make back in Hollywood. “I have spent two weeks in Berlin,” he wrote. “I found the town mad, depraved, starving—fascinating as background for a movie. My notebooks are filled with hot research stuff. . . . I have lived with some GIs and put down their lingo.”28 Wilder was confident that he had more than enough material to serve as the basis of a screenplay.
Even though Wilder had made a misstep with The Emperor Waltz, he was still the Paramount director par excellence. He had outlasted Preston Sturges, whose career had declined, and he had outlived Ernst Lubitsch.
While Wilder was mulling over some preliminary ideas for the screenplay, Brackett ran across the sketch for a proposed film titled “Love in the Air” in the stockpile of the studio’s unproduced scripts; it was credited to David Shaw. It told the story of an officer in the U.S. Air Force who accompanies a congresswoman on a tour of American army installations in postwar Europe. He falls in love with her en route and proposes to her on the return flight to Washington. Shaw’s seventy-two-page screen treatment begins with this preamble: “The Second World War was not only witness to the most enormous movement of material goods in the history of the world; it also saw the greatest mass movement of lust in recorded time.”29 Since Shaw’s synopsis was the property of Paramount’s story department, Wilder and Brackett were free to incorporate elements from it into the script of A Foreign Affair. But Wilder added a romance between an American officer and a German siren to pep up the story line.
Wilder and Brackett finished a forty-three-page treatment of the movie by May 31, 1947. Paramount assigned Richard Breen (no relation to Joseph Breen), a junior writer in the story department, to assist them in composing a full screenplay. The front office was uncomfortable with the movie’s working title, A Foreign Affair, since it suggested hanky-panky between American soldiers in Berlin and German women. They proposed a substitute title, “Operation Candybar”; this was a reference to the manner in which GIs ingratiated themselves with fräuleins by offering them American chocolate bars and other hard-to-get items. Wilder and Brackett scoffed at the proposed title, just as they had earlier refused to consider “Rommel’s Last Stand” as a title for Five Graves to Cairo.
As Wilder and Brackett worked on the screenplay, Brackett became extremely uneasy about the film’s problematic portrayal of American GIs in Berlin. He and Wilder had several serious disagreements while they were constructing the screenplay for this movie. One of the first sequences that Brackett took exception to begins with U.S. Army captain John Pringle, a wheeler-dealer and a cad, trading a dozen candy bars for nylon stockings at the black market near the Brandenburg Gate. Then he jumps into his jeep and drives through the rubble-strewn streets to the digs of his German mistress, Erika von Schluetow, who lives in a bombed-out apartment building. Along the way he whistles “Isn’t It Romantic?” which, given the movie’s grim backdrop, lends an ironic twist to the scene. As Pringle enters Erika’s ramshackle flat, she is standing at the bathroom mirror, wearing a bathrobe, and rinsing her mouth with mouthwash. She turns to Pringle and playfully squirts him full in the face with mouthwash. Pringle responds by wiping his face in her hair; then he hands her the nylons.
Brackett protested that it was revolting to show “a woman spitting lovingly in a man’s face.” He fumed, “Hell, it offends me beyond words, Billy.”30 Wilder responded, “Charlie, that’s just how a broad is, if she really likes the guy. We show how close they are—physically.” Brackett replied, “You’re sick, Billy! Sick!” as he hurled the Los Angeles telephone book at Wilder’s head, just missing his target.31 But the scene stayed in the script. Like Erich von Stroheim, Wilder was ahead of his time when it came to portraying sexual relationships on the screen frankly.
Wilder was becoming fed up with Brackett’s squeamish attitude toward the material he wanted to film. When he recalled their frequent, vociferous quarrels over their previous screenplays in the course of their increasingly stormy professional relationship, he began to consider breaking off their creative association for good.
But their feuding was never reflected in their screenplays. The crackling dialogue they wrote for A Foreign Affair is pure backroom Wilder and Brackett. For example, Colonel Rufus J. Plummer, who is in charge of the twelve thousand American troops in Berlin, comments at one point about the GIs’ getting involved in the seamier side of Berlin by openly dealing with the venal, tawdry black market: “This isn’t a Boy Scout camp. Some of the boys do go overboard once in a while. But you can’t pin sergeant’s stripes on an archangel.”
Wilder and Brackett completed the bulk of the screenplay at the beginning of August 1947, but they continued revising it off and on until the end of November, right before shooting started. All the time he was writing the script, Wilder had Marlene Dietrich in mind for the role of Erika, the sultry chanteuse at the Club Lorelei and the mistress of Captain Pringle. “I had known Marlene from Germany before I came to this country, when I was a newspaperman in Berlin,” Wilder said, “and we were very friendly.”32 When Wilder offered her the part of Erika, however, Dietrich declined. Erika hobnobbed with Nazis, and Dietrich was afraid that her longtime anti-Nazi stance would be tarnished by playing the role. Wilder ran the screen test by June Havoc (Gentleman’s Agreement) for Dietrich. He cleverly persuaded her that no American actress could play Erika convincingly. Dietrich concurred and accepted the role. She writes in her autobiography that she learned that “you can’t refuse Billy Wilder.” Moreover, she had a high regard and trust for him as an artist. In addition, quite frankly, she needed the money.33
Dietrich’s daughter, Maria Riva, writes in her biography of her mother that Dietrich’s credentials as an anti-Nazi were confirmed when the U.S. government selected her to receive the Medal of Freedom—the highest honor the nation could bestow on a civilian—for her bravery in entertaining the troops at the front throughout World War II. As Wilder put it, “She was at the front more than Eisenhower.” Dietrich, the first woman to be so honored, proudly accepted the award in November 1947, shortly before filming started at Paramount on A Foreign Affair.34
Dietrich was not pleased with her costars, John Lund, who was to play Pringle, and Jean Arthur, who was to play Phoebe Frost, the straitlaced congresswoman investigating the morale and the morals of the American army of occupation. Dietrich referred to Lund as a “petrified piece of wood” and dismissed Arthur as that “funny little woman with that terrible American twang.”35 Dietrich’s assessments of Lund and Arthur were hardly fair. Lund was not a matinee idol by any means, but he had given a creditable performance in his first picture, Leisen’s To Each His Own (1946), opposite Olivia de Havilland. And Arthur’s midwestern accent was just right for her to play a congresswoman from Iowa. She had been in films since 1923 and was always appealing as the girl next door. She had excelled in screwball comedies in the 1930s and more recently had appeared in George Stevens’s The More the Merrier (1943). She would receive top billing in A Foreign Affair.
Furthermore, Arthur was being paid more than Dietrich. Arthur’s salary was $175,000; Dietrich’s was $110,000. Wilder’s take-home pay now exceeded that of his stars; he was allotted $116,000 for directing the picture and $89,000 for coauthoring the screenplay. Brackett’s paycheck for producing the picture and coauthoring the script was $135,000 total.
Wilder chose Marlene Dietrich to play the key role of Erika von Schluetow, “the Berlin bombshell,” because her appearance in the film “helped to give the movie a more authentic atmosphere. There was a natural similarity between Lola, the café singer that she portrayed in von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel [Der blaue Engel, 1930], and the Berlin nightclub singer she played in my film.” Dietrich’s songs in A Foreign Affair were composed by Frederick Hollander, the German composer who had written the songs for The Blue Angel. “That made the connection between Dietrich’s two roles even closer,” Wilder added.
Most critics of A Foreign Affair assume that Wilder commissioned Hollander to write the songs expressly for this movie. Actually, Hollander composed them for the Tingeltangel Club, his failed attempt to establish a bistro in Hollywood “recreating a disenchanted Berlin cabaret.” When the club closed, Wilder arranged to have Paramount purchase the screen rights to the songs for Dietrich to warble as the torch singer of the decadent Lorelei Club in A Foreign Affair. The songs are sardonic and mockingly sentimental; Dietrich, said Wilder, “sold a song very well.”36 The three cabaret songs Hollander composed evoke the disenchanted mood of a devastated, defeated people. In one of the musical numbers, “Black Market,” the lyrics describe how “salami and soap . . . are traded for black lingerie.” In another, “Illusions,” Erika sings of her “broken-down ideals” and her illusions, which are “slightly used, secondhand, and for sale.” One journalist noted that, given the collaboration of Wilder, Dietrich, and Hollander, the picture has such an authentic atmosphere of Berlin that one expects to see the logo of Ufa, not Paramount, on the movie. Wilder replied that it was really Dietrich who brought the authentic atmosphere of Berlin to the movie: “Marlene is Berlin incarnate!”37
Wilder secured Charles Lang as his director of photography. Lang, who had photographed Midnight, which Wilder cowrote for Leisen, was, along with John Seitz, one of the best cinematographers for black-and-white movies in Hollywood. Lang gave A Foreign Affair a documentary-like quality with his spare cinematography. He adroitly captured the jagged edges of the Berlin cityscape. “The cinematography of A Foreign Affair by Charles Lang is a masterplay of shadow and light among the grey ruins,” writes Robert Dassanowsky-Harris.38 This was the first of four Wilder films that Lang photographed, culminating in Some Like It Hot in 1959.
The opening credits state that “a large part of this film was photographed in Berlin,” but that is not precisely true. Wilder and his camera crew did spend three weeks in Berlin, photographing actual locations, but most of the film was shot at Paramount Studios in Hollywood. German film historian Oliver Kuch, the principal expert on this film, writes that “Wilder’s familiarity with Berlin shines through the picture, as bombed-out images of the city come together with studio sequences so seamlessly that the entire movie looks as if it had been shot on location.”39 The skillful meshing of the location footage with the studio material is, of course, the handiwork of Wilder’s longtime editor Doane Harrison.
Location filming lasted from August 17 through September 6, 1947, prior to the start of principal photography in Hollywood. Erich Pommer, who was studio chief at Ufa when Wilder was a tyro screenwriter there, had joined the exodus to Hollywood before the war. Pommer returned to Germany in 1946 and was now head of the film unit of PsyWar, with which Wilder had been associated immediately after the war in 1945. Pommer was charged with revitalizing the German film industry. He helped facilitate Wilder’s obtaining official permission from the U.S. army of occupation to film in Berlin. Wilder filmed the movie’s opening shots of Berlin from a plane. “It was absolute ashes, Berlin; rubble,” he recalled.40 Wilder’s cameras captured the black market at the Brandenburg Gate and the GIs flirting with the fräuleins near the rutted Tiergarten (zoo). As Wilder had feared, some Berliners objected to an American film crew invading downtown Berlin and disrupting traffic. But, Steven Bach writes, “Wilder cut them down to size in his acidic, Austrian-spiced German.”41
While Wilder was shooting in the ruins of Berlin, he wanted to “reconnect with the Berlin” he had once known. He remembered filming Menschen am Sonntag there in 1929, when Berlin was, he said, “the most beautiful and the fastest city on earth.”42 After Wilder returned home, he collaborated with Harrison in editing the location footage together, with a view to integrating it into the studio material.
The only time Wilder expressed his deep-seated hatred of the Nazis while making this picture came in the editing room. After running the aerial shots of the widespread devastation in Berlin, an assistant editor noted how the Allied bombings had destroyed the city. Wilder jumped up and shouted that the Allies were not responsible for the destruction of Berlin; ultimately the Nazis were. “To hell with those bastards!” he exclaimed. “They burned most of my family in their damned ovens! I hope they burn in hell!”43 After that outburst, Wilder never mentioned the fate of his family again during the making of this picture.
Wilder and Brackett had finished the revised version of the script after taking into consideration the industry censor’s objections to the screenplay. Joseph Breen reminded Wilder that the U.S. Army and the members of Congress were not to be ridiculed. He pointed to the Production Code: “The just rights, history, and feelings of any nation are entitled to consideration and respectful treatment.”44 Breen accordingly required that certain offensive lines of dialogue be eliminated from the script, such as the description of Congress as “a bunch of boobs that flunked out of law school.” The writing team complied. Breen also complained about “the over-emphasis on illicit sex that seems to run through most of the picture.”45 Wilder and Brackett removed a few blatantly offensive lines of dialogue. But these were merely token gestures to make Breen favorably disposed to approving their screenplay, which he finally did.
Principal photography began at Paramount on December 1, 1947. Dietrich had to shoot a simulated newsreel that showed Erika socializing with the Nazi high command at the opera. Dietrich glared at Wilder while filming this scene and said, “Only you, Billy, could make me play a part like this.” He replied, “Relax! It’s only a movie.”46
Wilder invited Dietrich, his Berlin buddy of old, to move into his house for the duration of the shoot. During her stay, Dietrich regaled Wilder, at his prompting, with stories about her multiple love affairs with directors like Sternberg and costars like Gary Cooper. She acknowledged that she had had liaisons with members of both sexes, which was an open secret in film circles.47
Jean Arthur saw Wilder’s inviting Dietrich to be his houseguest during filming as an example of his favoritism toward Dietrich, a complaint that she would register often during the shoot. She was jealous of the bond between Dietrich and Wilder, and it unnerved her when the two joked in German on the set. Moreover, Dietrich would invite Wilder to lunch in her dressing room, where she would cook German dishes for him, while Arthur retreated to her dressing room in tears. Arthur was an insecure and skittish actress, although it never showed in her performances on the screen. “During the making of A Foreign Affair her nervousness . . . and natural timidity made her finicky and difficult about how well she was being filmed, which caused Marlene to detest her,” writes Ean Wood.48 Arthur resented Dietrich’s line of dialogue, which she thought Dietrich delivered with too much relish, in which Erika describes the prim, plain-looking Phoebe (Arthur) as having a face “like a well-scrubbed kitchen floor.” Arthur had convinced herself that Wilder would allow Dietrich to upstage her in every scene they played together and that ultimately Dietrich’s performance would eclipse her own.
Wilder was aware that Dietrich was somewhat narcissistic and possessed a frank fascination with her own glamour and beauty. Sternberg, Dietrich’s mentor, had taught her to check the lighting of a scene before the cameras turned. “This spotlight,” she would say to the camera crew, “is not in the right place” to illuminate her face properly. “Could you put it over there?” When the crew ignored her orders, she would say to Wilder, “Billy, tell the lighting crew they should change the lights.” Wilder would respond that the lighting of a scene was up to the director of photography; “leave me out of it.”49 He exclaimed, “What a picture; one dame who’s afraid to look in a mirror, and one who can’t stop!”
Wilder admired Arthur as an actress, but he grew impatient with her paranoia. Things came to a head in the middle of shooting. One night Wilder’s doorbell rang after midnight; there was Arthur in a frenzy, with her eyes bulging. Her husband, producer Frank Ross, was standing behind her on the porch for moral support. “What is it, Jean?” Wilder asked. She answered, “What did you do with my close-up? The one where I look so beautiful!” Wilder asked her what she meant. “You burned it,” she replied; “Marlene told you to burn that close-up; she does not want me to look good.” Wilder responded, “This is madness; that I should destroy something.” The next morning he took Arthur to the editing suite and had Harrison show her her close-up, still intact. “This is typical,” he commented wryly. A movie set “is a little insane asylum,” and the actors “are all inmates.”50
Over the years, various commentators on A Foreign Affair have taken Wilder to task for the way he handled Jean Arthur in this movie. Richard Corliss, in his book Talking Pictures, asserts that Arthur looks far from her best in this film. Wilder photographed her, he continued, “with all of the gentleness of a mug shot.”51 The most outspoken of Wilder’s detractors on this subject is Andrew Sarris. In his 1968 book The American Cinema, Sarris denounces Wilder for his thoughtlessly “brutalizing a charming actress like Jean Arthur in A Foreign Affair.”52 Yet in his 1977 essay “Billy Wilder, Closet Romanticist,” Sarris reassesses his harsh judgment: “Am I blaming Wilder too much and the devastating Dietrich too little for what happened to Miss Arthur in A Foreign Affair? After all, Hitchcock once told me that Jane Wyman burst into tears when she saw how she looked next to Dietrich in Stage Fright [1950]; and yet I never condemned Hitch for his cruelty.”53
Perhaps the most salient defense of Wilder in this regard comes from Dassanowsky-Harris, who emphasizes that Arthur’s Phoebe Frost is the dowdy, stridently prudish congresswoman only for the first half of the picture. When she gradually becomes enamored with Captain John Pringle in the second half of the movie, “Arthur’s shy, lovely beauty eventually surfaces in her portrayal; she becomes relaxed and even girlish.”54
Moreover, Arthur herself ultimately changed her tune about Wilder’s treatment of her on this picture. Some forty years later, in 1989, Arthur phoned Wilder to say that she had finally seen A Foreign Affair on TV. Karasek writes that she declared, “It was a wonderful film, and even the close-ups were wonderful!” Arthur asked Wilder to forgive her for her behavior while making the picture. Wilder gallantly answered that there was nothing to forgive.55
The shooting of A Foreign Affair wrapped on February 12, 1948. Harrison had a rough cut ready in two weeks. Hollander, who wrote Dietrich’s songs, also supplied the background music for the film; he wove throughout his score the themes of the three cabaret songs that Dietrich sang.
The film opens impressively with the aerial shots of the bombed-out city of Berlin. The devastation reflects the desolate lives of the German civilians, who inhabit a world of disillusionment and cynicism. The plane flying overhead is carrying some members of Congress, including the prim, puritanical Phoebe Frost. She and her colleagues are members of a fact-finding committee charged with investigating the “moral malaria” that seems to be infecting the soldiers attached to the American occupation forces in Berlin. She is determined to “fumigate Berlin with all the insecticides at our disposal.”
Congresswoman Frost is shocked to discover that the American troops are openly trading with civilians on the black market and “fraternizing” with the fräuleins. She is further upset to learn that Erika von Schluetow, the former mistress of a high-ranking Nazi, Hans Birgel, is singing at the Lorelei, an off-limits café frequented by American GIs. To make matters worse, Erika is now rumored to be the mistress of an American officer. Phoebe enlists the help of Captain John Pringle in her effort to smoke out Erika’s American lover. Little does she know that the officer she is trying to identify is Captain Pringle himself.
Erika explains away her opportunism by observing sardonically, “A woman picks out whatever is in fashion, and changes it with the seasons, like wearing a spring hat after winter.” Wilder does not appoint the audience Erika’s hanging judge, however. “Erika is the film’s most problematic character,” writes Dassanowsky-Harris, because she has learned to cultivate “the survival spirit.” She is a worldly-wise and war-weary individual who knows how to survive by making the best of a bad situation.56
To distract Phoebe from her official mission, randy John Pringle woos her. He accompanies her to the army intelligence file room, where she plans to investigate Erika’s records. John makes advances toward her, and she resists his blandishments by opening one file drawer after another between them. But John closes every drawer that she opens; he finally traps her in a corner between two drawers and kisses her. “You are out of order!” Phoebe blurts out. “Objection overruled,” replies John.
Phoebe becomes romantically inclined toward John, but she vows to sever their relationship when she finally discovers that he is Erika’s lover. John seeks to mollify Phoebe by telling her that he pursues his affair with Erika only to smoke out Birgel, who is still at large. Erika is indeed being used by the American military police as bait for the trap to snare her jealous, most-wanted Nazi lover. He eventually takes the bait and shows up at the Lorelei in disguise, looking for Erika. But the military police are lying in wait for him, and he is killed in an exchange of gunfire. Erika is slated for a labor camp because she is tainted by her Nazi affiliations. Unrepentant to the last, she gives a seductive wink to the two young MPs assigned to escort her to prison. She hikes up her skirt to her knees and asks coyly, “Is it still raining? If there are any puddles, you’ll carry me, won’t you, boys?”
Hence the filmgoer infers that the incorrigible Erika will most likely slip away from the two bedazzled soldiers and never see the inside of the prison camp. Farber is probably right when he writes, “Wilder cannot quite abandon such a bewitching character to her fate without a hint of possible reprieve.”57 Perhaps only a Hollywood filmmaker who grew up in Europe amid the privations of World War I and experienced the decadence of Berlin between the wars could have presented Erika as a somewhat sympathetic character to the viewer. As John Russell Taylor puts it, Wilder “had become an American filmmaker, though with continental trimmings.”58
As for the frigid Phoebe Frost, once Erika is out of the picture, she thaws out and warms up to Pringle once again. “Wilder’s choice of ending has Capt. Pringle selecting Phoebe over Erika,” writes Malene Sheppard Skaerved, “but would any man really have chosen Arthur over Dietrich?”59 Actually, Pringle does not have a choice between the two women: Erika is gone for good at the film’s end, whatever may become of her, and Phoebe alone is left to him.
With A Foreign Affair, Wilder was denounced on the floor of the U.S. Senate for making a movie in which “our occupation forces appear undisciplined and ill-behaved.”60 Certain members of the Department of Defense also criticized the film, specifically because some of the American GIs were depicted as taking advantage of the citizenry of Berlin whenever they got the chance.
Stuart Schulberg, who was involved with the Motion Picture Export Association of America, determined whether or not American films could be exhibited in Germany. He banned A Foreign Affair from being released in Germany. “Our initial disappointment with the picture later escalated to outrage and disgust,” he subsequently wrote in an essay defending his decision. “We could not excuse a director who played the ruins for laughs and cast Military Government officers as comics.” He condemned the picture as “crude and superficial. . . . Berlin’s trials and tribulations are not the stuff of cheap comedy.”61 (Oliver Kuch notes that A Foreign Affair “was first shown in West Germany as a successful television special in 1977, and only hit the German big screen in 1991,” when it was a smash hit.)62
Wilder’s response to the film’s detractors at the time of its release was to point out that he put into the movie what he had himself observed during his German tour of duty in the summer of 1945. He was not criticizing the American occupation forces alone, he continued; “every occupying, victorious army . . . plunders, steals. That is a rule that goes way back to the Persians.”63
At all events, A Foreign Affair had its American premiere at the Paramount Theatre in New York on July 1, 1948, a scant two months after the long-delayed premiere of The Emperor Waltz. The picture collected a sheaf of mostly favorable reviews. Critics pointed out that, even in a landscape of ruins, “Billy Wilder sets off a firework display of witty dialogue.” Still Wilder’s masterly control of the plot ensures that “this movie is anything but a formless string of gags” or a mere sideshow. Nevertheless, some reviewers expressed reservations about the movie, saying that it was too soon after the war to joke about a tragedy of this magnitude.64
Because of the hostile reaction to the movie in official circles, Paramount is said to have discreetly withdrawn A Foreign Affair from distribution. Actually, the studio delayed doing so until the movie had fulfilled most of its dates across the country. So Paramount’s action seems a token gesture, since the film certainly was exhibited long enough to make money.65
The movie ultimately weathered the storm that had brewed in Washington at its original release. What is more, it has come to be regarded as a sophisticated dark comedy, distinguished by Wilder’s astringent, cynical wit. Wilder himself said, “A Foreign Affair I regard as one of my better pictures.” Set in the still-smoky ruins of postwar Berlin, the picture leaves a bitter aftertaste of defeated hopes and soiled illusions. A warts-and-all account of U.S. military corruption in Berlin after World War II, the movie riffs on themes of deception and moral relativism. Yet the caustic bite of the dialogue does not keep the film from being entertaining. It is a warmly acted, briskly paced movie. Jean Arthur came in for her share of critical praise for her performance; with her apple-pie features and no-nonsense air, she is well cast as Phoebe. The movie was a personal triumph for Marlene Dietrich. As Erika, Dietrich sports a succession of attractive costumes, which the camera caresses. She exudes a wry, world-weary dignity.
Charles Brackett maintained that he endured working on A Foreign Affair, although he disapproved of its satire on the U.S. military officialdom in Berlin, because Wilder promised that their next film would be more to his liking. It would be about a silent film star who attempts a comeback twenty years later. This was a concept that Brackett had suggested to Wilder more than once. The picture would be a comedy with perhaps some dark undertones, but a comedy nonetheless, thought Brackett. He was anxious to give it a whirl.