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“There’s something funny going on here and I’m not in the mood for laughs.” So says Phoebe Snow (Jean Arthur), an uptight Republican senator from Iowa, toward the beginning of A Foreign Affair (1948). The funniness she detects doesn’t involve the thing for which she has come to Berlin: a survey, embarked on with other members of a U.S. congressional committee, of American reconstruction efforts in the city. (The film is set in 1947.) It comes from a kink in the trip’s ambitions: the possibility that one of the military men decamped in the ruined city is helping cover the (beautifully clothed) ass of Erika von Schlütow (Marlene Dietrich). Slinky Erika is a torch singer who does her sensuous crooning at a cramped and smoke-suffocated bar in town American soldiers raucously frequent mostly because it’s her doing the crooning. She also is suspected of being the onetime mistress of either Hermann Göring or Joseph Goebbels. Her glamor, then, should maybe be looked at as less occupational than a vestige of the life she once possibly lived. 

Finding out whether the allegations around Erika’s regal name are true, as well as the identity of the army man responsible for having her back, preoccupy Phoebe in A Foreign Affair. So does an unexpected romance with John Pringle (John Lund), a younger captain with a fetching mustache she enlists for investigative help less because he is decorated (though he is) but because he too hails from Iowa and is therefore easier to trust. 

But that ease, unbeknownst to Phoebe, doesn’t actually mean anything. Viewers find out before she does that John is, in fact, the culprit. He’s been Erika’s lover for a while, meeting her happily for rendezvouses in the bombed-out apartment building in which she lays as low as someone who works as a popular lounge singer for a living could be. He’s willing to overlook telling pet names like “my new führer” because this is a woman who, rank political ideologies aside, has the allure of one Marlene Dietrich. Poor Phoebe, already disappointed by the misconduct and debauchery of so many of these Berlin-stationed Americans, is on track to even more disappointment, not only trusting the guy she ought not to have but also falling in love with him. (He makes the first move, though only because he wants to distract her from the dirty little secret he harbors.)

This all is presented less like the shifty romantic thriller it might sound like and more — as much as it’s possible to, anyway — as a frothy rom-com built on a love triangle. The presentation, headed by director and co-writer (with Charles Brackett and Richard L. Breen) Billy Wilder, is calculated, and also guided by strains of the personal. Jewish, Austrian-born Wilder had himself lived in Berlin before immigrating to America after Nazism proved too inescapable to bear anymore. He shot most of the film on location in the city he once and still loved, where much of the population was so despondent over what the future might hold that one woman he spoke with was eager to get her gas stove fixed not so that she could again cook for herself but so that she could kill herself.

Jean Arthur, John Lund, and Marlene Dietrich in A Foreign Affair.

A Foreign Affair is superficially daring for, if not always successful at executing, the challenge-accepted-esque attempt to pit largely frivolous romantic entanglements and comedy against a backdrop of ruin. More substantively it’s stealthily used, even as it implicitly backs overarching American aims, as a way to take some of the hot air out of then-echt images of Americans as uncomplicated heroes and do-gooders. 

You have members of the committee joking in one scene about how some little kids playing baseball among the rubble won’t have to worry about breaking any windows; you have someone in the first few moments of the film cynically talking about how helping those in Berlin will look good come election time. But you also have the no-nonsense Phoebe, for instance, losing her professional doggedness when love comes into the picture, or the behaving-badly John moving with impunity largely because he otherwise has a good record. The former characterization is undermined by what would feel less like sexism if Phoebe weren’t so one-dimensionally written as a sex-deprived party-pooper. The latter, though, is still bracing.

Lund feels at once right and wrong for the part. Right because Lund, otherwise a decent actor, is so bland as a star personality that it complements the moral fuzziness of his character. He’s an indistinct actor playing a character whose loyalties and motivations are indistinct too. But he also feels wrong because A Foreign Affair is more parts romantic comedy than serious examination of post-war life and American interventionism — an identity that requires an actor you not only believe could bag both Arthur and Dietrich, but also is charming enough to make you willing, even a little, to forgive him for his improprieties. Lund is someone who can decisively pull off neither. 

The only person you never doubt in A Foreign Affair is Dietrich, unsurprising since, for most of the movie, she largely is a projection whose biggest on-screen moments come from a succession of musical numbers where she alternately is sheathed in dragon-lady florals or something shimmery and sultrily snug. A Foreign Affair is at its best when Dietrich is finally given more to do besides further fertilize the iconic image she started growing in the movies she made more than a decade earlier with Josef von Sternberg — something that doesn’t happen until there are only about 30 minutes left in a movie that never convinces you it had to almost be a full two hours. She and Arthur are finally alone together; Wilder and his co-writers at last meaningfully cut through Erika’s menacing glamor to, with an open ear rather than misplaced empathy, evince a woman for whom self-preservation has always been the priority, no matter how much that has come at the cost of anything resembling integrity. It’s here that we realize the extent to which she is a shell, awaiting a dark fate she can only defer so many times.