In our series on films with Marlene Dietrich, we are showing a classic film by Billy Wilder:

A FOREIGN AFFAIR

USA 1948. D: Billy Wilder. D: Jean Arthur, Marlene Dietrich, John Lund, Millard Mitchell. 116 min. Engl-dtOmdtU. FSK: 12

Phoebe Frost, a moralistic congresswoman, visits the US troops in occupied Berlin. And is appalled by the moral slovenliness, both on the black market and in the nightclub "Lorelei", where the singer Erika von Schlütow performs. She had close ties to the Nazi leadership and is now apparently being protected by an American admirer. Phoebe Frost turns to Captain Pringle to drain the moral swamp - and promptly falls in love with him. But it is Pringle who is having an affair with Erika von Schlütow - for political reasons...
Billy Wilder, in exile since 1933, returned to a destroyed Berlin in 1945 as a US film officer. He used his footage of the ruins for this film, in which Marlene Dietrich plays her signature role of a half-silent singer - she in turn had fought fascism in her own way as a GI troop leader and had marched into Germany with the fighting US military in 1944/1945.

Introduction: Peter Bär