This underrated Wilder comedy is more pleasurable than some of his more acclaimed, 'serious' films. it does need the Preston Sturges touch - to excise those Wilderean longueurs for a start - but 'Affair' has an agreeable sourness that poisons any move towards fairy-tale resolution. When the most sympathetic character in this tale of a protecting U.S. Army and conscientious senators is an opportunistic Nazi turned 'nightclub singer', you get where Wilder's coming from. His vision of American military imperialism is presciently negative, astonishingly so for 1948, as is the sexual frankness, the shifting sado-masochism of Pringle's relationship with Erika (linked to Nazism); the bawdy innuendo of that with Miss Frost. The film also works as a tribute to/critique of Marlene Dietrich, a creation of light and mirrors, who, unlike earthier stars, will never be caught.
Review of A Foreign Affair
