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Ahead of The Third Man, a mordant eye on Manichean Yanks vis-à-vis European relativism. The postwar view: "Moral malaria" infects American MPs in occupied Berlin, the fumigator is the crusading Midwest congresswoman (Jean Arthur) who ventures into the rubble and is promptly picked up by a pair of uniformed mooks. Her opposite is the chanteuse (Marlene Dietrich) in the bombed-out flat, former Nazi mistress and peddler of "slightly used, second hand" illusions, Brecht's "bitch in heat" in a sequined gown. Wedged between them is the Army captain (John Lund) well-acquainted with the black market, a bull's-eye hovers over his heart. "Oh, I suppose that's publicity from Hollywood!" Not Rossellini's crater (Germany Year Zero) but a modulatory cabaret for Billy Wilder, his ruined city traffics in candy bars and cigarettes and mattresses. ("For fifteen years we haven't slept in Germany.") There are Gestapo officers in hiding yet the mood is jaunty and amoral, politics are faddish things and swastikas have become a little punk's graffiti. At the center of the vortex is the Lorelei Nightclub with its caustic Frederick Hollander numbers, the overarching shift is from the lowdown S&M of Dietrich and Lund to the Ninotchka thawing of Arthur via "The Iowa Corn Song." Newsreel wreckage and chiaroscuro burlesque, the new war is the one between leading ladies—the ironic Dietrich mask is chipped just enough for her to spit toothpaste at the camera, Arthur flits nervously until she's frozen in heartbroken profile, silhouetted but for a lone, glinting tear. The seduction in the filing cabaret, "my goods behind the screen," the Stars and Stripes on the fräulein's stroller. "Don't tell me it's subversive to kiss a Republican?" A vital Deutschland for Fassbinder (The Marriage of Maria Braun), Wilder disperses with the romance for the next visit (One, Two, Three). With Millard Mitchell, Peter von Zerneck, Stanley Prager, and William Murphy. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |