Billy Wilder goes back to Berlin after the war and doesn't like it much. If you're expecting a capricious romantic comedy, you won't find it here.
Jean Arthur is an uptight Congresswoman from Iowa investigating conditions in the bare ruined choirs of Berlin. The Colonel in charge of wrangling the Congressional committee is Millard Mitchell. He hands the committee members, Arthur included, a piece of boilerplate about how we are teaching the Germans about democracy and baseball. "We teach them that if they steal anything it must be second base." It's all working out very well, if only they can get those damned kids to stop drawing swastikas every place they go.
The occupation army isn't much better. It's 1948 and the Russians haven't yet become "real shifty" as they would in Wilder's "One, Two, Three," which appeared twelve years later, although even here they are pretty ugly, dumb, and given to vodka. At the climax, with a dead body on the floor, the night club is empty except for a couple of MPs and four Russians at one of the tables singing the Volga Boatman. But the American troops are taking advantage of the down-and-out Berliners as well, swapping chocolate bars and nylons for more tawdry treats. The Berliners, if they've learned nothing else, have learned the arts of survival under stress and they're very cooperative. Congresswoman Arthur notices how friendly the soldiers and Frauleins are and is perturbed.
It develops that two of the major players in this illicit system are an Army Capitain, John Lund, and a nightclub singer, Marlene Dietrich. They swap favors almost every night. Of course, Lund must wind up shepherding Arthur around and they fall in love. Dietrich is jealous about the fading interest of her meal ticket, but the two women know nothing of each other. It's just that their common interest is switching his affection from one to the other.
The script by the patrician Charles Brackett and the Jewish refugee Billy Wilder crackles with subversive wit. Nobody comes out looking spotless. Human weaknesses and strengths abound -- mostly weaknesses. The plot changes as it moves along, from mostly funny to mostly dramatic and sad. When she finds out about her man's treachery, Arthur's sadness is palpable, helped along by the photography of Charles Lang, who manages to capture convincingly the wreck that the German capital has now become. People live in piles of rubble, and the script gives them a little humanity. "Do you know what it was like to be a woman when the Russians came in?", Dietrich asks Arthur -- who has no idea.
The three songs sung by Dietrich sort of sum up the subject of the film and it's not funny romance -- "The Black Market," "Illusions," and "The Ruins of Berlin." It's funny, though. There are some good gags and amusing situations. But Billy Wilder lost his mother and some of his other family in the Nazi's genocide program, and the wisecracks seem to come out of some dark shadowy corner. It's hard to imagine how it could have been otherwise. His father's grave was buried under a heap of rubble and, when he arrived in Berlin, there were still thousands of putrefying corpses buried under the collapsed bricks.
