Friday | July 13, 2012 9:00 pm

A Foreign Affair

Screening on Film

Directed by Billy Wilder.
With Jean Arthur, Marlene Dietrich, John Lund.
US, 1948, 35mm, black & white, 116 min.
Print source: Universal

In A Foreign Affair, the famously jaundiced sense of humor shared by Wilder and co-writer Charles Brackett was turned upon a remarkably timely subject: the interaction between the American occupiers and native Germans in war ravaged Berlin. The result is a deeply subversive comedy of manners that pits a corn-fed ingénue, played by Jean Arthur, against Marlene Dietrich’s sultry blackmarketeer, with both women vying for the affections of Army soldier John Lund, whose world-weary cynicism emblematized the Wilder anti-hero. Among the finest of Wilder’s early films, A Foreign Affair today remains strangely underappreciated—even despite Dietrich’s luminous presence in one of her great postwar roles.

July 13 – September 3, 2012

100 Years of Paramount Pictures

December 8–17, 2006

Major and Minor Notes: A Billy Wilder Centennial

January 17–March 6, 2016

Innocence Abroad

July 5–October 27

Melville et Cie.

September 6–November 7

Psychedelic Cinema

September 29–December 1

Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith

October 18–November 3

António Campos and the Promise of Cinema Novo

sepia photo of Artie Freedman in silhouette with a video camera at show

November 8

Boston Punk Rewound / Unbound. The Arthur Freedman Collection

November 9–December 9

The Yugoslav Junction: Film and Internationalism in the SFRY, 1957 – 1988

November 10–24

From the Jenni Olson Queer Film Collection

a mausoleum that looks like a miniature Spanish cathedral, next to a variety of others, against an evening sky

November 11

The Night Watchman by Natalia Almada

a double-exposed image that includes a 16th century Russian man being fed grapes by another amid decadent decor

November 23

Wings of a Serf