This was the penultimate film for Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder as a team. Up to this point, they had been the longest-running writing partnership in the history of motion pictures and one of the most successful, scripting such memorable films as Ninotchka (1939), Ball of Fire (1940), and The Lost Weekend (1945), and working together as producer and director on many productions. The tensions that arose between them over the years (some sources say reaching a head on A Foreign Affair) were finally too much to overcome, and after Sunset Boulevard (1950), they called it quits.

According to biographer Maurice Zolotow, after the split between Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, Wilder cut off anyone who chose to work with his former partner, including Richard Breen, a co-writer on A Foreign Affair.

Behind Billy Wilder's carefully cultivated air of cynicism lay an apparently very charitable man. In an interview with biographer Charles Higham, Marlene Dietrich said Wilder had worked harder than almost anyone else involved with the European Refugee Rescue Fund and was one of the kindest and sweetest men she had ever known. Another source said Wilder sent several minority students through college on the condition that he never be identified as their benefactor.

Although they remained lifelong friends, Dietirch and Wilder worked together on only one other picture, the courtroom drama Witness for the Prosecution (1957).

After returning to the screen from a four-year absence to make A Foreign Affair, Jean Arthur agreed to a three-picture contract with Paramount with the stipulation that she could refuse any production. It took her years before she finally made a film for the company, the Western Shane (1954), and that turned out to be her last feature film appearance.

Four-time Oscar-nominated composer Friedrich Hollaender, a German born in London in 1896, was long associated with Marlene Dietrich (see POP CULTURE 101), as well as other notable emigres from Germany to Hollywood. He began his career with Ernst Lubitsch on Sumurun (1920) and made two other movies with the director: Angel (1937), starring Dietrich, and Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (1938). He also wrote the score for Wilder's Sabrina (1954) and appeared as a conductor in Wilder's comedy One, Two, Three (1961).

Writer Richard L. Breen began his film career auspiciously with an Academy Award nomination (shared with Brackett and Wilder) for this picture. He and Brackett also shared a Writers Guild of America nomination the same year for Miss Tatlock's Millions (1948) and another Oscar nomination (also shared with Walter Reisch) for Titanic (1953). Brackett and Breen teamed for an additional three pictures after Brackett and Wilder's break-up.

Cinematographer Charles Lang (sometimes billed, as here, as Charles B. Lang Jr.) had a long and successful career working on nearly 150 pictures between 1926 and 1973 and earning 18 Academy Award nominations. He won early on for A Farewell to Arms (1932) and in 1991 received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Cinematographers.

Dietrich knew a lot about lighting and film and had a lifelong habit of walking onto a set and giving orders about where the camera should be placed and how she should be lighted. Cinematographer Charles Lang was already familiar with this, having shot two of her earlier movies, Desire (1936) and Angel (1937). He was also working on I Loved a Soldier (1936) when she clashed famously with director Henry Hathaway over how glamorous her character was supposed to be (she, of course, thinking she should be more glamorous than he wanted). The conflict caused the production to be cancelled. The film was finally made later under the title Hotel Imperial (1939) with a different cast and crew.

Referring to her years touring Europe in World War II to boost the morale of the troops, Wilder once asked Dietrich if she had ever slept with General (later President) Dwight Eisenhower. Her reply: "How could I? He was never at the front."

Dietrich's friends noticed that after she returned to Hollywood from Paris to make A Foreign Affair, she made a constant show of the Legion of Honor medal bestowed on her by the French government. Eventually, people like director Ernst Lubitsch told her they'd only come to parties if she promised not to wear it.

This was only the third picture John Lund made after his debut at the age of 35 in To Each His Own (1946) opposite Olivia de Havilland. Prior to that, he worked on radio and in theater. He retired in 1963 and died in 1992.

by Rob Nixon Memorable Quotes from A FOREIGN AFFAIR

CONGRESSMAN PENNECOTT: If you give a hungry man a loaf of bread, that's democracy. If you leave the wrapper on, that's imperialism.

COLONEL PLUMMER (giving the congressional delegation a tour of Berlin's ruins): That used to be an arch of triumph, until they got out of the habit. ... There's the balcony where [Hitler] bet his Reich would last a thousand years. That's the one that broke the bookies' hearts.

CAPTAIN PRINGLE: You Germans need a better conscience.
ERIKA: I have a good conscience. I have a new Fuhrer now. You. Heil, Johnny.

ERIKA: What does it matter, a woman's politics? Women pick up whatever is in fashion and change it like a spring hat.

REP. PHOEBE FROST (referring to the nightclub): What is the name of this sewer?
PRINGLE: The Lorelei.
PHOEBE: Are there other sewers in Berlin?
PRINGLE: Three or four, but this is the best sewer.

PHOEBE: We had the lowest juvenile delinquency rate in the country until two months ago.
PRINGLE: What happened?
PHOEBE: Little boy in Des Moines took a blowtorch to his grandmother. We fell clear down to sixteenth place, it was humiliating.

ERIKA (to Phoebe): I see you do not believe in lipstick. And what a curious way to do your hair, or rather not to do it.

PRINGLE: Don't tell me it's subversive to kiss a Republican.

ERIKA (referring to Phoebe): That funny woman with a face like a scrubbed kitchen floor.

ERIKA: Let's go up to my apartment. It's only a few ruins away from here.

ERIKA: We've all become animals with exactly one instinct left––self-preservation. Now take me, Miss Frost. Bombed out a dozen times, everything caved in and pulled out from under me. My country, my possessions, my beliefs. Yet somehow I kept going. Months and months in air raid shelters, crammed in with five thousand other people. I kept going. What do you think it was like to be a woman in this town when the Russians first swept in? I kept going. It was living hell. And then I found a man, and through that man a roof, and a job, and food, and––and I'm not going to lose him.

PRINGLE: During the war [a soldier] couldn't go fast enough for you. Get on that beachhead, get through those tank traps, get across the Rhine. Step on it, step on it. Faster, a hundred miles an hour, twenty-four hours a day, through burning towns and down smashed autobahns. And then one day the war is over and you expect him to jam on those brakes and stop like that! Well, everybody can't stop like that. Sometimes you skid quite a piece, sometimes you go into a spin and smash into a wall or a tree and bash your fenders and scrape those fine, shiny ideals you brought from back home.

ERIKA (singing the song "Black Market"): I'm selling out - take all I've got! Ambitions! Convictions! The works! Why not? Enjoy my goods, for boys, my goods...are hot!

by Rob Nixon