The New Pictures

A Foreign Affair (Paramount), which displays Marlene Dietrich, Jean Arthur and John Lund against the ruins of Berlin, is obviously intended as a light satirical comedy about victors & vanquished. Unlikely as it sounds, that could be done; done well, it could be salutary as well as entertaining. But Messrs. Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder are a little too clever and a lot too inhumane to bring it off much of the time.

Jean Arthur, a visiting Congresswoman is flabbergasted to find John Lund, an American captain, fraternizing with Marlene Dietrich, the ex-mistress of a fugitive top Nazi. As bad or worse, Miss Dietrich is going around scot free; she is even singing in a nightclub. Millard Mitchell, a levelheaded, wisecracking colonel, does his best to calm Miss Arthur down; but since she is falling for Captain Lund, she doesn't calm easily. At long last she comes to realize that the Army always has its reasons: Miss Dietrich is being used to smoke her jealous Nazi lover out of hiding. By the time he emerges the rest of the cast has so conducted itself that he seems the only person in the picture one might possibly have sympathy for. He is killed before there is any chance to find out.

Miss Dietrich, at her best, is a past mistress of sardonic comedy and of low-life glamor, and if this picture really handled what it pretends to, she could probably have done herself proud; instead, she is required to sing such pseudo-bitter cabaret ersatz as Black Market. Miss Arthur used to have a nice knack for comedy; now & then it still clicks, but she leans more & more lazily on her famous woolly drawl and is forced, in this picture, into an embarrassing passage of whimsy involving a flustered retreat (from amorous John Lund) among filing cabinets, and a panicky recitation of Paul Revere's Ride. Millard Mitchell handles the smart cracks ably, but since the brightest and nastiest of them are delivered against the terrible backdrop of Germany's annihilated capital, their echoes go a little sour.

Throughout the picture, the Army is given an immaculate bill of health, though the main thing said in its favor (it is said twice) is that it is teaching German boys how to play baseball. There are some wickedly gratifying swipes at the kinds of nosy, sentimental Americans who are sure, at their comfortable distance, What to Do with Germany. Some of the cynicism about the "conditions" Miss Arthur observes is refreshing, too. But most of the picture is about as tastefully amusing as slipping the hotfoot to a dying man.

Hatter's Castle (Paramount) is the beetle-browed mansion of a brutal hat-shop owner (Robert Newton) whose arrogant ambition to rise above his station kills his wife, drives his son to suicide, and sends his unmarried pregnant daughter (Deborah Kerr) out into a raging storm with fine Victorian flourish. Then, completely batty, father pulls the burning castle down over his ears in a huff, and leaves a mild young doctor (James Mason) to make an honest woman of Miss Kerr. The only possible excuse for bringing this seven-year-old film to the U.S. is mercenary: the box-office pull of Deborah Kerr and of James Mason, who, at this tender stage of his career, seems never to have heard of sadism. The only possible reason for seeing it is the work of Robert Newton, an excellent actor who can put amazing variety and intensity of meaning into the oft-repeated dissyllable, yee-ew.

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