Movie |
Bombed Building | Nazi
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Best Written American Comedy | 1949
Budget 1,500,000 USD
Female stars Jean Arthur and Marlene Dietrich were in their late 40s when they shot this film. But the leading man, John Lund, was a decade younger than both.
Director Billy Wilder said famously of his difficulties with Marlene Dietrich and Jean Arthur in the film, "I have one dame who's afraid to look at herself in a mirror and another who won't stop looking!"
Billy Wilder said that John Lund "was the guy you got after you wrote the part for Cary Grant and Grant wasn't available."
Upon completion of location shooting, Billy Wilder headed back home by way of Paris, where he stopped in to see Marlene Dietrich to convince her to take the part of the German cabaret singer and former Nazi official's mistress. Dietrich had spent most of the war travelling among Allied troops, justly lauded for her anti-fascist efforts, often at the front lines, popping back to the States only occasionally for movie roles. Her immediate reaction when Wilder brought his offer to her at the Hotel Georges V where she was staying was a quick and vehement no. She had no intention of playing a woman with a Nazi past, but Wilder wouldn't take no for an answer. He swayed her with the promise that her songs in the picture would be written by her old friend and frequent composer Friedrich Hollaender. One story has it that eventually he showed her screen tests of other actresses he claimed to be considering for the role and that did the trick (reportedly, one of them was June Havoc), although Wilder denied that such a ploy was ever used. More likely what swayed her was the fact that her screen popularity had waned and she needed a hit movie. It also helped considerably that she would be paid $110,000 with an additional $66,000 promised for overtime.
While researching the existing situation for his screenplay, Billy Wilder interviewed many of the American military personnel stationed in Berlin, as well as its residents, many of whom were having difficulty dealing with the destruction of their city. One of them was a woman he met while she was clearing rubble from the streets. "The woman was grateful the Allies had come to fix the gas," Wilder later recalled. "I thought it was so she could have a hot meal, but she said it was so she could commit suicide."
"Erika von Schluetow: Let's go up to my apartment. It's only a few ruins away from here."
"Erika von Schluetow: 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."
