Foreign Affair

Gerd Gemünden is Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities and Professor of German Studies, Film Studies, and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Framed Visions: Popular Culture, Americanization and the Contemporary German and Austrian Imagination (1998) and editor of volumes on Wim Wenders, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Douglas Sirk, as well as an anthology of critical writings on Marlene Dietrich.

• List of IllustrationsIntroductionChapter 1. An Accented Cinema Chapter 2. The Insurance Man Always Rings Twice: Double Indemnity (1944) Chapter 3. In the Ruins of Berlins: A Foreign Affair (1948) Chapter 4. Ghosting Hollywood: Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Fedora (1978) Chapter 5. All Dressed Up and Running Wild: Some Like It Hot (1959) Chapter 6. Being a Mensch in the Administered World: The Apartment (1960) Chapter 7. In the Closet of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)Chronology Filmography Bibliography Index

“…provides a hugely readable, insightful examination of Billy Wilder’s American films as the product of transnational cultural exchange.”  ·  Monatshefte"Gemünden’s vital decoding of Wilder’s translation of himself into the American vernacular offers stimulating new material and perspectives that will no doubt shape Wilder scholarship to come."  ·  Austrian Studies Newsletter"Billy Wilder is hard to trump, because everything one writes about him is only half as entertaining as his great sense of humor. Gerd Gemünden, however, achieves a small miracle: his A Foreign Affair is a highly readable yet serious critical study that reveals Wilder, the alleged cynic, as the moralist he really was."  ·  Volker Schlöndorff