Fraulein (1958)
Directed by Henry Koster
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Synopsis by Hal Erickson
About the only perils that heroine Dana Wynter avoids in Fraulein are being tied to the buzzsaw and chased across the ice by bloodhouds. Wynter plays a German girl of genteel upbringing who is forced to wake up and smell the coffee when her family is killed in a WW2 air raid. She helps American officer Mel Ferrer escapes the Gestapo, then must figure out a way to elude her Russian Army captors, headed by Theodore Bikel (who later ruefully commented that more people remembered him for this film than for anything else). Escaping to the American sector of Berlin, Wynter naively registers herself as a prostitute, leading to a daunting series of tribulations. The upshot of all this is that German officer Helmut Dantine lusts after Dana because of what he thinks she is, while American officer Ferrer loves her because he knows deep down that she's not what she's supposed to be. Filmed on location, Fraulein was based on a novel by James McGowan.
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Keywords
war, America, behind-enemy-lines, camp, Communism, concentration-camp, corporal [military], enemy, escape, fiancee, Germany, happiness, health, help, hospital, love, Nazism, officer, prison, prostitute/prostitution, record [world record], reunion, romance, Russia, Russian [nationality], soldier, wound [injury], girl
