One, Two, Three (1961) – Billy Wilder
“Any world that can produce the Taj Mahal, William Shakespeare, and striped toothpaste can’t be all bad.”
Molto furioso, indeed. Billy Wilder delves back into the waters of pure farce, this time against the backdrop of a pre-Wall Berlin. James Cagney sheds his gangster persona, although not entirely, to play C.R. MacNamara, a corporate officer in the Coca-Cola army who quickly finds himself embroiled in the holy trinity of comedy: marriage, slapstick and the boss’s daughter.
The movie has more than enough laughs, with every cast member doling out one-liners like they were afraid the scene would end before they’d get a chance to. When there are misses—and there are misses—the film has already cycled through three more jokes before you get a chance to complain; the sheer volume of humor is staggering, and surprisingly effective. The dialogue takes on an almost musical rhythm of back-and-forth, punctuated by the clacking heels of the formerly-SS office assistant Schlemmer and Cagney’s repeated calls of “Sitzen Machen!”
Wilder’s screenplay tries to be an equal-opportunity offender, with Russians, Americans, Berliners, Capitalists and Communists each getting their turn with a zinger or twelve, but it’s always clear which side of the Iron Curtain its loyalties lie. Despite a few jabs at Coke and the cultural imperialism it represents, it is evident that by 1961 Wilder, regardless of his Teutonic origins, was as American as apple strudel.
Otto, an angry young Mensch and faithful Party member played by Horst Buchholz, is the film’s only significant weak point, the broadest of caricatures in a sea of broad caricatures. Like a Marxist Pygmalion, he must be transformed from a proletarian revolutionary into a “respectable” über-bourgeois in order to gain the approval of his prospective father-in-law, the CEO of Coca-Cola. Unfortunately, Otto’s over-the-top Commie schtick becomes grating very quickly, and it doesn’t help that Buchholz plays the character for maximum volume and obnoxiousness, but thankfully it’s one of the few sour notes to be found.
The film plays like a Marx Bros. flick on fast-forward, and Groucho’s name even shows up as one of an unrelenting barrage of pop and political references, in-jokes and callbacks. Red Buttons appears briefly to do an impression of Cagney, and a few scenes later Cagney does an impression of Cagney, armed with an iconic grapefruit. While you’re still smiling at this, the film just barrels onward. It is both riotous and exhausting, and quite possibly the only film whose frenetic pace justifies the use of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee.”
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