One, Two, Three

Year: 1961 (USA)
Genre: Screwball Comedy/Satire
Directed: Billy Wilder
Stars: James Cagney, Horst Buchholz, Pamela Tiffin, Arlene Francis, Howard St. John, Hanns Lothar, Leon Askin, Ralf Wolter, Karl Lieffen, Hubert von Meyerinck
Production: Pyramid Productions


Remember when there were imminent nuclear attack drills in school? The alarm would sound and students were instructed to crawl underneath their school desks as if the flimsy plastic top and tin would protect them from a nuclear explosion. Yes the threat of Soviet annihilation was a very real thing back then and the dichotomy of the Cold War informed the worldviews of baby-boomers and generation x’ers for decades to follow. Thankfully I was not part of either generation yet having lived on both sides of the east/west divide I can tell you that despite the severity of 1960’s evening news telecasts, the standoff is hilarious in retrospect.

The hilarity was evident as far back as 1961 when Billy Wilder’s One, Two Three hit theaters. Starring James Cagney as a fast-talking Coca-Cola executive, the movie was sly, witty and light as air, masking a cynical and subversive worldview taking the ideologies of the USA and USSR to task. Cagney plays C.R. MacNamara, a dependable company man who is asked to take care of the CEO’s daughter Scarlet (Pamela Tiffin) while she’s in West Berlin. His wife (Arlene Francis) was looking forward to a vacation in Venice with the kids while his secretary (Liselotte Pulver) was hoping to teach him the sultry phonetics of the umlaut. Naturally no one is happy with the imposition. Things spiral out of control when the seventeen-year-old southern belle falls in love and marries an East Berlin Bolshevik (Horst Buchholz) all while the CEO (Howard St. John) comes in for a surprise visit to pickup his sweet little angel.

Russian car chases are slower than you think

The screenplay written by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond based on a Ferenc Molnar play has enough gags to go toe to toe with today’s joke a minute youtube generation. Even without prior knowledge of the Cold War, the movie is one heck of a ride featuring, among other things, a high speed chase with a disintegrating Russian car, a constantly heal-clicking lackey who may or may not have been an SS member and the old staple; a man wearing women’s clothing. Those who do know their 20^th century history will be further rewarded with coy references to Khrushchev, Tito and Yuri Gagarin not to mention the adversarial tones of Cagney’s character and the Russians he deals with. “He could use a hair cut…and I’d like to give it to him myself with a hammer and sickle,” says MacNamara to the debutante’s new liebchen.

The characters are exactly what you would expect from a fast-paced farce; broadly drawn and exaggerated by a single feature or fault. Buchholz’s Otto is an overzealous card-carrying Red, bloviating about Coca-Cola colonialism and dead herring in the moonlight. Scarlet is so overwhelmingly dense to the point of annoyance, at one point musing “did you know Otto spelled backwards is Otto?” Meanwhile the trio of Russian dignitaries who complicates MacNamara’s plans remind me of an old Russian joke: why do Russians walk around in sets of three? One reads, one writes and the third keeps an eye on the other two intellectuals. If you’re looking for anything more than stock characters causing havoc in post-war Berlin, you may be setting your standards unrealistically high.

I have a real affinity for Billy Wilder and his directorial efforts to which One, Two, Three is a splendid addition to my Seen It list. Like The Apartment (1960), One, Two, Three achieves wonders with its cast; like Ace in the Hole (1951) it has the propensity to be cynical yet charming and like Some Like It Hot (1959), One, Two, Three is gut-bustlingly hilarious.

Final Grade: A