“Is everybody in this world corrupt?” “I don’t know everybody.” Berlin Coca-Cola rep James Cagney’s got it made: wise-cracking wife, shimmying blonde secretary, and heel-clicking assistant Schlemmer — and the trade deal he’s cooking up with the Russkies will guarantee that promotion. But first he’s got to keep visiting boss’s daughter, airheaded Pamela Tiffin, under a tight rein. But wait a minute! She’s crazy about Horst Buchholz’s fanatical Commie Otto Piffl?! She’s married him?!! And now her dad, the big boss, is en route! ? . . . The jokes just keep on coming — lightning fast from the beginning, and then Cagney goes into overdrive — in Wilder and co-screenwriter I.A.L. Diamond’s throwback to 30s pacing (the script’s first page noted, “This piece must be played molto furioso”), escalating into Cagney’s machine-gun-fast consumerist aria that ultimately required 52 takes. And the targets of Wilder’s corrosive satire never stop: capitalism, consumerism, Communism (the Russian trade commissar trio are first cousins to a similar threesome in the Wilder co-scripted Ninotchka), “ex”-Nazis, middle-class American families, rock ‘n’ roll (East German torture methods include multiple spins of “Itsy-Bitsy, Teenie-Weenie, Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini”), The Coca- Cola Company and the Cold War itself. (The East Germans provided a topper by erecting the Berlin Wall during production, but only after extensive location shooting in a then undivided Berlin; designing legend Alexandre Trauner took care of the rest.) Based on a frenetic one-act play by Hungarian great Ferenc Molnar (Lilliom, basis of Carousel), Wilder’s adaptation set cynicism records even for him that bugged many contemporary critics and Cagney himself (he disliked the frenetic pacing and promptly began a 20-year retirement). But in our taste-free, post-Communist age, One Two Three can now be seen as prophetic of the eventual Fall itself, as well as a latter-day classic of screwball comedy. “Begins at mach one and gets somewhere near the speed of light by the time it finishes.” – The Movie Guide.
REPERTORY RELEASE
3:10, 7:20

Return to UNITED ARTISTS 90th ANNIVERSARY Festival

“Where most of Wilder’s comedies were elegantly sculpted and edited
to allow room for laughter, this film is a steamroller.
The jokes come fast and furiously, one on top of another....
There are no lower gears to [Cagney’s] performance; it’s full-blast from the top.
Ahead of its time, this film was subsequently screened again around the time the Berlin Wall came down*.
It was a hit again in Germany in the late eighties.”
– Cameron Crowe, Conversations with Wilder
[*there is now a restaurant called Billy Wilder’s in Berli’s Potsdammerplatz]

“A fast-paced, high-pitched, hard-hitting, lighthearted farce
crammed with topical gags and spiced with satirical overtones.”
– Variety (1961)

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