When I started this blog the very first movie I wrote about was Billy Wilder’s great black comedy Ace in the Hole starring Kirk Douglas.  The film was controversial upon its release, was a box office flop and was not released on home media until 2007.  A decade after Ace in the Hole, Wilder directed another film that might have been a little edgy for audiences at the time.  One, Two, Three was one of the first films to take a humorous look at the cold war, and it did so in a positively zany, uproariously funny way.  Just how much of the public was willing to take a humorous look at the cold war in 1961 is certainly questionable.

One, Two, Three stars James Cagney as C.R. “Mac” MacNamara, a Coca-Cola executive in what was then West Berlin.  On the surface, things are pretty rosy for him.  He has a car and a chauffeur, a nice home for his family and a gorgeous secretary who he’s not only fooling around with but who is also pretty damned competent.  Alas, old Mac isn’t too happy with his lot.  He once was in charge of the Middle East, “Nine countries, fifteen bottling plants all facing Mecca,” he proudly boasts.  But now he’s relegated to only half a city.  He’s hoping to get back on good terms with the home office in Atlanta by making a deal to sell Coca-Cola on the other side of the iron curtain.  Hopefully, he will then be promoted to the head of European operations at their head office in London.

Meanwhile, his wife Phyllis (Arlene Francis) is quite upset with him.  She’s planning on taking a trip to Venice with their two children.  This will give Mac some time with Ingeborg (Liselotte Pulver) his super hot secretary who, not incidentally, resembles Marilyn Monroe, whom Billy Wilder directed in The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot.  These plans are put on hold when he gets a call from Mr. Hazeltine (Howard St. John), MacNamara’s boss in Atlanta.  He’s sent his young daughter Scarlett (Pamela Tiffin), his flakey southern belle who he sent to Europe in order to distance her from a rock & roll singer she got engaged to.  Wilder supposedly hated rock & roll.  Well, to quote Joe E. Brown in Some Like It Hot, nobody’s perfect.

Scarlett arrives for what is supposed to be a two-week visit.  She ends up staying for two months.  One day Mac’s chauffer and limousine are missing.  He also learns that Scarlett’s bed hasn’t been slept in.  Turns out she’s been sneaking over into East Berlin to meet with a boy named Otto Ludwig Piffl (Horst Buchholz) a card-carrying Bolshevik who dresses in a beat-up pair of pants and a sweater, wears sandals and apparently doesn’t wear underwear.  He also has long hair.  When Mac first meets him he comments that “he could use a haircut.  I’d like to give it to him myself with a hammer and sickle.”

Things go from bad to worse when Mac gets a call from Hazeltine in Atlanta telling him that he and his wife are coming to West Berlin.  When Mac tells Phyllis, she’s rather tickled.  “Why, this will be the biggest thing to hit Atlanta since General Sherman threw that little barbeque.”  Truth is she’s tired of globe-hopping and wants to head back to the States.  She wishes that Mac would get a nice job at the home office in Atlanta, a prospect that he doesn’t relish.  “Atlanta,” laments MacNamara, “you can’t be serious.  That’s Siberia with mint juleps.”

Getting back to the Otto situation, Mac sends him back to East Berlin with a balloon attached to his exhaust pipe reading “Ruskie’s Go Home.”  Mac also gives him a wedding present, a coo-coo clock that his employees gave him.  Instead of a bird emerging from the top of the clock, a little Uncle Sam emerges waving a little American flag.  The clock plays “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” which of course is a homage to Cagney’s Oscar-winning performance as George M. Cohan in the film Yankee Doodle Dandy.  He also wraps the gift up in a copy of the Wall Street Journal.  All of this is designed so that Otto is stopped when crossing the border.  Sure enough, the guards at the Brandenberg Gates arrest him.  As far as MacNamara is concerned, the Otto problem is over.

Ah, but it’s not.  When he tells Scarlett that her “husband” has been arrested, she faints.  They call for a doctor.  He reports that she’s not only fine but that she’s…he doesn’t know the English word for it.  Mac’s children know what he means, and his younger daughter says “Scarlett’s going to have puppies.”  Well obviously, this puts Mac in the dog house.  “Just what the world needs,” he laments.  “A bouncing, baby Bolshevik.”

Things start to move into high gear at this point.  With the help of his secretary Ingeborg and Schlemmer (Hanns Lothar) he heads into East Berlin.  He gets past the Checkpoint Charlie’s by bribing them with a six-pack of Coca-Cola.  He heads with Ingeborg to the Grand Hotel Potemkin to meet with a trio of Russian Commerce Secretaries that we met earlier in Mac’s office.  He offers to have Ingeborg work for them if they can get Otto out of jail.  It takes some convincing but they ultimately agree.  In the meantime, Otto is being questioned by the police.  In what I think is one of the funniest moments in cinema history, the officers torture him by playing what was at the time a very popular novelty record.  Just to keep up the element of surprise, I won’t tell you the song but even if you aren’t familiar with it you’ll find the scene funny.

Eventually, they get Otto back and have to make a run back across the border in a classic, Mack Sennett style chase.  Before they can cross into West Berlin, the border guards make sure to bring back the empty deposit bottles of Coke.

Back in his office Mac frantically tries to transform Otto into the perfect son-in-law.  So much happens in this last half-hour that it would be pointless for me to describe it.  Just know that it all moves at a frantic pace with jokes flying at you fast and furiously.  Wilder himself said that his goal with One, Two, Three was to make a film even faster pace than Howard Hawk’s His Girl Friday which, incidentally, was based on the play The Front Page, which Wilder would later make his own film version of.  One joke I particularly like comes when Otto is being taught proper dinner etiquette.  A whole banquet is laid out for him but when he insists on eating with his hands an angry Mac picks up a half a grapefruit and threatens to smash it in his face, a clear reference to Cagney’s immortal scene in The Public Enemy.  Another scene has an American MP doing an impression of Cagney from one of his gangster films.  Some consider Wilder one of the fathers of post-modernism.  Indeed, can you think of a film prior to Sunset Boulevard that was so self-referential?

Wilder was on a real winning streak before he directed One, Two, Three, having scored three back-to-back smash hits with Witness for the Prosecution, Some Like It Hot and The Apartment.  For the latter, Wilder won an Oscar for Best Director and for Best Screenplay.  One Two Three certainly sold tickets, grossing some $4 million in the U.S.  That was, however, significantly less than his previous three films.  More problematic was the fact that the film went way over budget.  This wasn’t due to any recklessness on Wilder’s part but rather the wheels of history were to blame.  One, Two, Three was actually being filmed in Berlin when that famous wall went up through the city.  Suddenly they needed to re-create parts of the city, including the Brandenburg Gates and the Berlin airport, back in Hollywood.  As a result, the film lost money.  It was also all but ignored by the Academy, which failed to even acknowledge the hysterical screenplay Wilder wrote with his frequent collaborator, I.A.L. Diamond.  The only Oscar nomination the film received was for Daniel F. Fapp’s wide-screen, black and white cinematography.  One of the most lamentable things about the movie industry today is how hard it is to get a black and white movie made today.  Directors like Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchock and John Ford frequently went back and forth between color and black and white.  Budgetary concerns were a factor, yes, but the reasons were primarily ascetic.  Today someone would be considered crazy for wanting to do a comedy in black and white, even though many of the greatest comedies of all time, be they the films of Chaplin, Keaton, the Marx brothers, etc. were all in black and white.  Parenthetically, at around the same time he made One, Two, Three Wilder was developing a movie for the Marx Brothers in which they take over the United Nations.  The death of Chico and then Harpo prevented this film from ever being made.  We can only wonder.

We should point out, of course, that One, Two, Three was made during the height of the Cold War, when kids were taking part in air raid drills across the country and fear of Soviet aggression was a very real threat.  Like that other great cold-war comedy, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, a few jokes cut pretty close to the bone.  At one point one of the Russian Trade Commissioners says that “We have trade agreement with Cuba.  They send us cigars, we send them rockets.”  Less than a year later the Cuban Missel Crisis took place.

This brings us to another question.  Is One, Two, Three “dated.”  After all, there’s a whole second generation of kids growing up after the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Frankly, I think that anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of the cold war should have no problem seeing the humor in One, Two, Three.  Unfortunately, I fear that there is also a whole second generation that is not being properly educated in school and therefore might indeed find One, Two, Three hard to understand.  I pity such people because Billy Wilder was very much ahead of his time, able to find humor in just about any situation, no matter how potentially dire it might seem.