For Your Consideration: Movie of the Month

Don't believe in "isms".

Anybody familiar with the work of director Billy Wilder knows right off the cuff that he was a man who understood that nothing, despite of his occasional dramatic proclivities, can be taken too seriously. Not even a war.

You know, that cold one.

And if there was ever a man who could see the bright side of a German POW camp or the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, it was him. Take for instance this month's highlight: the 1961 motor-mouthed comedy of communists, commercialism and Coca-Cola, “One, Two, Three". 

Shot on-location in Berlin, the plot centers around high-strung soda magnate C.R. MacNamara (Cagney) and his numerous travails, including but not limited to his unhappy family, an office full of ex-Nazis and a buxom blonde secretary. But when he’s tasked to watchdog the boss’s daughter Scarlett (Tiffin)---an irrepressible Southern belle—things can’t seem to get any worse for MacNamara. That is until she crosses into East Berlin and elopes with a passionate young commie firebrand (Bucholz).

Yet what pushes the movie beyond mere slapstick is not so much the absurdity of the scenarios but its acute self-awareness, its prescience. 

Wilder was never a political animal in the true sense. While he was said to be virulently anti-communist, it’s hard to label anything that comes out of his characters’ mouths as mere rhetoric or Americana. Instead, MacNamara's world belies the politics he extols, revealing only a happy jokester poking fun at the foibles of a generation uncomfortable within its time. At the self-seriousness of those who would attempt to clean up what is essentially a messy bit of fun. And culture(s) that simply refuse(s) to cooperate.

As MacNamara jumps from one task to the next, set to the riff of Khachaturian’s “Sabre Dance”, there is a sense of furious glee that is hard, if not impossible, to ignore. By today’s standards, the scenery may move by at a turtle’s romp, but the crackle of the dialogue is as sharp as it ever was.

So with that I leave this month’s recommendation to Mr. Wilder in his own words. It is said that prior to submitting the script, he affixed to the title page a memo which read something like this: “Suggested speed: 110 miles an hour - on the curves - 140 miles an hour in the straightways.”

I hope you’ve got good traction.

***

Directed:
Billy Wilder

Written:
Billy Wilder & I.A.L. Diamond

Based on the play "Egy, kettö, három":
Ferenc Molnar

Produced:
I.A.L. Diamond
Doane Harrison
Billy Wilder

Cast:
James Cagney ... C.R. MacNamara
Horst Buchholz ... Otto Ludwig Piffl
Pamela Tiffin ... Scarlett Hazeltine
Arlene Francis ... Phyllis MacNamara
Howard St. John ... Wendell P. Hazeltine
Hanns Lothar ... Schlemmer
Leon Askin ... Peripetchikoff
Ralf Wolter ... Borodenko
Karl Lieffen ... Fritz
Hubert von Meyerinck ... Count von Droste Schattenburg
Lois Bolton ... Melanie Hazeltine
Peter Capell ... Mishkin
Til Kiwe ... Reporter
Henning Schlüter ... Dr. Bauer
Karl Ludwig Lindt ... Zeidlitz
Lilo Pulver ... Fräulein Ingeborg