BeWildered Berlin

One, Two, Three (Mirisch; United Artists) is a yell-mell, hard-sell, Sennett-with-a-sound-track satire of iron curtains and color lines, of people's demockeracy, Coca-Colonization, peaceful noexistence, and the Deep Southern concept that all facilities are created separate but equal. What's more, Director Billy Wilder makes his attitude stick like Schlagobers slung in the spectator's kisser. He purposely neglects the high precision of hilarity that made Some Like It Hot a screwball classic and The Apartment a peerless comedy of officemanship. But in the rapid, brutal, whambam style of a man swatting flies with a pile driver, he has produced a sometimes beWildered, often wonderfully funny exercise in nonstop nuttiness.

The plot, borrowed partly from a one-act play by Ferenc Molnar and partly from a Wilder-Brackett-Lubitsch movie called Ninotchka (1939), is almost as intricate as the famous secret recipe for Coca-Cola--a beverage that, incidentally, benefits in this film from 108 minutes of effervescent and unmitigated schlock. The hero (James Cagney), who heads up the Coca-Cola operation in West Berlin, dreams of a deal with Moscow's Soft Drink Secretariat that will 1) insinuate the pause that refreshes into the Communist way of life, and 2) install him in London as chief of European operations. While the deal is still pending, the hero is ordered to keep tabs on the boss's giggly, wiggly, teen-aged daughter (Pamela Tiffin), who is flying to Berlin for a two-week visit. Woe is Cagney. The boy-crazy bag stays for two months, then casually announces that she has secretly married a red-hot Red (Horst Buchholz) and will be moving to Moscow the next day.

Hot pop! There goes that job in London--unless . . . With fiendish glee, Cagney plants a Wall Street Journal in the groom's motorcycle, gets the poor patsy clapped in a Communist clink. But Cagney stops milking his gloat when he finds himself snapped in his own trap. The boss's daughter turns out to be pregnant, and the boss himself announces that he will arrive in Berlin within 24 hours. Problem: in that one little old puckered-up day that he has left, can Cagney 1) spring the groom from his East German cell, and 2) convert him into a proper sort of son-in-law for Old King Coke.

Such pictures are, like high-wire artists, beyond criticism: they're either good or they're dead. One, Two, Three is far from dead. Both the actors and the jokes come and go so fast that it is easier to rate them, not for quality, but in terms of smiles-per-hour. In fact, many of the jokes are soggy burps that might well have been planted in the script by a secret agent from Canada Dry. But many more, as usually happens in pictures written by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. ("Izzy") Diamond, have edge and temper. Cagney's wife (Arlene Francis): "But she can't stay long. Doesn't school open soon?" Cagney: "In Georgia? You never know." Cagney's ten-year-old son, hopefully, when the boss's daughter has a fainting spell: "If she dies can I have my room back?" First Communist, bitterly: "Is everybody in this world corrupt?" Second Communist, thoughtfully: "I don't know everybody."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.