One, Two, Three
One, Two, Three is a comedy movie by Billy Wilder from 1961. It is based on the 1929 Hungarian one-act play Egy, kettő, három by Ferenc Molnár, with a "plot borrowed partly from" Ninotchka, a 1939 film co-written by Wilder.
It's set in West Berlin shortly before the wall was built, it's about James Cagney as the boss of Coca-Cola Germany who has to care for the daughter of his boss spending her holiday there. And trying to do business with some Communists, to expand Coca-Cola beyond the Iron Curtain. And preventing his marriage from falling apart. Hilarity Ensues (lots of!).
It would be Cagney's last film appearance until Ragtime, 20 years later.
- The Alleged Car: The Soviet agents' Moskvitch 407.
-"Is exact replica of 1937 Nash!"[1]
- All Germans Are Nazis: Played with. MacNamara has a former S.S. member as his assistant; one scene shows his employees acting like complete robots when issued orders.
- All Girls Want Bad Boys: And during Cold War, no one was worse than a Commie.
- Bait and Switch: The very movie starts with it. James Cagney starts talking how the world was looking to Washington DC on August the 13th of 1961... for a sports game. Oh, BTW, on the same day the Commies built The Berlin Wall.
- Clumsy Copyright Censorship: Completely and utterly averted. Joan Crawford, at the time a major stockholder of Pepsi, was enraged by what she saw as blatant product placement.
- Comically Missing the Point:
Peripetchikoff: "We have emergency meeting with Swiss Trade Delegation. They send us twenty car-loads of cheese. Totally unacceptable... full of holes."
- Cool and Unusual Punishment/Loud of War: The communist who married the daughter of Coca Cola's CEO is being tortured in East Germany... by being forced to listen to "Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polkadot Bikini" on repeat for hours on end. With the record spindle off-center. He writhes in pain.
- Crossdresser: Schlemmer disguises in Ingeborg's dress to fool the Russians, so they'll let Otto free.
- Deadpan Snarker: MacNamara's wife, sometimes.
- Dirty Commies
- The Ditz: Scarlett, definitely.
- The Great Politics Mess-Up: This time the other way round. Before August 1961, people could cross the border between West and East Berlin quite easily - which millions of East Germans used to move to the golden west. The movie was based on this premise and suffered when the wall was built.
- Guile Hero: MacNamara.
- Impoverished Patrician: Graf von Droste-Schattenburg, who is paid to adopt Otto.
- Improbably Cool Car: MacNamara's "Adenauer" Mercedes; a regional Coca-Cola plant manager in Germany in 1961 would likely have had a smaller, near-taxi-spec "Ponton" Mercedes if not an Opel Rekord or Ford Taunus as a company car.
- Misplaced Nationalism: Parodied when Jimmy Cagney is upset with Coca-Cola heiress Scarlet for taking part in a "Yankee, Go Home" rally: "But back home, everybody hates the Yankees!" ("Ami, Go Home" would have been a completely different thing, of course...)
- Product Placement: No wonder if the main character is a Coca-Cola exec.
- Richard Wagner: The German doctor who finds out Scarlett's pregnant is very fond of him, and sadly missed the 3rd act of Die Walküre / The Valkyrie.
- Sexy Secretary: Ingeborg, played by Lilo Pulver, the fräuleinwunder.
- Shout-Out: To Little Caesar, Gone with the Wind, Yankee Doodle Dandy, The Public Enemy, Ninotchka.
- Wide-Eyed Idealist: Otto about Communism. He even thinks it's a capitalist lie that Siberia is cold, and is happy that the Communists assigned them "a magnificent apartment, just a short walk from the bathroom!"
- You No Take Candle: The Russians.
- Zany Scheme: At one point, they need a Zany Scheme to revert the effects of another one. Which they are responsible for.