A twisted, wild takeoff on the basic idea of Ninotchka, One, Two, Three is Billy Wilder and I.A.L Diamond running in top form, after their home-run with the sentimental comedy (The Apartment) from the previous year. There's probably no direct connection, but during a Soviet visit, a Russian reporter praised Wilder's criticism of the American system, where a worker has to use sex and his apartment to get ahead. Wilder retorted that The Apartment could never happen in Russia - because there's no such thing as an available apartment!

Wilder normally didn't come out with opinions on politics. He'd participated in the de-Nazification of Germany for the Army, and made a good comedy out of the situation called A Foreign Affair, but he mostly stayed away from topical themes, especially after the backlash of his rather subversive film noir, Ace in the Hole.

But in One, Two, Three he comes out swinging at every pitch available. It's everything American versus everything Eastern-bloc: baseball, soft drinks, Huntley & Brinkley, Gone With the Wind, and the Pledge of Allegiance - versus Commisars, party dues, propaganda, missiles, caviar, trains that don't run on time and pitiless interrogators using The Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini as a torture device. Americans are arrogant, pushy, boorish, ignorant, sex-obsessed and success-driven, while the East Germans and Russians are sneaky, arrogant, paranoid Marx-spouters who hate The Wall Street Journal and want Yankee to Go Home. In between, Wilder gets in a few merciless jabs at the efficient West Germans - every West Berliner seems to be have a guilty secret in the closet. A reporter is revealed to be ex-S.S. officer. MacNamara's own assistant clicks his heels at every command and lets slip that he used to be a pastry cook in the S.S. - " A very bad pastry cook." MacNamara: "Schlemmer! You're back in the S.S. again! Smaller Salary!"

Cagney is nothing less than marvellous, changing comedic gears at the drop of a cuckoo clock and keeping us breathless with his limitless energy. Wilder pulls in references so fast our radar picks up on only the top 20%: grapefruits in the kisser (Public Enemy), a bowler and an umbrella stored away for a big promotion (Mister Roberts). Red Buttons contributes some of his most worthy screen time doing a great Cagney imitation. We almost think Cagney's will break out in a dance once or twice, he's still so spry on his feet. Cagney made a lot of great pictures during his Warners' heyday, but few demonstrated his comedy talent to the degree seen here.

The much-maligned Horst Buchholz is intense & frenzied as the commie punk who doesn't wear underwear, spits in disapproval of Coca-Cola diplomacy, and wears a wedding ring that was "Forged from the steel of the guns of Stalingrad!" Pamela Tiffin has her best role as the air-brained jet-setting Southern belle likely to fall in the sack with every Otto or Pierre available. She's ready to be an impoverished Communist bride, but only if she has the proper tableware like back home in Atlanta.

Arlene Francis also shines, with perfect delivery as MacNamara's patient but wise-cracking wife, trying to find out what 'Schwange' means and mimicking Scarlett's hysterical laugh. Lilo Pulver (Liselotte, previously seen in Sirk's A Time to Love and a Time to Die) is the tall, stacked sexpot secretary who gives Wilder a chance to lampoon lust, German-style. She's a borderline nympho who laughs like a stevedore and snaps out some of Wilder's earliest raunchy humor:

MacNamara, staring at Ingeborg's chest: "Don't look now, but your goose pimples are showing." Ingeborg: "That's nothing, you should see my sister!"

Angular Hanns Lothar plays Schlemmer, MacNamara's heel-clicking functionary, who'd probably jump out of a window if ordered. Ccompletely corruptable Commisars Leon Askin, Ralf Wolter and Peter Capell provide the crass example MacNamara uses to eventually convert Otto Piffl to Freedom-loving Western ways ... after a short detour into aristocratic decadence, via an arranged adoption by the monocle-snapping Count von Droste Schattenburg. In short, Communist ideology proves too inflexible for warm-blooded humans, and MacNamara wins his case.

The setpiece of the film is an eight-minute stretch where MacNamara does a high-toned makeover on the beatnik Piffle, bringing in a parade of tailors, barbers, haberdashers, etc., and rattling off pages of exacting dialogue with perfect articulation and precision - precisely as Wilder wrote it (it reportedly took many takes and some strained tempers). This dovetails into a mad car chase to the airport and a sharp finish. Audiences laugh - and then still themselves to not miss out on the next joke - Wilder's pace leaves little room for reaction time, just a raised eyebrow or a quick breath.

The amped-up pacing works because it's not forced on the material - the agitated Germans are inspired to lunatic levels of efficiency by MacNamara's demands, unlike the Italians of Avanti! who are always trying to slow things down. 43 years later, with its topical subject matter now considered ancient history, One, Two, Three still keeps audiences breathless and laughing.

MGM's DVD of One, Two, Three is sharp, detailed and nicely tuned to Wilder's b&w Panavision comedy grayscale. It has a very punchy English track, and also dubbed tracks in French and Spanish, with the dubbing talent really working overtime keeping up with the quick patter. You can tell MGM has upgraded its general transfer/encoding specs in the last couple of years: besides having a better image than The Apartment and Irma La Douce, it has an adequate number of chapter stops, instead of the old standard of 16, no matter how long the movie.

The only extra is an amusing original trailer that billboards Wilder as a comedy genius. The disc is a flipper with a pan-scan transfer on the flip side, that hopefully will keep square screen squares happy. I'm for the wide expanses on the Panavision side.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, One, Two, Three rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: trailer
Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: August 4, 2003