27 Days With Billy Wilder And Me

Billy Wilder’s nineteenth movie, One, Two, Three, starring James Cagney, was released in 1961. Billy was 55 years old.

I know I’m in trouble when the blurbs on the DVD box announce the movie inside is: “A fast-paced, lighthearted farce crammed with gags!” and “Wilder and Diamond at their zaniest best!”

“Gags” and “zany” are not words I like associated with my movies. And what’s with that second blurb? “Zaniest best”? Shouldn’t it be “zany best”?

One, Two, Three is a movie about an American Coca-Cola executive (Cagney) working in West Berlin who’s asked by his boss in Atlanta to watch over his young daughter for two weeks. The girl is sent to Berlin where she proves to be a wild child, and the Coca-Cola executive quickly learns he has his work cut out for him.

Principle Cast:
C.R. MacNamara…………………………………..James Cagney (1899–1986)
Otto Ludwig Piffl………………………………..Horst Buchholz (1933–2003)
Scarlett Hazeltine……………………………….Pamela Tiffin (1942- )
Phyllis MacNamara ……………………………….Arlene Francis (1907–2001)
Wendell P. Hazeltine …………………………….Howard St. John (1905–1974)

Despite the red-flag words (“gags” and “zany”), One, Two Three starts with promise — voiceover narration revealing setting, character, and the revealing the mere edges of a plot.

But Cagney’s character is blustery, fast-talking, brusque, and seemingly without much depth. He barks orders, he flirts with his secretary, he moves from one side of a room to the other with the subtlety of a one-legged dancer doing the can-can.

If there’s one thing I’ve discovered watching Billy Wilder movies it’s this: He and his screenwriting partners were inconsistent. Following a movie like The Apartment with a movie like One, Two, Three indicates either a poor excuse for taste, or a woeful lack of consistency. I prefer to blame it on the latter.

There’s a lot of screaming in One, two, Three. It’s a frenetic movie, with so much going on — a plethora of ludicrous characters with outrageous accents — that I’m getting a headache. Very few lines have been spoken in a normal voice. They’re all shouted. Loudly

If this is what “zany” means, it’s no wonder I’ve avoided such movies all my life.

It’s interesting to note that Jame Cagney didn’t appear in films for 20 years after making One, Two, Three. Maybe he didn’t care much for “zany,” either.