One, Two, Three (1961)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

C.R. 'Mac' MacNamara (James Cagney) is a Coca-Cola exec in charge of the West Berlin operations. Tension is rising across the Iron Curtain. It's a little over a year before the start of the Berlin Wall. He's trying to introduce Coke to the East. The communists want the secret formula. There is his sexy secretary Fräulein Ingeborg. His wife wants a quiet life in Atlanta. His boss dismisses expanding into Russia and asks Mac to care for his clueless party-girl daughter Scarlett Hazeltine.The talk is fast-paced. The humor is broad and full of Wilder wordplay. Cagney is an unrelenting engine. He is buzzing with energy and I half-expected him to explode in song and dance. The machine gun dialog is non-stop and can get tiring at some point. This is a feat of performance from the great Cagney.

. . . from the 1900s. Not content with merely filling his script with then-contemporary references to the Cuban Missile Crisis, Hollywood starlet-turned-Princess Grace Kelly, Nikita Kruschev's shoe-pounding at the United Nations, the Marshall Plan, the advent of the Berlin Wall, the likelihood of Russians landing the first people on the Moon, Sputnik, shoddy Communist consumer goods, Pan American Airlines, periodic Soviet leadership purges, Nazi war criminals in hiding, "German efficiency," and European nobles serving as men's room attendants, writer\director Billy Wilder has James Cagney quote Edward G. Robinson's final line from LITTLE CAESAR, and he also has Cagney sort of reprise his own infamous grapefruit-to-the-face move from PUBLIC ENEMY (both gangster films from the early 1930s). Therefore, anyone born later than former U.S. Veep Dick Cheney's Loser Generation (that is, the cohort which failed to produce a single American President) will find ONE, TWO, THREE a time capsule of ancient humor, not unlike a classic Greek satire or a Shakespeare comedy. So if YOU were born after 1945, don't watch ONE, TWO, THREE without some sort of Cliff's Notes!

It was a little like looking at a work of art that annoyed me; yet, I could not stop looking at it.I liked the film, although I gradually became weary with Cagney's hyperactive style of acting. It can be a lot to take when I am not in the mood for his intense, quick style. On the other hand, Cagney can be an engaging actor who keeps the pace of a film moving interestingly. Cagney was in good form in this film, proving that he still had it after all the years of typical, prime roles behind him. I could not help thinking that he was an anachronism; but then, I get a kick out of that sort of thing in films.Everything else about the film was as odd as films might be in that time period of film making.

James Cagney was pretty much retired when Billy Wilder lured him away from his farm to do "One, Two, Three," a witty, fast-moving comedy from 1961. And what a credit to Cagney - rapid dialogue and plenty of it, taxing to memorize probably for a man half his age.The story concerns an American Coca-Cola executive, C.R. McNamara, heading up an office in Berlin who is asked by his boss to host his daughter (Pamela Tiffin). Hoping for a plum assignment in London, C.R. and his wife (Arlene Francis) welcome the young woman with open arms. She's southern, beautiful, flirtatious, and before they know it, she's got a Communist boyfriend (Horst Bucholz) Then he becomes her Communist husband, and that London promotion is looking less and less likely unless C.R. can pull off a miracle.Wilder's direction for this was to have the dialogue shouted rather than spoken and to keep the film moving at a very fast pace. Admittedly this can get a little exhausting. Cagney gives a high-voltage performance and is extremely funny as the harried executive. And there are some hysterical bits as well as the madcap feeling of a '30s film. The rest of the cast is wonderful: Arlene Francis as C.R.'s long-suffering wife, Lilo Pulver as C.R.'s sexy secretary, and Hanns Lothar as Schlemmer, C.R.'s assistant who was "underground" during the war. ("The resistance?" "No, the subway. Nobody told me anything down there.") Though this was not a happy set - Wilder and Cagney had their differences, and Horst Buccholz was a major pain - the result is very good. Late in their careers, Wilder and Cagney still had it. Big time.