Short take: One, Two, Three

As a big James Cagney fan, I can’t believe it took me so long to get around to One, Two, Three – a crazy, breathless political comedy that is everything you might expect from the only ever collaboration between Cagney and Billy Wilder. This story about a middle-aged Coca-Cola executive in West Berlin – and a ditzy 17-year-old girl in his charge who crosses the border and falls in love with an East German Commie – is chockful of verbal digs at Capitalism and Communism, and everything in between. And Cagney, even in his sixties, is that tremendous force of nature – rat-a-tatting his way through the Wilder-IAL Diamond screenplay, and probably making those two writers feel slow for the only time in their careers. (No one in any Wilder film has tossed off so many lines so quickly. This is stuff to equal the best of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. And some of the situations are as deadpan-absurd and chaotic as the ones in another Grant-starrer, Arsenic and Old Lace.)

Of added interest: here you see Horst Buchholz, who played Nathuram Godse on screen two years later (in Nine Hours to Rama), as the fiery young America-loathing Otto.

Also, Cagney pays tribute to one of his most famous scenes from 30 years earlier – the grapefruit-smashing in The Public Enemy.

P.S. those two commas in the film’s title feel like a sly joke – this film’s script plays like it is from a universe where commas never existed and can only cause unnecessary trouble.