Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three is one of those truly special comedies like His Girl Friday (1940) and Sullivan's Travels (1941) which somehow manages to cram about 240 pages of dialogue into a running time of around an hour and a half. In other words, the actors speak loud, energetically, and fast! Thankfully, the lines that the actors of One, Two, Three have to deliver are some of the funniest and most entertaining in the entire Wilder filmography. Considering that this is the man that also brought us Some Like It Hot (1959), this is quite a claim. But it is not unjustified. One, Two, Three is deliriously hysterical. The film stars James Cagney in one of his last performances as C.R. "Mac" MacNamara, a powerful executive in the Coca-Cola Company. MacNamara is head of the West Berlin office and is in charge of brokering a deal which would allow Coca-Cola to be sold in the Soviet Union. But things are complicated when MacNamara is ordered by the head of the company, W.P. Hazeltine, to take care of his firecracker of a daughter, Scarlett, during her trip to Berlin. Desperate to be promoted to the head of Western European Coca-Cola Operations in London, MacNamara reluctantly agrees. What he couldn't have expected was that Scarlett would run away and get married to a young, enthusiastic Communist from East Berlin. What ensues is a level of madness and confusion unseen since the Golden Age of Screwball Comedies. One of the most fascinating aspects of the film is its biting social commentary on Post-War Germany. The satire is thick enough to cut with a set of titanium kitchen knives. The sheer audacity of some of the humor and characterizations are dumbfounding even to this day. Quite simply, it is a film that needs to be seen to be believed.
9/10
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