I’ve been enjoying my long-postponed Billy Wilder festival. Last week, we watched Sunset Boulevard and Witness for the Prosecution, both of which I’d seen many times before and enjoyed just as much as if I were coming to them for the first time.

Tonight, we watched One, Two, Three, which I’d never seen before. It’s wicked!—and refreshingly straight-on anti-establishment. Whatever you’re selling, Wilder isn’t having any of it. (You’ve gotta know by now that I love that.)

I’m wild about Billy, and I’m in mourning for his kind of smart filmmaking, which tapped into rich cultural veins (yes they were middlebrow; so what?). I particularly love Wilder when he goes directly at his target. Glenn Erickson of DVD Savant gives you a flavor:

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 called A Foreign Affair out of the situation, 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 Teeny 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 have a guilty secret in their 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!”

Netflix it—Jimmy Cagney is magnificent!

(I wrote this on the run earlier today; embarrassing typos are now fixed)

A delightful and helpful reminder for those contemplating “negotiations” with the Islamic Republic of Iran:

Azar Nafisi, the author of “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” quoted a former colleague in Tehran who compared dealing with the Islamic Republic to playing chess with a monkey.

“In the middle of the game, the monkey picks up your queen and swallows it,” she said. “Then what are you going to do? You are dealing with a country that is not going to follow your rules.”

Nafisi, like all the Iranian expats/analysts interviewed for the New York Times piece I quoted above, is in favor of engaging Iran, not bombing it.***

Mehdi Khaliji, a visiting fellow at the Washington Institute, for example, makes a lot of sense:

With Iran, the United States needs to become both more confrontational in private, and less bellicose publicly, he said. For example, rather than threatening regime change and not doing much to back it up, he said, the American military should have come down hard on Iranian interference in Iraq while sounding more diplomatic in public. That approach would make Iran more amenable to compromise, he said [emphasis added].

Like I was saying yesterday, when I was talking about plan B: it’s all about hypocrisy public diplomacy. Get used to it.

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***In a demented attack earlier this year on Nafisi and her wildly successful memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran (a work of dissident literature about the soul-killing totalitarian regime of the Mad Mullahs of the Islamic Republic of Iran), Columbia “scholar” Hamid Dabashi accused Nafisi of being a “native informer” and “colonial agent” serving the agenda of the Bush administration and of writing “a kaffeeklatsch version of English literature as the ideological foregrounding of American empire.” He called her work “reminiscent of the most pestiferous colonial projects of the British in India.”

In an interview, he called Nafisi “the Lynndie England of Abu Ghraib dressed up as the simple, everyday comprador intellectual you might meet in the supermarket.”

I have no desire to get in between Persians. However, this is my wish for “Professor” Dabashi:

May all his teeth fall out except one, and may that one be the source of constant, agonizing pain.