One, Two, Three

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!