One, Two, Three

“It’s that damned German efficiency.” If there’s anyone who could hit the nail on the head in Hollywood, it was director and screenwriter Billy Wilder. His heyday were set in the forties and fifties, but with ONE, TWO, THREE and IRMA LA DOUCE he made a couple of late career highlights.

C.R. MacNamara – Mac to his friends – is a high-ranking executive at Coca-Cola, stationed in West-Berlin. Mac wants to become the head of Western European Coca-Cola Operations, based in London, at all costs. And in an effort to get there, he is working on a trade agreement to introduce Coca-Cola to the Russian market. When the daughter of his boss is visiting West-Berlin on her Europe trip, his life completely derails.

While making ONE, TWO, THREE, Wilder turned out to be a little too foreseeing. During the morning of the 13th of August 1961, in the middle of the shoot, they started building the Berlin Wall. The movie lost at the box office, because the story became too sinister after the Wall was raised. In addition, the production had to abruptly move to Munich because the Wall was built straight across the set at the Brandenburger Tor. Luckily, ONE, TWO, THREE was given a re-release in Germany two decades after its initial release, where it was resoundly acclaimed and ran in theatres for over a year.

With ONE, TWO, THREE, Wilder set a challenge for himself. The movie had to progress at high speed. On the screenplay, he noted: “This piece must be played molto furioso. Suggested speed: 110 miles an hour–on the curves–140 miles an hour in the straightaways.” They wouldn’t wait for laughs. “We knew we had to go with Cagney, because Cagney was the whole picture,” said Wilder. “He really had the rhythm, and that was very good. It was not funny. But just the speed was funny. The general idea was, let’s make the fastest picture in the world.”