History on Screen: One, Two, Three
A frenetic Cold War comedy that satires anything and everything
Today, the 1961 comedy One, Two, Three has largely been forgotten. It isn’t currently available on any streaming services in the U.S., so the only way to watch it is on DVD. Unlike other classic movies of the 1960s, most people today probably have never heard of One, Two, Three. And that is a shame, because One, Two, Three is not only an absolutely hilarious comedy that showcases an impressive performance by James Cagney, it is also a sharp satire of the early Cold War.
Directed by Billy Wilder, and written by Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond, One, Two, Three was released in December 1961. The movie stars James Cagney, Horst Buchholz, Pamela Tiffin, and Leon Askin. Cagney and Wilder were both major figures in Hollywood at the time. Cagney had made his name in the 1930s by playing tough guys – often gangsters – perhaps most famously in The Public Enemy (1931). Despite being typecast early in his career, Cagney later negotiated a wider variety of roles, some of which included dancing opportunities (he had started his career as a dancer on vaudeville). In 1942, he won an Oscar for his portrayal of George M. Cohan in the musical Yankee Doodle Dandy.
Billy Wilder was born to a Jewish family in Galicia (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now in Poland). As a young man, he moved to Vienna, where he became a journalist. In the mid-1920s, Wilder moved to Berlin and pursued a career as a screenwriter in Weimar Germany’s vibrant film industry. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Wilder moved first to Paris, then to Hollywood in 1934.1 In the 1940s, he made his directorial debut. Wilder directed a number of now-classic films, including Double Indemnity (1944), Sunset Boulevard (1950), Stalag 17 (1953), Sabrina (1954), The Seven Year Itch (1955), Some Like It Hot (1959), and The Apartment (1960).
In the early 1960s, Horst Buchholz was an up-and-coming young German actor. One of his earliest English-language films was The Magnificent Seven (1960). Having started modeling at the age of 12, Pamela Tiffin had been spotted in Los Angeles in 1960 and cast in her first film. One, Two, Three was only her second film.
Many of the supporting actors in One, Two, Three were German or Austrian, including those playing the three Soviet trade commissars. For instance, Leon Askin, who played Commissar Peripetchikoff, was an Austrian Jewish actor who had fled the Nazis, served in the U.S. military during the Second World War, and pursued an acting career after the war. His most well-known role was General Burkhalter on the TV comedy Hogan’s Heroes, which ran from 1965 to 1971.2
Caution: spoilers ahead!
One, Two, Three opens in West Berlin in 1961. C. R. “Mac” MacNamara is a high-ranking executive at Coca-Cola, assigned to West Berlin. Not content with his current job, Mac wants to be promoted to head of European operations for Coca-Cola, based in London. To get his boss’s attention, Mac is in negotiations with a Soviet trade commission to get Coca-Cola into the Soviet Union. He also agrees to host his boss’s daughter, Scarlett Hazeltine, a slightly dim-witted young southern socialite, when she comes to West Berlin as part of a European tour.
When Scarlett’s two-week stay becomes two months, Mac discovers just what is keeping Scarlett in West Berlin: she’s fallen in love with – and gotten married to – Otto Ludwig Piffl, a young East German Communist. Mac is decidedly unimpressed with Otto and horrified when Scarlett announces that she and Otto will be heading to Moscow, so that Otto can study to become a missile engineer. Seeing his dreams of promotion to London disappearing, and with Scarlett’s parents due to arrive in West Berlin the next day, Mac hatches a plan to get rid of Otto.
When Otto leaves Coca-Cola headquarters and crosses the border back into East Berlin, he is arrested by East German police. Unbeknownst to him, Mac has planted a “Russki Go Home” balloon on his motorcycle and given him a wedding present of a cuckoo clock that plays “Yankee Doodle Dandy” (and is wrapped in a copy of the Wall Street Journal).
Mac can’t congratulate himself on his cleverness for very long, though, as it is soon revealed that Scarlett is pregnant. Now, Mac has to get Otto back from East Berlin, so that Scarlett will have a husband and father of her child.
In one of the most hilarious sequences in the movie, Mac, accompanied by his driver, Fritz, assistant, Schlemmer, and very attractive secretary, Fräulein Ingeborg, heads to East Berlin to negotiate Otto’s release. His partners at the negotiating table? The Soviet trade commission, which may not want Coca-Cola, but definitely want Ingeborg to come work for them. Mac outwits the Soviets, using them to get Otto back from the East Germans (slightly worse for wear after being interrogated to “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini”). When the Soviet trade commission discovers Mac has “bamboozled” them, a hilarious car chase ensues, as the three Soviet commissars chase Mac back towards the Brandenburg Gate in their Soviet-made car (“… Is wonderful car. Is exact copy of 1937 Nash”).
Having escaped the Soviet trade commission, and made it back across the border to West Berlin, Mac now has another problem to contend with: he has to turn Otto, the firebrand Communist, into a good, capitalist son-in-law for his boss. And he has less than 24 hours in which to do it.
From here on out, the pace of the movie steadily increases, until it is absolutely frenetic. (As a side note, James Cagney’s performance as Mac is absolutely incredible; I don’t know how he had the stamina to perform the many complicated monologues in the film.) Mac arranges for Otto to be adopted by an impoverished count, giving him a title, and makes him head of the Coca-Cola bottling plant in West Berlin. He and Scarlett also give Otto a makeover, making him look like a member of the bourgeoisie that he hates so much.
Or does he? When the Hazeltines arrive at Tempelhof Airport to meet their new son-in-law, Otto plays his role perfectly, winning over Mr. Hazeltine so completely that he makes Otto, not Mac, the head of European operations. So, Otto and Scarlett are off to London, while Mac gets a promotion to Vice President of Procurement back in Atlanta. When Mac’s family turns up at the airport (long story; side plot), he celebrates by buying them Cokes from a vending machine. The last one, however, turns out to be a Pepsi-Cola. The movie ends with Mac’s outraged face and the sound of him yelling, “Schlemmer!”
Cold War Satire in One, Two, Three
Interestingly (and not a little ironically), the filming of One, Two, Three – a Cold War satire – was interrupted by one of the major events of the Cold War in Europe: the East German government’s decision to close the border between East and West Berlin on August 13, 1961, and the subsequent building of the Berlin Wall. When the border was closed, One, Two, Three was not yet done filming. With the Brandenburg Gate now firmly out of commission, given that it was on the East German side of the border, production had to shift to the Bavaria Film Studios in Munich, where a copy of the lower half of the Brandenburg Gate was constructed.
Wilder also added an opening voiceover montage – narrated by Mac – explaining that the events of the movie occurred before August 13, 1961, in order to account for the fact that the characters in the movie travel freely between West and East Berlin. In true One, Two, Three fashion, this hastily-added monologue includes several clever jabs at the East Germans (“the Eastern sector, under Communist domination, was still in rubble. But the people went about their daily business: parading.”).
Because One, Two, Three was actually filmed in Berlin – at least until the Berlin Wall went up – the movie highlights the visual contrast between West and East Berlin. Particularly in the opening sequence, West Berlin’s modern, reconstructed buildings contrast significantly with East Berlin, where many of the buildings are either still in ruins or still show signs of wartime damage. The state of East Berlin is also visible when Mac and company arrive at the Grand Hotel Potemkin to negotiate with the Soviet trade commission, as there is a pile of rubble next door to the hotel. Similarly, during the car chase scene, the cars drive past several ruined buildings in East Berlin. The car chase ends at the Brandenburg Gate. While the gate itself doesn’t show any signs of wartime damage, the impact of the war is still visible in the few shots of the area around the Brandenburg Gate (Pariser Platz).
Another visual reference to Berlin’s wartime and postwar history comes at the end of the movie. The airport to which Mac, Scarlett, Otto, and company race in order to pick up the Hazeltines is Tempelhof Airport, then the main airport in the American sector of West Berlin. Tempelhof Airport’s terminal building was constructed by the Nazis in the 1930s, and it is one of the major surviving examples of Nazi architecture in Berlin. (A few shots of Tempelhof’s exterior are visible in the film.) Between 1948 and 1949, Tempelhof Airport was the main airport used by the United States to supply West Berlin during the Berlin Airlift.3
There are so many jokes in One, Two, Three that I can’t possibly analyze them all, so I’ve picked a select few. One of the jokes proved to be particularly prescient. When Mac meets with the three Soviet trade commissars for the first time, they offer him a cigar, explaining that they have a trade deal with Cuba (“they send us cigars, we send them rockets”). One year later, those very rockets – in the form of Soviet nuclear missiles – had the world on the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Speaking of the Soviets, there are several references to Soviet leadership in One, Two, Three. When Mac is negotiating with the Soviet trade commissars for Otto’s release – at the fictional Grand Hotel Potemkin in East Berlin – Ingeborg begins dancing on the table (it makes sense in the context of the movie, I promise). As the music and her dancing become increasingly frantic, a portrait of Nikita Khrushchev falls out of its frame, revealing a portrait of Joseph Stalin – gone, but certainly not forgotten – beneath. In the same scene, one of the Soviet commissars begins banging his shoe on the table in time with the music, a visual reference to an incident in which Khrushchev allegedly banged his shoe on his desk during a meeting of the UN General Assembly in 1960.
In addition to poking fun at the Soviets, One, Two, Three also satirizes the incomplete denazification process in West Germany. At one point, Mac asks Schlemmer, his assistant, what he did during the war. “I was in der Untergrund, the underground,” Schlemmer explains. “Resistance fighter?” Mac asks. “No, motorman. In the underground, you know, the subway,” Schlemmer replies. However, another layer of Schlemmer’s past is revealed when a newspaper reporter shows up at Mac’s officer during Otto’s makeover, having been tipped off that Otto is, in fact, not a count, but an East German Communist. Schlemmer recognizes the reporter as his old commanding officer: not in the subway, but in the SS. Mac uses this information to blackmail the reporter into going away without a story. Schlemmer then explains that he was drafted, indicating to the audience that he wasn’t a “real” Nazi.
Although historically inaccurate in one respect (Schlemmer would not have been drafted into the SS, which had very strict requirements for those who joined), this sequence has real historical truth in it. In the 1950s and 1960s, there were plenty of people in West Germany who had been members of the Nazi Party, had fought in the German army during the war, and/or had been classified as “fellow travelers” by postwar Allied denazification courts. While high-ranking Nazis had been removed from public life in postwar Germany, there were plenty of lower-level bureaucrats, businesspeople, etc. who had some kind of connection to the Nazis.
For instance, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, the chancellor of West Germany from 1966 to 1969, had been a member of the Nazi Party and worked in the broadcasting department of the German Foreign Ministry during the Second World War. After the war, Kiesinger was interned by American occupation forces for a while. In 1948, a denazification court classified him as “exonerated,” allowing him to resume his legal and political career. Kiesinger’s membership in the Nazi Party and wartime activities made him a controversial figure before and especially during his chancellorship. In 1969, Kiesinger fell from power, replaced by Willy Brandt, who became the first Social Democratic chancellor of West Germany. By that point, for many West Germans – especially young people – Kiesinger had become a symbol of the incomplete denazification process.
It’s not just European history that is satirized in One, Two, Three, though. Because the Hazeltines are from Atlanta, a couple of references to the U.S. Civil War are worked into the movie. When Scarlett first tells Mac about her relationship with Otto, she mentions that the night before, she and Otto were blowing up balloons together. The balloons in question were printed with “Yankee Go Home,” which (according to the movie) the East Germans float across to West Berlin. When Mac accuses Scarlett of helping spread anti-American propaganda, she explains “it’s not anti-American, it’s anti-Yankee. Where I come from, everybody’s against the Yankees.” Later, when Scarlett and Mac coach Otto before his first meeting with Mr. Hazeltine, Scarlett tells Otto that one of the things her father feels very strongly about is the Civil War. Mac tells him that “if the subject comes up, just say it was a draw” (more palatable to a conservative southerner of the 1960s than the historical truth).
There’s so much packed into One, Two, Three in terms of jokes and satire that the only way to truly appreciate it is to watch the movie yourself (maybe a couple of times to catch all the jokes). So, if I’ve convinced you to watch One, Two, Three, go find order a DVD and settle in for a wild ride!
Wilder’s mother, stepfather, and grandmother were all murdered during the Holocaust.
Askin’s Hogan’s Heroes costar John Banner, who played Sgt. Schultz, appears in One, Two, Three in an uncredited voiceover-only role. He provided the voices for the manager of the bottling plant and the haberdasher.
Tempelhof Airport ceased operations in 2008. Since then, part of the former airport has become a public park; it was also used as a temporary refugee shelter in 2015. Today, you can take guided tours of the former airport, which is currently undergoing renovation and redevelopment.