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Friday, Feb 6, 2015
8:45PM
[no title]
One, Two, Three's travesty of Cold War politics, filmed in Berlin at the moment when the Wall went up, boils the war down to its essentials: "To hell with Krushchev!" "To hell with Frank Sinatra!" In a furiously paced slapstick entirely lacking The Apartment's humanity, no one is spared Wilder's acid pen: not the West Germans who, while "enjoying all the blessings of democracy" (i.e., Coca Cola), seek every opportunity to click their heels; nor the East Berliners, who don't return deposit bottles; nor the Russians, whose trio of emissaries are rather more decadent than their counterparts in Ninotchka; nor, finally, Coca Cola functionary/Yankee Doodle Dandy Jimmy Cagney, who speaks loudly and is all schtick. Pamela Tiffin's Patty Hearst–like runaway capitalist meets Horst Buchholz's runaway communist in Berlin-a bombed–out desert ripe for ideological battle, a place that, for Austrian–emigré Wilder, like Russia "is to get out of, not into."
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