One, Two, Three

One, Two, Three (1961) is a Billy Wilder comedy you can watch online on iFILM, with James Cagney as C.R. MacNamara — the driven, perpetually scheming head of Coca-Cola's West Berlin office. He has Soviet bottling rights almost locked up and a promotion within reach. Then his boss calls from Atlanta: his teenage daughter Scarlett is flying over for a visit. Keep an eye on her.

Scarlett quietly marries a committed East Berlin Communist. The boss lands in days. MacNamara has to turn a Marxist who calls Coca-Cola the opiate of the masses into a presentable capitalist son-in-law before anyone notices the whole situation. Wilder fires the dialogue at machine-gun pace — Cagney handles it like he was born for exactly this kind of controlled pandemonium.

The film was shot in the summer of 1961, weeks before the Berlin Wall went up. Wilder had already wrapped his location work when the border closed — the timing was that close. Cagney retired from acting after this role and stayed away for twenty years, apparently exhausted. The Cold War as material for farce has only grown funnier with distance. Stream One, Two, Three (1961) online on iFILM.