June 27 movie: One, Two, Three. Middle aged Coca-cola executive in Germany (James Cagney) reluctantly agrees to host the teenage daughter of the company president, then discovers to his horror that she's gotten secretly married to an East German fanatical Communist. Hilarity ensues!
Billy Wilder was able to do zany slapstick comedy to perfection (Some Like It Hot). And he was able to do excellent, funny movies with political topics (Stalag 17). But here? Not so much. The wackiness at times took on a tone of frantic desperation -- like watching an amateur comic who knows his act is bombing, but has to keep going -- that was literally cringe-inducing. Yes, literally: I physically cringed a couple of times.
Also, I don't know if One, Two, Three was based on a play or not, but it had a stagey feel to it that got on my nerves a bit. By which I mean, the movie almost entirely takes place in one room, and most of the actors seem to be projecting to the balcony all the time.
Not that it was all bad. The Cold War humor was sometimes funny precisely because it was so unfunny -- like Cagney's assistant snapping his heels together everytime he speaks, but insisting that he worked as a subway conductor during the war, then eventually admitting (at a particularly madcap moment) that he was in the SS. Because Nazis are funny! Unintentional comedy gold, people.
I guess it just goes to show that no matter how good the director, with such sheer volume of output, they can't all be brilliant.
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Yes, it was based on a play by Ferenc Molnēµ, a prolific Hungarian playwright who wrote the play which was the basis for the musical Carousel. Good spotting.