Quite a few years ago when I began my hobby of writing these reviews on IMDb, I began to notice how often Coca Cola showed up in movies as a result of their ubiquitous marketing and product placement. It got to the point that I made a game out of it with my family, as to who could shout out the first appearance of a Coke mention while watching a film. As it turns out, the movie "One, Two, Three" takes that whole idea and turns it on it's head, as the trick here is to catch a scene where you don't have any sign of Coke at all!
Well, the movie itself is a farcical take on East/West relations, made just before the Berlin Wall went up in the same year this picture was released. One of my all time favorites, Jimmy Cagney, is on hand in a frenetic, fast paced and fast talking gig that was a hallmark of some of his very earliest pictures, like 1933's "Hard to Handle" and 1934's "Jimmy the Gent". In those flicks he was pretty much a con man, while here he's heading up the entire Coca-Cola operation in Germany, with an eye to extending the soft drink's reach into Russia! That idea is squashed by the home office, while at the same time, C.R. MacNamara (Cagney) is assigned the task of babysitting the seventeen year old teenage daughter of the company president in Atlanta. The story gets a lot of mileage out of the clashing ideologies of capitalism versus communism, as young Scarlet Hazeltine (Pamela Tiffin) falls for German commie Otto Ludwig Piffl (Horst Buchholz), who's most thoughtful criticism of capitalism is that it's "like a dead herring in the moonlight. It shines, but it stinks!" Not that I agree, but it was quite the colorful description coming from the mind of screenwriter and director Billy Wilder.
For this viewer, the biggest kick I got out of the picture were the under the radar tributes to some of Cagney's earlier pictures. There was that moment when MacNamara threatened Otto with a grapefruit to the kisser, which the actor actually did do to Mae Clark in 1931's "The Public Enemy", and if you noticed, that cuckoo clock in Mac's office rang out each time with 'Yankee Doodle Dandy' from Cagney's 1942 movie. And though it didn't relate to any of Cagney's prior pictures, I couldn't contain myself when the band at the Grand Hotel Potemkin launched into the German version of 'Yes, We Have No Bananas'!
So when I plug this title into my list of James Cagney movies I've watched and reviewed here on IMDb, it comes out in a very respectable third place out of the fifty one titles I've seen (as I write this) when sorted in IMDb ranking order. Personally, I wouldn't rate it that high against my own Cagney favorites like "White Heat", "Angels With Dirty Faces" and "The Public Enemy", but if you're a Cagney fan like I am, you'll enjoy it just the same. Easy enough to catch now too, as it's been released on DVD, which wasn't the case when I first sought it out a few years ago.
Well, the movie itself is a farcical take on East/West relations, made just before the Berlin Wall went up in the same year this picture was released. One of my all time favorites, Jimmy Cagney, is on hand in a frenetic, fast paced and fast talking gig that was a hallmark of some of his very earliest pictures, like 1933's "Hard to Handle" and 1934's "Jimmy the Gent". In those flicks he was pretty much a con man, while here he's heading up the entire Coca-Cola operation in Germany, with an eye to extending the soft drink's reach into Russia! That idea is squashed by the home office, while at the same time, C.R. MacNamara (Cagney) is assigned the task of babysitting the seventeen year old teenage daughter of the company president in Atlanta. The story gets a lot of mileage out of the clashing ideologies of capitalism versus communism, as young Scarlet Hazeltine (Pamela Tiffin) falls for German commie Otto Ludwig Piffl (Horst Buchholz), who's most thoughtful criticism of capitalism is that it's "like a dead herring in the moonlight. It shines, but it stinks!" Not that I agree, but it was quite the colorful description coming from the mind of screenwriter and director Billy Wilder.
For this viewer, the biggest kick I got out of the picture were the under the radar tributes to some of Cagney's earlier pictures. There was that moment when MacNamara threatened Otto with a grapefruit to the kisser, which the actor actually did do to Mae Clark in 1931's "The Public Enemy", and if you noticed, that cuckoo clock in Mac's office rang out each time with 'Yankee Doodle Dandy' from Cagney's 1942 movie. And though it didn't relate to any of Cagney's prior pictures, I couldn't contain myself when the band at the Grand Hotel Potemkin launched into the German version of 'Yes, We Have No Bananas'!
So when I plug this title into my list of James Cagney movies I've watched and reviewed here on IMDb, it comes out in a very respectable third place out of the fifty one titles I've seen (as I write this) when sorted in IMDb ranking order. Personally, I wouldn't rate it that high against my own Cagney favorites like "White Heat", "Angels With Dirty Faces" and "The Public Enemy", but if you're a Cagney fan like I am, you'll enjoy it just the same. Easy enough to catch now too, as it's been released on DVD, which wasn't the case when I first sought it out a few years ago.