One, Two, Three

Berlin before the construction of the Wall: the director of the Coca Cola branch in West Berlin C.R. MacNamara (James Cagney) is at his wit’s end; not only do his attempts to tap into the newly founded East Germany as a market for Coca Cola risk failure, but his role as a chaperone for the young daughter of his American boss is also too much. The only people able to help him are MacNamara’s wife (who continually calls her husband “Mein Führer”), Liselotte Pulver in her iconic dotted dress and his submissive assistant Schlemmer who used to be in the SS. Wilder’s scornful, irreverent, in-your-face film is more than happy to move into the realm of the macabre and the stereotypical and only found its audience a good 20 years after the construction of the Wall.