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  Love on the run one, two, three and Irma la douce I’ve reaffirmed my lack of confidence in my fellow men. —Rock Hudson as Robert Talbot in the film Come September “Don’t ask me why, but I just got the feeling I wanted to make a picture again in Germany,” Wilder said; “I hadn’t done one since 1948, when I did A Foreign Affair.”1 He explained to a German interviewer, “Of course I was bitter after the war; but today it’s a closed chapter. I have buried my anger and my hate. The wounds are healed. It is absolutely, totally forgotten. I even miss Germany again today. I’m homesick for Berlin.”2 Wilder had a penchant for choosing story material from obscure European literary sources. These stories would be unfamiliar to American film critics, who could consequently not complain that he had not been faithful to his source story. The literary source for Five Graves to Cairo, for example, had been Hotel Imperial, a play by Lajos Biró. Wilder’s next film would be derived from a play by another Hungarian playwright, Ferenc Molnar. Wilder had seen Molnar’s one-act play Ein, zwei, drei (One, two, three) on the stage in Berlin in 1928. Wilder remembered vividly the incredible performance on the Berlin stage of Max Pallenberg as Norrison, a highstrung Parisian banker. Pallenberg was noted for delivering his dialogue in a fast staccato, like the rapid chatter of a machine gun. The whole play takes place in Norrison’s office. Lydia, the daughter of a Swedish tycoon who is one of Norrison’s prize clients, is the banker’s houseguest. During her stay she secretly weds Anton, a rabid Socialist taxi driver, and becomes pregnant with his child. Norrison has to hastily turn Anton into an imitation aristocrat , worthy to be the son-in-law of his wealthy client, before the industrialist meets Anton. Norrison does so with the help of an army of clothiers. What would happen, Wilder wondered, if he set Molnar’s farce in Berlin Some LIke It WILder  during the cold war? In Wilder’s screenplay, Norrison, the banker, becomes C. R. “Mac” MacNamara, chief representative of Coca-Cola in Berlin. Scarlett Hazeltine, the scatterbrained daughter of Wendell Hazeltine, an executive at Coke’s home office in Atlanta, is staying with Mac and his family in Berlin. During her sojourn she surreptitiously marries an East German Communist, Otto Piffl, and is now expecting his child, “a bouncing baby Bolshevik,” according to Mac. When Wendell Hazeltine and his wife decide to come to Berlin for a visit, Mac must transform Otto, a scruffy dropout, into a capitalist and an aristocrat by means of a host of tailors and haberdashers to impress Scarlett’s parents. Although Coca-Cola plays a significant role in the script, Wilder never personally liked Coke. While a tabloid journalist in Berlin in 1929, Wilder wrote that “Coca-Cola tastes like burnt pneumatic tires.”3 He admitted privately in later years that he never had any reason to change his opinion of Coke. Wilder made Mac an executive of the Coca-Cola Company and not of a fictitious soft drink company for the same reason that Frank Flannagan, Gary Cooper’s character in Love in the Afternoon, worked for Pepsi-Cola: Wilder abhorred the use of phony brand names in films. “When you have that,” he insisted, “believability goes out the window.”4 What’s more, Wilder claimed that, after the release of Love in the Afternoon, he had promised the Coca-Cola Company that he would one day make a film that featured a Coke executive. After all, the tie-in with Coke in a film, the bosses at Coke knew, would reap a great deal of publicity for their product. One, Two, Three (1961) Wilder could think of only one actor who could deliver dialogue at the triphammer tempo of Max Pallenberg: James Cagney. He contacted Cagney very early in preproduction at his residence in Martha’s Vineyard, to lure him to commit to the part. The sixty-one-year-old actor had been beset by some unworthy material in recent years; consequently, he was delighted to appear in a promising film like One, Two, Three. Wilder was glad that he got Cagney when he was still “working on eight cylinders. For me there’s never been anybody better on the screen.”5 When Wilder gave Cagney the screenplay , Cagney noticed the foreword: “This...

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