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16. One, Two, Three and Other Projects
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16 One,Two,Three and Other Projects B illy Wilder’s next picture, One,Two,Three, might be called inevitable . Finally he had to have his say on the screen about postwar Germany, in a way that reflected his own wit and brilliance. As the vehicle for his satire, he chose an old Molnár play, Eins, Zwei, Drei (One, Two Three), and he changed almost everything about it but the title. Cary Grant was the original preferred casting for the role of MacNamara, the Coca-Cola executive in postwar Berlin. It played off Grant’s characterization in the Front Page remake, His Girl Friday, where Grant played fast-talking editor Walter Burns to Rosalind Russell’s reporter Hildy Johnson. When Cary Grant proved to be unavailable, Billy immediately sought out James Cagney. Cagney was sixty years old at the time, near the end of his career, and didn’t work again after One, Two, Three until his very old age, twenty years later. Billy wanted the picture to be exceedingly fast-paced. He wanted it to move like an express train, and he knew Cagney could give him that. Cagney later said that he wasn’t happy with Billy. He felt that Billy was too rigid in following his script and didn’t allow Cagney as much leeway as he wanted in developing his role. However, I don’t think that affected the film at all. It was shot, partially, in Germany. And as luck would have it, during the production of the picture, the zones between East and West Berlin 131 were closed as a result of international problems. We were filming in Munich at the time, but we finally brought the picture back to California , where we picked up all the scenes in the Goldwyn Studio that we had not been able to shoot in Germany. When the picture was previewed, audience laughter covered up the soundtrack. That might have been a mistake, since it didn’t leave space for either important dialogue or other possible laughs. Its rapid-fire pace hurt One,Two,Three. Billy is Austrian and had lived in Berlin, where he had worked as a newspaper reporter for a time. Then he started to work in silent pictures , as a writer at the UFA Studio, where his best-known credit was on the film Emil und der Detektiv. When the Nazis came to power, Billy made his way from Berlin to Paris, en route to the United States, having decided that he wanted to work in films in Hollywood. The Holocaust was very personal and painful to him. Members of his family were trapped in the Holocaust; his mother was sent to a concentration camp and was killed. His revenge was in his films Stalag 17, Foreign Affair, and One,Two,Three. Unfortunately, One, Two, Three was not a commercially successful film. I was surprised. I thought it was going to be successful. The previews were marvelous. The theaters rocked with laughter. It was one of three or four pictures in my career that I expected to be successful and then was very disappointed. By 1961 we had delivered to United Artists Fort Massacre, Man of the West, The Gunfight at Dodge City, The Man in the Net, Some Like It Hot, The Horse Soldiers, Cast a Long Shadow, The Magnificent Seven, and The Apartment. Awaiting release, or in various states of post-production, were West Side Story, By Love Possessed, and Town without Pity. As a result of this production record, we extended our deal with United Artists for an additional three years. Eric Johnston, who in 1961 was president of the Motion Picture Association of America, asked me if I would agree to serve as the American delegate to the Cannes Film Festival. In those years, the Cannes Festival was treated as an international conference, and foreign nations were invited to participate by the French government. I discussed the invitation with Pat, and we thought it would be fun to accept. 132 One, Two, Three and Other Projects / [35.168.113.248] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:30 GMT) Eric Johnston recommended me to the State Department, and I was appointed by Secretary of State Dean Rusk to represent our country . I was asked to go first to Washington, where I was briefed by various people in the State Department about whom I would be meeting at Cannes, primarily the representatives of other governments. The State Department people were...