Review of One, Two, Three

I'm a massive Billy Wilder fan but count this as a rare mis-fire from one of Hollywood's greatest directors. It has the odd good one-liner, but the political satire is crude, the portrait of the Germans is so stereotypical it would get prosecuted under race hate laws these days and the pace is overly furious, so that you're left gasping for breath at the sheer pace of it all halfway through the film. Worse, it has little charm - Liselotte Pulver as the secretary is great, as are one or two of the German supporting cast, but Cagney is a long way off his best here and the film would have been redeemed if instead of Cagney Jack Lemmon had taken the lead - because Lemmon always had charm, even when he was barking his lines - see him in Avanti! if you don't believe me. This movie had the singular misfortune to be overtaken by historical events, as the slightly uncomfortable spoken prologue reveals: its comedy of east-west tension looked a little tasteless when the Soviets built the Berlin Wall between the start of shooting and its release in the cinemas. My least favourite Wilder movie, by a considerable margin.