Softwing Most undeservingly overhyped movie of all time??

PlatinumRead Just so...so bad

ChampDavSlim The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

Bob This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

JohnHowardReid How the mighty have fallen! Here's a Billy Wilder farce loaded with gimmicks and some of his favorite predilections, but it just doesn't come off! Wilder's direction is too heavy-handed. Likewise, the acting is too earnest and enthusiastic for a script that should have been played with the light touch of a soufflé. What was needed was a group of players with a collective tongue-in-cheek air about them. Plus the ability to throw away lines. Because – let's face it! – the dialogue is just not very funny. Cagney's pow-pow-pow rendition is all wrong. True, Maurice Chevalier might have got away with this approach, but Jimmy Cagney is definitely not a Chevalier. Alas, the support players try hard too, and that's jut the trouble. Only Lilo Pulver knows the score and acts accordingly. You can scratch the rest of the cast. They all try hard too – and that's just the trouble! To cap it all, even the technical credits fail to impress. In fact, one might be pardoned for deducing that the movie had been heavily subsidized by a prominent soft-drink company.

djderka I thought Airplane 1 & 2 were very funny. I liked all the Scary Movies (the comedies). I really liked It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, World with all of the greatest comedians of the time. And Bridesmaids was really funny too.But compared to One Two Three they all are in slow motion.One Two Three is the fastest most witty comedy I have ever seen. I just saw it on cable. And it is one of Billy Wilder's finest films. You cannot afford to laugh as you will miss the next zinger.The comedic innuendos come a flying at ya' and you better have a cup of Dark Roast coffee to stay alert.Fun is made of East/West, North/South, Communism/Capitalism and a ton of everything including society itself. A real tour d'force of life in the 60s and the cold war.Cagney has the fastest and longest lines you have every seen and he is backed up by a great supporting cast. The story is simple: Executive has to confront his capitalistic boss with the fact that his egocentric daughter falls in love with a commie. The quick witted dialogue between the Russian embassy guy and Cagney are great!I have to buy the video and show it too my friends, ASAP. And had to get my 2 cents in for a legacy post.And no CGI special effects, explosions, gun fire, car chases, impending disasters, foot chases, and the big mean bad guy.All dialogue and funny sight gags. Why can't we make this kind of comedy today.

edwagreen It was sixteen years after World War 11 ended when this film was made. It was a time of the Cold War and the wall being built between East and West Germany.That being said, James Cagney turned in still another fine performance as a soda executive caught up with a wife wanting to come back to the U.S. and a boss who has had his teenage daughter running throughout Europe and now she is set to come to a divided Germany.Cagney's timing and the pacing of the film are in fine form. I didn't appreciate his wife referring to him on occasion as "Mein Fuehrer." That really isn't funny and should have been avoided.This is great satire on the corporate world and the cold war.

Ed Uyeshima A genuine Cold War relic, this frenetic 1961 comedy is the film that master director Billy Wilder made right after two genuine classics, "Some Like It Hot" and "The Apartment". While it's not nearly in that league, the 61-year-old James Cagney is in top fighting form as ever-resourceful C.R. MacNamara, the head of Coca-Cola's West Berlin plant. The pugnacious screen legend went into a two-decade-long retirement after making this film which pointedly satirizes both American capitalism and Russian communism. He makes the film watchable but not necessarily essential since this sitcom-level rehash of "Ninotchka" (which Wilder co-wrote with Charles Brackett) doesn't really resonate now as much as it did when the Berlin Wall was hastily built despite all the obvious sweat in the effort. Despite the scabrous political rhetoric and Wilder's unmistakable mark, it all feels more like a period piece along the lines of a Keystone Kops comedy or Stanley Kramer's "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World".Co-written by Wilder and his constant partner I.A.L. Diamond based on a one-act play by Ferenc Molnar, the story has MacNamara discovering that his Atlanta-based boss is shipping out his promiscuous seventeen-year-old daughter Scarlett for the summer. A family man with an exasperated wife and two kids, MacNamara is forced to cancel a long-planned vacation to Venice to baby-sit the Southern belle. However, before he knows it, Scarlett has become Mrs. Otto Ludwig Piffl, the wife of a die-hard Bolshevik. In the middle of brokering a deal to open a Coca-Cola plant in the Soviet Union, MacNamara contrives to get rid of Otto by having him get picked up by the secret police in East Berlin where he is tortured by the repeated playing of "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini". However, complications ensue when it is discovered that Scarlett is pregnant, which means MacNamara needs to retrieve Otto pronto and convert him into a capitalist just in time for the arrival of Scarlett's ultra-conservative parents.The indefatigable Cagney is really the whole show here as he single-handedly accelerates an addled screwball comedy into a free-for-all farce on hyper-drive. His showpiece is a ten-minute segment where he barks orders to his staff in machine-gun fashion to get Otto cleaned up and groomed for Scarlett's parents. Horst Buchholz ("Fanny") - whom both Cagney and Wilder detested during filming - is appropriately didactic as Otto, while the long-forgotten Pamela Tiffin ("Harper") plays the bubble-headed Scarlett with surprising élan. Effective on the sidelines are Lilo Pulver as the sexpot secretary, Hanns Lothar as the heel-clicking assistant, Arlene Francis as MacNamara's wisecracking wife, and in a cameo, Red Buttons as an MP not above doing a Cagney impression in front of the master. However, they all appear understandably overwhelmed by Cagney's all-cylinders-on presence. Composer André Previn orchestrated the music score which makes maximum comic use of Khachaturian's "Sabre Dance". The 2003 DVD offers the original theatrical trailer as its sole extra.