ONE, TWO, THREE

MATINEE:

“The Communist gentlemen have arrived,” says the heel-clicking ex-SS man now secretary to Mr. MacNamara. The American (his wife likes to call him “mein Führer” ) has come to West Berlin to oversee Coca-Cola productions in spring 1961. For the sake of love, the ardent Communist Otto Ludwig Piffl from East Berlin undergoes a re-education programme that turns him into a West German aristocrat with a taste for the diabolical Capitalist brew. ―“I was always glad to go back to Germany after the war, and I made films there, but always with a crucial distance: the movies were American, and about Americans in Germany” (Billy Wilder). Nobody in this fast-paced comedy is spared the director’s scathing wit. Hardly surprising, then, that the film, of which the shooting was rudely interrupted by the building of the Berlin Wall, was initially cold-shouldered by audiences, and first attained cult status many years later.