Rating: NR
Genre:
Comedy
Release Date: 07/15/2003
SubTitles: English/French/Espanol
Dubbed: English/French/Espanol
Sound: DD1
Run Time: 109 Minutes
Flags: Adult Situations, Questionable for Children, Adult Humor
Distributor/Studio: MGM
In his last starring film (it was supposed to be his last film, but
Ragtime came along in 1981),
James Cagney plays Coca-Cola executive
C.R. MacNamara. Assigned to manage Coke's West Berlin office,
MacNamara dreams of being transferred to London, and to do this he must curry favor with his Atlanta-based boss,
Hazeltine (
Howard St. John). Thus,
MacNamara agrees to look after
Hazeltine's dizzy, impulsive daughter,
Scarlett (
Pamela Tiffin), during her visit to Germany. Weeks pass, and on the eve of
Hazeltine's visit to West Berlin,
Scarlett announces that she's gotten married. Even worse, her husband is a hygienically challenged East Berlin Communist named
Otto Piffl (
Horst Buchholz). The crafty
MacNamara arranges for
Piffl to be arrested by the East Berlin police and to have the marriage annulled, only to discover that
Scarlett is pregnant. In rapid-fire "one, two, three" fashion,
MacNamara must arrange for
Piffl to be released by the Communists and successfully pass off the scrungy, doggedly anti-capitalist
Piffl as an acceptable husband for
Scarlett.
MacNamara must accomplish this in less than 12 hours, all the while trying to mollify his wife (
Arlene Francis), who has learned of his affair with busty secretary
Ingeborg (
Lilo Pulver).
Seldom pausing for breath,
Billy Wilder's film is a crackling, mile-a-minute
farce, taking satiric scattershots at Coca-Cola, the Cold War (the film is set in the months just before the erection of the Berlin Wall), Russian red tape, Communist and capitalist hypocrisy, Southern bigotry, the German "war guilt,"
rock music, and even
Cagney's own movie image. Not all the gags are in the best of taste, and most of the one-liners have dated rather badly, but
Cagney's mesmerizing performance holds the whole affair together.
Billy Wilder and
I.A.L. Diamond adapted their screenplay from an obscure play by
Ferenc Molnár. Watch for
Red Buttons in an unbilled cameo as a military policeman, and listen for the voice of
Sig Rumann, emanating from the mouth of actor
Hubert Von Meyerinck (the
Count von Droste-Schattenburg).
~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
;)
