A hilarious free-for-all graced with mad genius, One, Two, Three makes them Keystone Cops look like slowpokes. Every time I watch it, I find myself perched on the edge of my seat, hoping that the film's fever pitch doesn't give the ever-inflamed James Cagney a heart attack--an illogically primal reaction that restores whatever immediacy the ravages of time have stolen from this precursor to Dr. Strangelove. Cagney stars as C.R. MacNamara, a Coca-Cola company man stationed in West Germany just after the Berlin Wall went up, willing to do whatever it takes to stay abroad for fear of relocation to the head office in Atlanta ("Siberia with mint juleps").

Pierre (Jacques Chevalier), a handsome pilot begging MacNamara's wife for assistance: "Madam, I appeal to you as a woman!"
Mrs. MacNamara (Arlene Francis): "As a matter of fact you do."

When the boss calls to say he's shipping out his promiscuous seventeen-year-old daughter Scarlett (Pamela Tiffin) to him for the summer, MacNamara cancels a long-overdue family vacation to babysit her--and she chews so quickly through his leash that before he knows it, Scarlett is Mrs. Otto Ludwig Piffl, the wife of a die-hard communist (Horst Buchholz, who at first seems to be spoofing Billy Wilder (the cap, the petulance), is much better cast here than as a Mexican in The Magnificent Seven). With Scarlett's marriage coinciding with the due arrival of her parents, MacNamara, while simultaneously brokering a deal to get a Coca-Cola plant in Russia, devises a plan to have Otto captured by the secret police (who wind up torturing Otto by subjecting him to "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini" ad nauseam; for all of Wilder's discernible hatred of rock 'n' roll, One, Two, Three's pop-cultural references, too numerous to catalogue here, betray a sensitivity to the zeitgeist that paints Tarantino as the curmudgeon) that's easy as one, two, three, but there's more to the situation than is visible on the surface, and a cuckoo clock--which plays, appropriately (if prosaically), "Yankee Doodle Went to Town" when it chimes--counts down the hours MacNamara has left to straighten things out.

MacNamara: "I'm not gonna let that communist kook ruin somebody's life!"
Mrs. MacNamara: "But she loves him!"
MacNamara: "Not hers, mine!"

A dyed-in-the-wool Republican off-camera, Cagney works himself into a genuine lather as a monger of the American dream in One, Two, Three, the undercurrent of authentic hostility to his performance--Cagney spends the entire film crushing proverbial grapefruits in people's faces until literally threatening to repeat that seminal moment from The Public Enemy--probably directed at the eminently-quotable Wilder/I.A.L. Diamond screenplay (adapted from a play by Hungarian Ferenc Molnar), which refuses to join a team: the Yankees and Russkies are portrayed as commensurate buffoons. The term "tour-de-force" should be reserved for lesser work: Cagney transforms a screwball farce into a fireball farce, and you can sense the other actors a little waylaid by his comedic ferocity. It's only in the film's final moments that its satire is pitched so as to threaten agenda, perhaps Cagney's ultimate reason for accepting what would be his last leading role; One, Two, Three's ending is the triumph of Western values, and while the antihero's victory is preferable in its sadistic wish-fulfilment to the mawkishness of The Fortune Cookie's conclusion (wherein the MacNamara-esque Walter Matthau character is duly punished), it's impossible to shake the chill one gets from seeing a sort of flipside to the Red Scare coin Don Siegel played (or, at least, wanted to play before the studio interfered) in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. You'll be asking yourself throughout how a picture this subversive got bankrolled, but there's no mystery left at the curtain call.

MacNamara: "Can't we discuss our problems without bringing up rival beverages?"

The best-looking disc in MGM's "Billy Wilder DVD Collection" and the second-most handsome of the Wilder titles available on the format thus far (edged-out by Sunset Blvd.), One, Two, Three preserves Daniel L. Fapp's Oscar-nominated cinematography with tremendous clarity of detail and contrast. (Sadly, Fapp received the film's only Academy nod.) Ignore the pan-and-scan side of the disc in favour of the 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer; I just wish I knew why MGM keeps replacing original logos with the '90s-era growling Leo: it makes no sense to introduce a b&w movie with a splash of colour, for starters. Source material is in excellent condition with the exception of irregular blotches that could be water damage. (It's doubtful the immersed viewer will notice them, anyhow.) The 2.0 mono soundtrack potently reproduces Wilder's sixties composer André Previn's riffs on Richard Wagner and Aram Khachaturyan, and Cagney's voice lacks the shrill quality one anticipates from previous viewings. One, Two, Three's theatrical trailer rounds out the disc--I sure do miss the edifying liner notes inserts of MGM's Woody Allen DVDs. ***1/2 (out of four) | Image: A, Sound: B+ | English Mono, French Mono, Spanish Mono | CC | English, French, Spanish Subtitles | DVD-10 | 109 minutes -Bill Chambers

So Irma the Sweet and her pimp Hippolyte (Bruce Yarnell, whose checked suit's moiré problems the DVD never solves) have a falling out after recently-fired gendarme Nestor bests Hippolyte in a drunken brawl. In need of a new "mec," Irma vows her allegiance to Nestor, who in turn disguises himself as wealthy Lord X so that his beloved need not sell her body to the night. Described by Wilder as the story of a man jealous of himself, Irma mistakes Nestor's graveyard shifts at the local butcher and fish market for indiscretions, and conspires to run away with Lord X, leading to a murder, a prison term, and the unlikeliest of contrivances, a Catholic wedding that takes less than three hours.

The prescribed happy ending of Irma La Douce comes with a metaphysical twist that undermines at once the picture's knowledge of itself as theatre and underscores the elasticity of cinema in creating illusion--the kind of directorial megalomania generally associated with Alfred Hitchcock. An inopportune birth is preceded by the Falstaff character Moustache (Lou Jacobi, in a role earmarked for the ailing Charles Laughton) hilariously motioning for the priest performing a wedding to speed it up a little in what could sub for a director's cameo, both events attended by the entire company in a way that is merely puzzling before becoming invasive. The idea of the viewer as voyeur--from the crowd gathered around the closed door behind which Irma is experiencing labour to the closing shots where a door is thrown open and we, the audience, play the invading throng--is explored with a sort of sugar-coated viciousness by Wilder here, pinging off the sleazy travelogue carnival façades of his previous film, One, Two, Three. Irma and Nestor's first night together is preceded by Nestor blocking off the window's to Irma's room and even asking Irma to don a blindfold while we sit amused by his humiliation at having to strip before his heart's desire. Irma herself strips several times, each seen illicitly in a mirror, Wilder inviting us to participate in the sort of leer that Hitchcock's Psycho (the quintessential sixties picture) introduced to our cinematic vocabulary: Wilder the pimp, Irma the whore, and we the John.

Ostensibly a light-hearted farce of the Indiscreet variety, the picture has moments of hilarity; with Lemmon at the peak of his lovable loser, cross-dressing game, the picture is more obviously a companion to Some Like it Hot than The Apartment. A montage of Nestor at work is perversely cheerful, laying André Previn's jaunty, Oscar-winning score over scenes of Nestor, soaked in blood, carrying carcasses around with Wilder comparing his hero's head first to a severed boar's, then to a head of cabbage. Nothing about Irma La Douce can be taken at face value, however, with Wilder ever caustic and unsympathetic as the film itself moves along with a blithe airiness. The interest of the director's films can usually be defined in terms of that discomfort: the tension between a film in a familiar genre and a director who delights in delivering a draught of acid as chaser. The hyper-reality of the film is brought to eye-catching life in MGM's release of Irma La Douce, offered in its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio in a 16:9 anamorphic video transfer that only really fails in the abovementioned moiré problems with Hippolyte's suit and, in chapter 11, during a brief shot of a similarly-patterned garage door outside Irma's hotel. A couple moments of edge enhancement don't distract from the fact that this film, with its expansive sets and mattes, deserves to be seen in its widescreen incarnation. The original English mono track is absolutely adequate, as spare and impressive/unimpressive as the disc's sole special feature: a long trailer that includes an animated film synopsis. ***1/2 (out of four) | Image: A, Sound: B | English Mono, French Mono, Spanish Mono | CC | French, Spanish Subtitles | DVD-9 | 143 minutes -Walter Chaw