Some Like It Wilder Read online

  Editor Daniel Mandell was working on his third Wilder picture, while Alexander Trauner was designing the sets for his fourth. One of Trauner’s significant contributions to the film was for the sequence set in a smoky East Berlin nightclub. The nightspot brings to mind the tawdry Hamburg cabaret that Trauner designed for a flashback in Witness for the Prosecution, not to mention the Club Lorelei in A Foreign Affair. In the present movie, the nightclub scene takes place in the sleazy ballroom of the Grand Hotel Potemkin (named after Wilder’s favorite silent film). In the scene as shot, there is a young man steering an older woman around the dance floor; this is an implicit reference to the Hotel Eden, where Wilder squired elderly matrons around the ballroom in 1929. Wilder also had Trauner reconstruct the arrival area of Tempelhof airport at the studio, since filming at the real airport proved impossible because of the noise of the planes passing overhead.

  Principal photography was scheduled to run from June through August 1961, with exteriors filmed on location in Berlin and interiors shot in the Bavaria Film Studios in Munich. When Wilder arrived in Berlin in early June, he set up his production headquarters at the Berlin Hilton. He immediately dubbed the divided city of Berlin “Splitsville.” The Berlin Wall would not be erected until mid-August, however; the Brandenburg Gate was still open to traffic between East and West Berlin. Wilder arranged with the East German authorities to do a shot of Buchholz as Otto riding a battered motorbike through the Brandenburg Gate and into East Berlin, with the camera mounted on a truck following close behind Buchholz. Unfortunately, a downpour intervened, and Wilder was unable to complete the sequence. He shut down filming for the rest of the day, with a view to returning the following morning.

  By late that same afternoon, however, the East German government had gotten wind of the fact that One, Two, Three was a comedy and that some of the humor in the picture would be at the expense of the Communist regime. When Wilder and his crew returned the next day to complete the scene, “he found the Soviet sector out of bounds, and the Gate bustling with uniformed guards.” Wilder moaned that this reversal was “Hitler’s last revenge.”16 He complained that the Communists had no sense of humor. “They raised no objection until they got the idea that we were poking fun at them. But we poke fun at everybody!”17

  Wilder was informed by the Communist authorities that he could stage the shot with Buchholz riding his motorcycle up to the gate, but Wilder and his film unit could not cross the boundary into East Berlin. Wilder made a dry run of the scene. Then he sent word to the Communist officials that their heavily armed guards were all in the shot. “While it was all right with him, he was afraid that it would give audiences the impression that East Berlin was a police state”! That message “cleared the Gate of East German policemen very fast.”18 But Wilder’s troubles with the East German government were only beginning.

  Much to Wilder’s consternation, the Berlin Wall was erected right in the middle of shooting. In the predawn hours of August 13, 1961, East German soldiers stretched a network of barbed wire across the boundary between East and West Berlin. The wire would soon be reinforced by a fifteen-foot-high concrete wall, creating a thirty-mile-long barrier separating the Communist sector from the capitalist. In this manner the East German authorities meant “to stem the flow of refugees defecting from East Germany to the West.”19 As Wilder put it, “They sealed off the Eastern sector and wouldn’t let people come across the border. It was like making a picture in Pompeii with all the lava coming down.”20

  “Early the following morning,” Diamond writes, he and Wilder “drove out to the Brandenburg Gate and found thousands of West Berliners milling silently along the border, which had been closed the night before.” The reports of the Berlin crisis that reached the Los Angeles papers described the situation as a powder keg ready to explode. Accordingly, Harold Mirisch, president of the Mirisch Company, wired Wilder to bring his film unit home before there was an outbreak of violence. Wilder replied, “Don’t worry.” Referring to the fact that filming had been suspended, Wilder stated, “Nobody is shooting. Not even us.”21

  The upshot of the erection of the Berlin Wall was that Trauner had to construct a full-scale replica of the Brandenburg Gate on the back lot at the Bavaria Film Studios, at a cost of $150,000. Although it was constructed out of papier-mâché, Trauner’s gate looked like the real thing. “When you’ve got the Brandenburg Gate, you don’t need East Berlin,” Wilder remarked. Exteriors originally scheduled to be shot in East Berlin could be filmed on the streets of West Berlin. No one would know the difference, because “East Berlin looks just like West Berlin.”22

  Wilder and Diamond had to make continuous revisions in the script to keep up with the headlines as the grim political situation continued to deteriorate. Wilder said,

  When refugees were killed trying to cross from East to West in real life, it made it harder for people to accept a comedy that took place in this setting. Filmmakers are vulnerable to this kind of risk. A situation, a political mood changes in the course of your making a film and things are not the same by the time you finish the picture as they were when you started. If you write a newspaper piece, it appears the next day. If you write a magazine article, it appears a week from Tuesday. But filmmakers who do a contemporary story have to pray that the situation that they are dealing with in the projected movie will still be valid a year in the future. Otherwise people may say that you are guilty of bad taste in treating a subject like the cold war that may have been quite different when you began.

  Putting it another way, Diamond said, “A playwright can update his lines while his play is still running. But once a joke is frozen on film, you’re stuck with it, come what may.”23

  Inevitably, Wilder and Diamond fell behind in revising the screenplay. One of the actors inquired flippantly, “Will we get some new pages today, or will we find them in our stockings next Christmas?”24 Wilder and Diamond revised dialogue wherever necessary. And they even added a prologue, to be spoken by Cagney, judiciously explaining the political situation in Berlin while illustrative shots of the city appeared on the screen. The new introductory voice-over places the action of the movie between June and August 1961, the same three months when Wilder was shooting the film in Germany.

  Wilder and his film unit returned to the Bavaria Film Studios, where they had filmed interiors earlier in the summer, to continue shooting throughout the balance of August and into early September. Cagney continued to rattle off pages of dialogue at ticker-tape speed. One day Wilder thought Cagney had slowed down and asked him to speak faster. “I’ve always been told to slow down, never to speed up,” said Cagney.25

  “Wilder asked me if I had ever played anything this fast before,” Cagney writes. “I said yes, Boy Meets Girl,” in which he costarred with Pat O’Brien. Cagney explained to Wilder that he learned on that picture “the absolute need for pacing,” to prevent the dialogue from being an “unadulterated rush.” He said to Wilder, “Let’s take our time for one spiel,” to give the audience a breather, “then pick it up and go like hell again.” Wilder went along with Cagney’s suggestion “to a degree,” according to Cagney.26

  Buchholz recalled coming to the studio early one morning and finding Cagney doing a soft-shoe routine in a dark corner of a soundstage. “What the hell are you doing that for?” he inquired. Cagney answered that the only way that he could get “the damned dialogue up to speed was by warming up for his scenes with a tap dance routine.”27

  Cagney reveals in his autobiography that he found Buchholz to be a headstrong young actor who attempted to upstage him. Buchholz would endeavor to maneuver Cagney around while shooting a scene with him, so that Buchholz alone would be facing the camera. Finally Wilder barked, “Stop it, Horst!” Cagney writes, “Horst Buchholz tried all kinds of scenestealing didoes, and I had to depend on Billy Wilder to take some steps to correct this kid. If Billy hadn’t, I was going to knock Buchholz on his ass, which at several points I would have been very happy to do.”28

/>   By contrast, Cagney was impressed by Pamela Tiffin (Scarlett), who was appearing in only her second film; she seemed to be willing to profit by Cagney’s experience. He told her, for example, when she began a scene, “to plant yourself, look the other fella in the eye, tell the truth, . . . and always mean everything you say.”29 Cagney was gratified that she tried to do just that.

  The movie’s opening credits are accompanied with a zesty rendition of “The Saber Dance” by the contemporary Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian, which had gained popularity throughout America around that time. The prologue, accompanied by Cagney’s voice-over, begins the movie. The narration explains that the action of the story takes place in the period leading up to the erection of the Berlin Wall. Meanwhile, the closing of the Brandenburg Gate is shown, as is a Communist youth parade with youngsters marching to “The Internationale.” They are carrying balloons with the motto “Yankees Go Home.”

  “On Sunday, August 13, 1961, without any warning,” Cagney as MacNamara intones, “the East German Communists sealed off the border between East and West Berlin. They are real shifty; I am stationed in Berlin, and I know. Let us go back to last June: Traffic flow is normal through the Brandenburg Gate, and one could pass from one side of the iron curtain to the other. In the Eastern sector, under Communist domination, the people still held parades. In the Western sector, the people were under Allied protection, so they had democracy.” The prologue ends with a shot of a billboard displaying a pigtailed fräulein holding a bottle of Coke, with the slogan “Mach mal Pause” (The pause that refreshes). Wilder cuts to Mac walking through the huge office at the Coca-Cola headquarters in West Berlin. The clerks are working diligently at their desks, which are arranged in symmetrical rows, recalling the opening sequence in The Apartment.

  Mac aims to expand the Coke market into Eastern Europe, which would win him the promotion to chief of European operations. “MacNamara plans to open the iron curtain just enough so he can introduce Coca-Cola to the huge untapped market in the East,” Wilder explained. “Cagney was short but aggressive; as MacNamara he comes across as ambitious and ruthless. Mac would do any goddamned thing to become the number one man for Coke in Europe.”30

  Mac hopes to crack the market with the help of the three befuddled Russian trade commissars, Peripetchikoff, Borodenko, and Mishkin. He wines and dines them in the seedy ballroom of the Grand Hotel Potemkin, formerly the Grand Hotel Goering. For openers, he reminds them that their rival product, Kremlin Kola, is an abysmal failure with the Russian peasants, who use it for sheep dip.

  The orchestra leader sings “Yes, We Have No Bananas” in German; a few couples dance. The band’s conductor is none other than Frederick Hollander, who accompanied Marlene Dietrich on the piano as she sang his songs at the Club Lorelei in A Foreign Affair. Mac brings along his sexy secretary, Ingeborg (Lilo Pulver), to the festivities. She is “a bubble-headed platinum blonde, a gum-chewing, hip-swinging Marilyn Monroe clone,” recalling the Monroe look-alike in The Apartment.31 “I’m bilingual,” Ingeborg assures MacNamara. “Don’t I know it!” he retorts. Mac addresses the Russian trade delegation at one point as “my old friends, Hart, Schaffner, and Karl Marx.” When Mishkin slaps Ingeborg on the behind, Mac adds, “I said Karl Marx, not Groucho!” Ingeborg obliges the three Russian stooges by executing a seductive dance on a tabletop, brandishing two flaming shish kebab skewers, accompanied by “The Saber Dance.” There is a hint of sadomasochism in Ingeborg’s dance routine as she swats the Russians with her black leather belt. The three commissars, whom Mac calls “Siberian wolves,” become quite boisterous watching Ingeborg’s gyrations.

  Mac finds out that Scarlett Hazeltine, whom he was supposed to be chaperoning during her sojourn in Berlin, has not only secretly married Otto, a card-carrying Communist, but is expecting a blessed event. Then he learns that Scarlett’s parents are coming from Atlanta for a visit. So he immediately formulates a plan to recondition Otto into a worthy son-in-law for Wendell Hazeltine (Howard St. John). Mac discovers that a German aristocrat, Count von Droste Schattenburg (Hubert von Meyerinck), is currently the men’s room attendant at the Hotel Kempinski. (Sig Ruman, who appeared in Stalag 17 and other Wilder pictures, was engaged to dub the count’s lines.) The penniless count adopts Otto for four thousand marks. For an additional five marks, he throws in a sketch of his ancestral coat of arms and a photo of the ruins of the family castle. Mac summons a fleet of tailors to outfit Otto in a full wardrobe of formal attire. In this scene, Cagney had to race through two pages of dialogue while selecting various items of apparel for Buchholz’s Otto. Cagney kept blowing his lines. Each time, Wilder called for another take. “Take it a little slower, Jimmy,” Wilder would say; “let’s go again.” Finally, when Cagney had done more than forty takes, he at last got the dialogue perfect. Wilder remarked, “Send a cable to Marilyn Monroe,” who had done forty-seven takes on one scene in Some Like It Hot; “warn her that she’s got competition.”32

  This episode illustrates why Cagney stated later that he thought Wilder was “overly bossy—full of noise, a pain. Still, we did a good picture together. I didn’t learn until after we were done that he didn’t like me, which was fine as far as I was concerned, because I certainly didn’t like him.”33 For his part, Wilder acknowledged that Cagney was a “great actor” but agreed that he and Cagney just did not get along. Wilder found Cagney “very opinionated,” which was precisely what Cagney thought of Wilder. Whenever Wilder invited Cagney and his wife to a German restaurant, Cagney declined. “I did not socialize with him,” said Wilder, but ultimately “we said goodbye on very good terms.”34 Cagney retired from pictures after completing One, Two, Three. He writes in his autobiography, “When I drove through the studio gate, and the thrill was gone, I knew it was time to quit.”35

  As the film nears its conclusion, Otto, “for love of his wife and unborn child,” permits himself to be seduced by Mac into the role of a capitalist, complete with morning coat and striped trousers.36 The movie’s last scene is at the Tempelhof arrival gate, where Otto and his new wife, Scarlett, along with Mac, meet Mr. and Mrs. Hazeltine’s plane. Only a couple of days before the scene was scheduled to be shot, Buchholz, while driving home from the studio, lost control of his car, spun off the road, and plowed into a clump of trees. Wilder rushed to the hospital with Buchholz’s wife, the French actress Myriam Bru. The physician on duty wanted to perform an exploratory operation on her husband to ascertain whether he had sustained internal injuries. But Myriam hesitated to give her approval because she thought her husband was set against “unnecessary surgery.” Wilder took her aside and said, “If there is something wrong, they will find it and fix it.” He persuaded Myriam to consent to the operation. “If she had not,” Buchholz maintained, “I would have died.” In fact, German radio newscasters were already pronouncing him dead. “I owe my life to Billy Wilder,” he concluded.37

  Wilder’s lease on the Bavaria Film Studios had expired, so he had to bring Buchholz back to Hollywood after he convalesced to shoot the closing scene at the airport. Trauner rebuilt the Tempelhof arrival gate at the Goldwyn Studios. In all, Buchholz’s accident added another $250,000 to the budget.

  After Wendell Hazeltine makes Otto’s acquaintance at the airport, he advises Mac that he is naming his eager son-in-law, whom he sees as a promising young executive, chief of European operations for Coca-Cola. This is precisely the position that Mac has been angling for all along. Mac is being posted back to the home office in Atlanta, to the delight of his wife, Phyllis, who has a hankering to stop traipsing around Europe and return home. But Mac is deeply disappointed at losing out to the likes of Otto Piffl. Mac cheers himself up by having a Coke. He is flabbergasted to see a bottle of Pepsi-Cola coming out of the airport Coke machine. Wilder subsequently received a note from Joan Crawford, at that time a Pepsi-Cola executive, in which she chided Wilder for ending the movie with a cheap shot at Pepsi’s expense. “How could you?” she asked.38

  When One, Two, Thr
ee opened in December 1961, critical reaction was sharply divided. Reviewers “either loved it or hated it,” said Wilder; “there was no middle ground.”39 Brendan Gill’s review in the New Yorker was enthusiastic: “Diamond and Wilder have had the gall to manufacture a hundred outrageous wisecracks about the desperate duel Russia and the West are currently waging,” he wrote. “Mr. Wilder could no doubt wring a hearty yock from the bubonic plague.”40 Time magazine raved that Wilder’s “rapid, brutal, whambam style” had produced “an often wonderfully funny exercise in nonstop nuttiness.”41

  By contrast, Andrew Sarris noted that the unrelenting one-liners in One, Two, Three “were more frenzied than funny”; only “Cagney’s presence” made the film worth seeing.42 Pauline Kael went further: “One, Two, Three is overwrought, tasteless, and offensive—a comedy that pulls out laughs the way a catheter draws urine.”43

  “Pauline Kael and some other critics were shocked that we made fun of the cold war,” Wilder said. They thought the movie exploited up-to-date issues in a crass effort to be timely. They believed it was “a great miscalculation,” Wilder explains, “that we even made mention of the building of the Berlin Wall. They failed to realize that the Berlin Wall went up while we were shooting the picture.” He acknowledged that “people were killed trying to escape” from the Soviet sector, “and the subject of the film no longer seemed very funny.” The political climate in Berlin had conspired to make One, Two, Three a much darker comedy than A Foreign Affair, Wilder’s previous Berlin film. Because One, Two, Three pulls no punches and lands satirical haymakers on both sides of the iron curtain, Wilder feared that “both the Communists and the capitalists would put me up against the Berlin Wall and shoot me!”44