Word: wildering
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...Three. A sort of Mack Sennett investigation of the situation in Berlin, conducted with a wham-bam abandon by Director Billy Wilder...
...Mirisch; United Artists) is a yell-mell, hard-sell, Sennett-with-a-sound-track satire of iron curtains and color lines, of people's demockeracy, Coca-Colonization, peaceful noexistence, and the Deep Southern concept that all facilities are created separate but equal. What's more, Director Billy Wilder makes his attitude stick like Schlagobers slung in the spectator's kisser. He purposely neglects the high precision of hilarity that made Some Like It Hot a screwball classic and The Apartment a peerless comedy of officemanship. But in the rapid, brutal, whambam style of a man swatting flies...
...plot, borrowed partly from a one-act play by Ferenc Molnar and partly from a Wilder-Brackett-Lubitsch movie called Ninotchka (1939), is almost as intricate as the famous secret recipe for Coca-Cola-a beverage that, incidentally, benefits in this film from 108 minutes of effervescent and unmitigated schlock. The hero (James Cagney), who heads up the Coca-Cola operation in West Berlin, dreams of a deal with Moscow's Soft Drink Secretariat that will 1) insinuate the pause that refreshes into the Communist way of life, and 2) install him in London as chief of European operations...
...rate them, not for quality, but in terms of smiles-per-hour. In fact, many of the jokes are soggy burps that might well have been planted in the script by a secret agent from Canada Dry. But many more, as usually happens in pictures written by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. ("Izzy") Diamond, have edge and temper. Cagney's wife (Arlene Francis): "But she can't stay long. Doesn't school open soon?" Cagney: "In Georgia? You never know." Cagney's ten-year-old son, hopefully, when the boss's daughter has a fainting spell...
Very French. Big names still show up, too: Thornton Wilder, Gene Kelly, William Shirer, James Jones. Playwright Brendan Behan even turns up sober. But, a good part of the present clientele is French. Jean-Paul Sartre and his constant companion, Simone de Beauvoir, make Harry's their regular hangout. Françoise Sagan uses Harry's for her tristes, and so do a growing number of young French playwrights, film directors and actors...