One, Two, Three

Coarse Cold War satire, structured largely as farce, with Cagney as the aggressive Coca-Cola executive in West Berlin, trying desperately to win advancement by selling the beverage to Russia, and simultaneously required to prevent his boss from discovering that the latter's bird-brained daughter has married a rabid Commie from East Berlin. Marvellous one-liners, of course, and Cagney, spitting out his lines with machine-gun rapidity in his final film until his belated appearance in 'Ragtime', is superb (and superbly backed by a fine cast). But the targets of Wilder's satire - go-getting, up-to-the-minute, consumer America versus the poverty and outdatedness of Communist culture - are rather too obvious.