On Sunset Boulevard

by Ed Sikov

  For the role of the manic capitalist, Wilder chose one of the most recognizable faces and voices in the world. The Public Enemy (1931), G-Men (1935), Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), The Roaring Twenties (1939) Yankee Doodle Dandy (1941), Blood on the Sun (1945), White Heat (1949), What Price Glory? (1952), Mister Roberts (1955), Love Me or Leave Me (1955), The Gallant Hours (1960)—James Cagney was a Hollywood titan. Like George Raft, Cagney could sport a machine gun and tap shoes with equal grace and credibility, and by 1961 he had been doing so for thirty years. A three-time Oscar nominee (he won once, for Yankee Doodle Dandy), Cagney knew his business well. This was an ominous sign.

  For the role of Cagney’s wife, essentially a wisecracking human caboose, Wilder and his team were initially stumped. At a casting meeting, Billy said something on the order of “I’m tired of clichéd typecasting—the same people in every film. Let’s get someone whose face isn’t familiar to moviegoers—a type like Arlene Francis.” (Pause.) “In fact,” said Billy, “why don’t we get Arlene Francis?” Best known for her good-natured appearances on the TV game show What’s My Line?, Francis’s only film-acting roles had been in Robert Florey’s Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1932 and small roles in Stage Door Canteen (1943) and All My Sons (1948). (Her appearance in Murders in the Rue Morgue is brief but lurid: she plays a prostitute whose corpse gets dumped in the Seine after Bela Lugosi bleeds her to death on a torture rack.) With her easygoing personality and television domesticity, Arlene Francis’s casting in One, Two, Three is inspired. Was it a pure coincidence that the mystery guest on What’s My Line? on Sunday, May 15, 1960, was none other than James Cagney, or was Billy watching something other than Roller Derby that day?

  The familiarity of the leading actors is essential to One, Two, Three. Cagney and Francis were recognizable figures in 1960 to 1961, though perhaps not to everyone. Wilder used to tell a suspect but funny story about this. According to Billy, he and Audrey were dining at the home of Mr. and Mrs. William Goetz, Mrs. Goetz being the daughter of Louis B. Mayer. She asked Wilder what his new picture was and who would be playing the lead. Jimmy Cagney. “Who?” “Jimmy Cagney! You know, the little gangster who for years was in all those Warner Bros.—” Edith Mayer Goetz cut Billy off: “Oh, Daddy didn’t allow us to watch Warner Bros, pictures.”

  One, Two, Three was scheduled to shoot on location in Berlin in June 1961, after which the company would move to Munich’s Bavaria Studios for all the interiors. Wilder assembled twenty-five key people for his production team, all of whom had worked with him before: Doane Harrison, of course; editor Danny Mandell; special effects expert Milt Rice; script supervisor May Wale; cameraman Danny Fapp, who had just gotten through filming the Mirisch Company’s West Side Story; and others. These were brisk, efficient men and women, and Billy trusted them—more than he let on. Alexander Trauner would be designing the film—a crisp, bland Coca-Cola Company office in West Berlin; the ballroom of a crummy East Berlin hotel; the interior of Cagney’s and Francis’s residence…. One, Two, Three seemed as if it would be a relatively easy and straightforward project.

  When June rolled around, East Germany’s Walter Ulbricht emphatically told a Western newspaper that, no, his government had no intention of building a barrier between the eastern and western sectors of Berlin. The flood of immigrants from East to West grew into a raging torrent, and Wilder’s timing seemed all the better. One, Two, Three had always been conceived as topical political humor. Now it was more topical than Wilder ever dreamed.

  Wilder and Diamond’s script begins with this description (or warning, or threat): “THIS PIECE MUST BE PLAYED MOLTO FURIOSO—AT A RAPID-FIRE, BREAKNECK TEMPO. SUGGESTED SPEED: 100 MILES AN HOUR ON THE CURVES—140 MILES AN HOUR ON THE STRAIGHTAWAY” Originally, a voice-over narrator opened the film by explaining: “In February 1945, with Hitler’s legions crumbling under the relentless onslaught of the Allied Armies, the Big Three, meeting at Yalta, agreed on the partition of Germany and the joint occupation of Berlin. Subsequent events have proved that this decision was—to put it diplomatically—a boo-boo.”

  After a few days of filming One, Two, Three, Billy asked Cagney if he had ever played anything so fast before. Cagney immediately replied that he had—Boy Meets Girl (1938), with Pat O’Brien. This was another bad sign. Cagney had despised playing everything at such rapid-fire, screwball speed and considered Boy Meets Girl one of the low points of his career. Cagney claimed that when he saw the film even he couldn’t understand what he was saying. Faced with Billy’s more extreme pacing, Cagney was already annoyed. Only two days into his work on One, Two, Three he was telling people that he wanted to go home.

  Following the skeleton of Molnár’s play, One, Two, Three concerns a command-spitting Coca-Cola executive in West Berlin who is forced to play host to his boss’s hot-blooded, seventeen-year-old daughter, who sneaks out of his house behind his back, crosses into East Berlin, and marries a Communist student named Otto Piffl. Adding to the capitalist MacNamara’s hyperactive agony is the fact that his wife discovers the mercenary affair he has been conducting with his secretary, the gum-chewing Ingeborg (Lilo Pulver), and leaves him. MacNamara is trying all the while to crack the Iron Curtain market with the incompetent assistance of three Russian trade commissars. (“Napoleon blew it, Hitler blew it, but Coca-Cola’s going to pull it off,” he predicts.) To top it all off, Scarlett’s parents announce their arrival from Atlanta, she announces she’s pregnant with Otto’s baby, and a reporter shows up having sniffed out the story of an American teenager having married an East German. MacNamara turns Otto into a suitable husband for Scarlett by paying off a destitute German nobleman—now the men’s room attendent at the Kempinski Hotel—and turning Piffl into the junior Count von Droste-Schattenburg. He outfits the Communist-turned-aristocrat with a full wardrobe of men’s formal wear and hires him as a Coke executive in the car on the way to the airport, where Scarlett’s parents fly in on schedule. All of this occurs to the naggingly antsy tune of the Lenin Prize–winning Soviet composer Aram Khachaturian’s “Sabre Dance.”

  The Brandenburg Gate is Berlin’s best-known monument. Its portals, through which vehicular traffic must squeeze on its way onto or away from the boulevard Unter den Linden, consist of a dozen weathered Doric columns, atop which the Goddess of Victory roosts along with her chariot and four stone horses. It’s an elaborate heap with historical overtones. When Berlin was divided into sectors immediately after World War II, the Brandenburg Gate served as an easy point of bifurcation; the line was drawn a few yards to the west.

  A symbol of Germany’s old imperial grandeur, its relatively recent ruin, its tenacious survival, and the conflict of Wilder and Diamond’s precarious farce, the Brandenburg Gate was to serve as the focal point of several sequences in One, Two, Three—most notably the crash site of a chase sequence involving MacNamara’s sleek American limousine and the three Russians’ decrepit Moskowitch, which was supposed to slam itself against one of the mighty Doric columns. In an earlier scene, too, Otto Piffl rides a motorbike through the Gate from West to East. For these two sequences, Billy arranged to shoot on location at the Gate itself. This, of course, required the permission of (at least) two governments. The West Germans were happy to oblige. The East Germans needed a little finessing, but they, too, agreed.

  Wilder’s MO with the Communist authorities was reminiscent of his treatment of Bellevue Hospital’s director for The Lost Weekend. He told them the basic facts of the shots he wanted but left out a few choice details, in particular the fact that Piffl’s cycle has a RUSSKI GO HOME balloon inflating on its tailpipe. On a cloudy but shootable day in mid-July, the cast and crew departed from their headquarters at the Berlin Hilton for the location on the Strasse des 17 Juni, the broad boulevard in West Berlin that leads through the Brandenburg Gate onto Unter den Linden. Billy rallied his troops: “Okay, get your steel helmets, everybody—we’re going back to the Gate!” A little later, with the camera rolling and the bright yellow balloon firmly attached to
the bike, Horst Buchholz sped off toward the Gate, a camera truck following him. A few shots were successfully taken, but the weather turned for the worse and the sequence couldn’t be completed that day. “It was Hitler’s last revenge,” said Billy, because by the following morning a regiment of uniformed East German police forbade him to shoot anything on their side of the border. They stood their ground at the Gate, quite visibly, and monitored Wilder and his crew through powerful binoculars.

  Lesser men would have been bullied. Not Billy, who rehearsed the scene on his side of the frontier and sent a message to the East Germans on the other: since he was shooting toward the Gate, he said, the East German officers were visible in the shot. This was fine with him, he added, but he was just afraid that international audiences would get the false impression that East Germany was a police state.

  The officers scattered, and Wilder reopened negotiations to film the sequence the way he wanted from the angles he wanted, including those in East Berlin. The East Germans were willing to talk again, but now they insisted on reading the script. “I wouldn’t even show my script to President Kennedy,” Wilder replied, and that ended the matter. The price of One, Two, Three soared instantly higher, as Trauner and his crew were asked to build a replica of the Brandenburg Gate on the lot in Munich. The cost of the new Gate was either $100,000 or $200,000, depending on who reported it.

  “We got to Berlin the day they sealed off the eastern sector and wouldn’t let people come across the border,” Billy said a few years after the fact, bending history slightly to make a snappier tale. “It was like making a picture in Pompeii with all the lava coming down. Khrushchev was even faster than me and Diamond.” Wilder’s sense of chronology is a little off, but the mood he describes is not. On the nights of August 12 and 13, with location work on One, Two, Three not yet complete after a little over a month of shooting, the Soviets and their East German deputies sealed off the border and erected a makeshift barrier of barbed wire and cinder blocks. (The fifteen-foot-high concrete walls, watchtowers, gun turrets, electric fences, and land mines came later.) The Berlin Wall was now in place. Not only was the production of One, Two, Three thrown into turmoil, but the already fragile premise of the comedy suddenly became a great deal shakier. If Billy wanted to make the most nervous comedy of his career, his timing couldn’t have been better.

  Tension in Berlin was extreme. Even before the Wall went up Billy was calling the city “Splitsville.” Now members of families were separated from one another. Subway and surface-rail service between East and West was halted. Berliners wondered if the superpowers would use their divided city as an excuse to set off an atomic World War III. More disturbing to Billy, perhaps, was the fact that he had to change his screenplay: “We had to make continuous revisions to keep up with the headlines. It seemed to me that the whole thing could have been straightened out if Oleg Cassini had sent Mrs. Khrushchev a dress.”

  Other exteriors were constructed in Munich as well as the Gate, and the whole production shifted to Bavaria sooner than scheduled, just to be on the safe side of international conflict. They hadn’t been able to film on location at Tempelhof airport, owing to the noise of real air traffic, so Trauner supervised the building of a replica in Munich. The Unter den Linden quarter of East Berlin—the embassy district, located on the first mile of the boulevard on the other side of the Gate—had to be reconstructed as well, though in Billy’s mind it still needed to be in ruins even though the East Germans had already renovated it as a showplace.

  Wilder still hadn’t filmed the final scene at the studio-reconstructed Templehof arrival gate when Horst Buchholz ran his motorcycle off the road and had to be hospitalized. The production shut down prematurely to give him time to recover, but since the Bavaria Studios soundstage on which Tempelhof was rebuilt was already booked for another production (John Huston’s Freud), they had to take the set down and rebuild it again—at the Goldwyn Studios in Hollywood, where everyone had to reassemble weeks later. Buchholz’s accident thus added $250,000 to the cost of One, Two, Three.

  For Billy, One, Two, Three is as much a matter of conflicting styles of wit as it is a battle of ideologies. Wilder was impressed by what he saw as the Communists’ complete lack of a sense of humor when he wrote Ninotchka in 1939. It hadn’t improved by 1961. Still, as in Ninotchka, Billy draws individual comrades affectionately. The three trade commissars, the sons of Buljanoff, Iranoff, and Kopalski, are sufficiently mercenary to retain Wilder’s respect.

  On the surface, Cagney seemed content. He equaled Billy in bullheadedness, but he kept his gripes to himself. Cagney was a consummate professional who recited his lines as often as Billy wanted, rehearsed his gestures and blocking well, practiced tap dancing during the break, and made it a point to help Pamela Tiffin with her scenes. Tiffin, young and inexperienced, was nervous to be working with a star of Cagney’s stature, and Cagney, sensing her discomfort, patiently and generously coaxed her into a state of confidence.

  Horst Buchholz, on the other hand, was a nagging problem for Cagney, who took a quick dislike to the headstrong young German. His contempt only grew as the filming proceeded. Cagney thought Buchholz was far too full of himself, especially for someone with so little experience. “I came close to knocking him on his ass,” Cagney said later. One of the few things Cagney appreciated about Wilder was that he kept Buchholz in line himself, saving Cagney the need to follow through on his threat.

  There was very little else about working with Billy Wilder that Cagney found enjoyable. “Billy Wilder was more of a dictator than most of the others I worked with,” Cagney said later. “He 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. He didn’t know how to let things flow, and that matters a great deal to me.” But Cagney kept his thoughts to himself, even after One, Two, Three wrapped. His close friend Ralph Bellamy later described the gentlemanly way Cagney handled it: “He was not happy with Wilder at all, and the pace of the film got to him, too…. When he finished, he came back and told me the experience had disturbed him, but he wasn’t all that specific.”

  When the production returned to Los Angeles to shoot the final scenes at the Goldwyn Studios, Cagney, who loved to sail for relaxation, loaned his yacht to some friends. They sent him a photo of themselves standing on the deck drinking a toast to their absent host; the photo was inscribed, “Thank God you are gainfully employed.” On a break between setups, the star of sixty-one previous films over the course of thirty-one years was standing in the warm Southern California sunshine when an assistant director called for him. “We’re ready for you now, Mr. Cagney,” he said. “That’s it, baby,” Cagney thought to himself, and he never made another film until Ragtime (1981).

  One, Two, Three had been grueling for Cagney. One shot in particular required fifty-two takes. Unfortunately, a reporter watched every last one of them. Cagney’s MacNamara is spitting out dialogue while trying to select clothes for Buchholz’s Piffl. The shot begins as a tailor wheels in a rack of suits and sportcoats:

  MACNAMARA: Now what do we have here?

  TAILOR: Very distinguished styles. All fabrics imported!

  MACNAMARA: They look more like they were deported. (Grabbing the jackets, one by one) Too loud, too quiet, all right but take the padding out of the shoulders, that’s not bad … (in disbelief) belt in the back!? I thought that went out with high button shoes!

  SHOEMAKER: High button shoes? I have some right here!

  MACNAMARA: Never mind! Take that stuff into the conference room! I want these ready in twenty-four hours!

  TAILOR: Twenty-four hours?!

  MACNAMARA: And where’s the morning coat and striped pants?

  TAILOR: My assistant is bringing them!

  MACNAMARA: Those I want fitted right away!

  JEWELER: Schmuck!

  MACNAMARA: (threateningly) What did
you say?

  JEWELER: Schmuck! Jewelry!

  MACNAMARA: Oh.

  Like Monroe with her bourbon, Cagney simply could not remember to say the “morning” in “And where’s the morning coat and striped pants?” Over and over Billy called for new takes, losing more of his temper each time. “Take it a little slower, Jimmy,” Billy said. “Let’s try it again.” On the eighteenth take, Cagney got it out, after which the jeweler failed to make his entrance on cue; thus no “schmuck.” “Damn it!” Billy roared. “Too late! You’re supposed to come in on ‘twenty-four hours!’” Wilder recovered his composure and said, “Let’s go again. With emphasis, Jimmy.”

  Cagney blew it once more. “Isn’t it a lovely day?” he cried after take twenty-five.

  On take fifty-two, everything worked. “Okay, print it,” Billy said in a rancid tone. But he still wasn’t happy and insisted that he would have to reshoot it. “This is the worst day I’ve had in thirty-two years of making pictures. It’s the föhn.” The what? the reporter asked. “The föhn,” Billy explained. “It’s a wind that comes down from the Alps and drives everyone crazy. Really. People get depressed. Kill their wives. Commit suicide. Forget their lines.”

  Billy makes fun of Cagney’s screen image, of course, but for Billy this kind of joke is a sign of respect. There’s a grapefruit gag, straight from Public Enemy; the cuckoo clock plays “Yankee Doodle”; one of the MPs does a Cagney impersonation; Cagney even performs a self-impersonation—when things look particularly bleak for MacNamara, he cries “Mother of Mercy! Is this the end of Little Rico?” But these are just the obvious homages; the whole film is a tribute.