It is based on the 1929 Hungarian one-act play Egy, kettő, három by Ferenc Molnár, with a "plot borrowed partly from" Ninotchka, a 1939 film co-written by Wilder.

[4][5] The film stars James Cagney, Horst Buchholz, Liselotte Pulver, Pamela Tiffin, Arlene Francis, Leon Askin and Howard St.

"Mac" MacNamara is a high-ranking executive in the Coca-Cola Company, assigned to West Berlin after a business fiasco a few years earlier in the Middle East (about which he is still bitter).

An expected two-week stay extends into two months, and Mac discovers just why Scarlett is so enamored of West Berlin: she surprises him by announcing that she's married to Otto Piffl, a young East German Communist with ardent anti-capitalistic views.

Mac tries to come to terms with letting his boss's daughter marry a Communist and learns the horrible truth: the couple are bound for Moscow to make a new life for themselves ("They've assigned us a magnificent apartment, just a short walk from the bathroom!").

Since Hazeltine and his wife are coming to Berlin to collect their daughter the next day, Mac deals with the disaster by bribing East German officials to steal Scarlett’s marriage certificate from the archives.

After Otto, during interrogation, is forced to listen endlessly to a cover of the song "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" (which is intentionally badly distorted as it plays) he cracks and signs a confession saying that he is an American spy.

Under pressure from his exasperated and disapproving wife Phyllis (who wants to take her family back to live in the US), and with the revelation that Scarlett is pregnant—and, worse, unmarried with her East German marriage certificate gone—Mac must now fix the mess he has created.

He must restore the marriage certificate and bring Otto back with the help of his new Soviet business associates on whom Mac uses all his wiles, as well as his sexy secretary, Fräulein Ingeborg.

With the boss on the way, he finds that his only chance is to turn Otto into a son-in-law in good standing—which means, among other things, making him a capitalist with an aristocratic pedigree (albeit contrived by adoption).

The general idea was, let's make the fastest picture in the world ... And yeah, we did not wait, for once, for the big laughs.Cagney decided to take the role primarily because it was to be shot in Germany: while growing up in Manhattan's Yorkville neighborhood, he had had fond memories of the area, which was "teeming with German immigrants.

[5] During principal photography, Wilder received a call from Joan Crawford, recently appointed to the board of directors of Pepsi-Cola following her husband Alfred Steele's death.

The Bass designed poster that Wilder originally intended for the film's release featured a United States style flag sticking out of a Coca-Cola-style bottle.

When the movie opened, it came with a spoken preface by Cagney, added by Wilder: On Sunday, August 13th, 1961, the eyes of America were on the nation's capital, where Roger Maris was hitting home runs No.

[1]Time magazine called it 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 [sic], and the Deep Southern concept that all facilities are created separate but equal.

"[4] Time notes Wilder "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 with a pile driver, he has produced a sometimes beWildered [sic], often wonderfully funny exercise in nonstop nuttiness."

They wrote, "Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three is a fast-paced, high-pitched, hard-hitting, lighthearted farce crammed with topical gags and spiced with satirical overtones.