Rhapsodies

For this week’s film I did a selection of lesser known Billy Wilder comedies, specifically ones with an international flavor.

This selection started with a conversation I had with a friend at a favorite hangout that went something like this.

“Say Bill you like films you know the name of that film with James Cagney as a Coca-Cola executive trying to sell Coke to the communists?”

“No but I can look it up and get back to you.”

It turned out the film was “One, Two, Three” and after that I just had to see it.

Cagney plays C.R. MacNamara, Coca Cola’s man in West Berlin in 1961 right before the wall went up. He is assigned to baby sit his boss’s out of control dim-witted daughter, Scarlett, only for her to sneak through the Brandenburg Gate and marry a cute but outspoken communist… Hilarity ensues as MacNamara desperately tries to fix things before his boss arrives in Berlin.

This film is fast paced, satirical and hilarious with Cagney giving a tour de force in a way I’d never expected from him.

To follow this up I watched Avanti starring Jack Lemmon and Juliet Mills. Lemmon plays Wendell Armbruster a straight laced successful businessman, who is summoned to a hotel in Italy to pick up the body of his father, who had been going to there every summer and died in a car crash. It turns out his father had been having a long term affair with another woman who was also killed in the crash.

While he is there fighting a seemingly endless amount of red tape he meets the woman’s daughter Pamella Piggot who is also there to retrieve her mother’s body. As the insanity of the situation continues they are drawn together.

This was a quieter comedy but Lemmon and Mills are great together.