I’ve reaffirmed my lack of confidence in my fellow men.
—Rock Hudson as Robert Talbot in the film Come September
“Don’t ask me why, but I just got the feeling I wanted to make a picture again in Germany,” Wilder said; “I hadn’t done one since 1948, when I did A Foreign Affair.”1 He explained to a German interviewer, “Of course I was bitter after the war; but today it’s a closed chapter. I have buried my anger and my hate. The wounds are healed. It is absolutely, totally forgotten. I even miss Germany again today. I’m homesick for Berlin.”2
Wilder had a penchant for choosing story material from obscure European literary sources. These stories would be unfamiliar to American film critics, who could consequently not complain that he had not been faithful to his source story. The literary source for Five Graves to Cairo, for example, had been Hotel Imperial, a play by Lajos Biró. Wilder’s next film would be derived from a play by another Hungarian playwright, Ferenc Molnar.
Wilder had seen Molnar’s one-act play Ein, zwei, drei (One, two, three) on the stage in Berlin in 1928. Wilder remembered vividly the incredible performance on the Berlin stage of Max Pallenberg as Norrison, a highstrung Parisian banker. Pallenberg was noted for delivering his dialogue in a fast staccato, like the rapid chatter of a machine gun. The whole play takes place in Norrison’s office. Lydia, the daughter of a Swedish tycoon who is one of Norrison’s prize clients, is the banker’s houseguest. During her stay she secretly weds Anton, a rabid Socialist taxi driver, and becomes pregnant with his child. Norrison has to hastily turn Anton into an imitation aristocrat, worthy to be the son-in-law of his wealthy client, before the industrialist meets Anton. Norrison does so with the help of an army of clothiers.
What would happen, Wilder wondered, if he set Molnar’s farce in Berlin during the cold war? In Wilder’s screenplay, Norrison, the banker, becomes C. R. “Mac” MacNamara, chief representative of Coca-Cola in Berlin. Scarlett Hazeltine, the scatterbrained daughter of Wendell Hazeltine, an executive at Coke’s home office in Atlanta, is staying with Mac and his family in Berlin. During her sojourn she surreptitiously marries an East German Communist, Otto Piffl, and is now expecting his child, “a bouncing baby Bolshevik,” according to Mac. When Wendell Hazeltine and his wife decide to come to Berlin for a visit, Mac must transform Otto, a scruffy dropout, into a capitalist and an aristocrat by means of a host of tailors and haberdashers to impress Scarlett’s parents.
Although Coca-Cola plays a significant role in the script, Wilder never personally liked Coke. While a tabloid journalist in Berlin in 1929, Wilder wrote that “Coca-Cola tastes like burnt pneumatic tires.”3 He admitted privately in later years that he never had any reason to change his opinion of Coke. Wilder made Mac an executive of the Coca-Cola Company and not of a fictitious soft drink company for the same reason that Frank Flannagan, Gary Cooper’s character in Love in the Afternoon, worked for Pepsi-Cola: Wilder abhorred the use of phony brand names in films. “When you have that,” he insisted, “believability goes out the window.”4 What’s more, Wilder claimed that, after the release of Love in the Afternoon, he had promised the Coca-Cola Company that he would one day make a film that featured a Coke executive. After all, the tie-in with Coke in a film, the bosses at Coke knew, would reap a great deal of publicity for their product.
Wilder could think of only one actor who could deliver dialogue at the triphammer tempo of Max Pallenberg: James Cagney. He contacted Cagney very early in preproduction at his residence in Martha’s Vineyard, to lure him to commit to the part. The sixty-one-year-old actor had been beset by some unworthy material in recent years; consequently, he was delighted to appear in a promising film like One, Two, Three. Wilder was glad that he got Cagney when he was still “working on eight cylinders. For me there’s never been anybody better on the screen.”5 When Wilder gave Cagney the screenplay, Cagney noticed the foreword: “This piece must be played multo furioso—at a rapid-fire, breakneck speed: 100 miles an hour on the curves, 140 miles on the straightway.”6 “I can see why he thought of me,” Cagney writes in his autobiography; “I’ve been a rat-a-tat talker all my life.” During the shooting period, Cagney found himself spitting out his words “like bullets from a machine gun.”7
One, Two, Three has some resonances of Ninotchka, which Wilder coscripted for Lubitsch in 1939. Otto Piffl, like Ninotchka, is saturated with Communist doctrine but eventually finds that capitalism is not so bad after all, once he experiences romance with someone from a capitalist country. One, Two, Three has another link to Ninotchka: Mac is determined to expand Coca-Cola’s market into Eastern Europe at any cost. To do so, he must negotiate with (that is, bribe) three petty Russian trade commissars: Peripetchikoff (Leon Askin), Borodenko (Ralf Wolter), and Mishkin (Peter Capell). They are modeled on the three bumbling Russian envoys in Ninotchka: Buljanoff, Iranoff, and Kopalski. The three inept commissars in One, Two, Three are likewise dim bulbs. At one point, for example, the benighted Peripetchikoff declares that he and his comrades rejected a shipment of Swiss cheese because it was full of holes. Like their counterparts in Ninotchka, the three commissars are seduced by the decadent pleasures of the West. As Wilder opined apropos of Ninotchka, he thought the fact that Russian diplomats would fall prey to the onslaught of our capitalistic world was quite funny. The same holds true for the present film. In One, Two, Three, when someone asks Peripetchikoff, who is a devious crook at heart, “Is everybody corrupt?” he replies, “I don’t know everybody!”
In adapting Molnar’s play for film, Wilder and Diamond opted to retain the original title, which the German film historian Harald Keller explains this way: “One, two, three—When Mac snaps his fingers in rapid succession, his minions know to jump into position. MacNamara’s impatient thwacking of ‘one, two, three’ stamps out the beat” of the movie.8
After World War II, writes Douglas Brode, “no world problem loomed more ominously than the division of Berlin into the East and West sectors,” which separated capitalists from Communists.9 In the screenplay of Wilder’s movie, he and Diamond were impartial in lampooning both factions. There is, of course, the trio of Russian trade commissars. Wilder satirized the Germans on the other side of the iron curtain in the person of Schlemmer (Hanns Lothar), Mac’s spit-and-polish, heel-clicking aide-de-camp. Schlemmer endeavors to hide that he served in the infamous SS corps of the Nazi army. Asked by Mac about his nation’s history, Schlemmer explains that he worked in the underground—not the resistance movement but the subway system, as a motorman! He denies that he knew what the Nazis were doing aboveground. Wilder is satirizing the attitude he often encountered immediately after the war when he was attached to the OWI film unit. Many Germans maintained quite disingenuously that they were ignorant of the brutal crimes committed by the Nazis. Schlemmer inadvertently gives his Nazi past away when he recognizes a newspaper reporter “as his old SS commander.”10 He then saves face by maintaining to Mac that he did not join the SS willingly; “I was drafted!” He further explains, “I was only a pastry cook in the officers’ mess.”
Since Wilder and Diamond created MacNamara with Cagney in mind, it is not surprising that they quote from two of Cagney’s most renowned pictures in the screenplay. When Mac gets fed up with Otto’s tirades against the United States, he grabs a grapefruit from the dinner table and threatens Otto: “How would you like a little fruit for dessert?” Cagney thus recalls how he pushed a halved grapefruit in Mae Clarke’s face in The Public Enemy. There is also a sight gag that recurs throughout One, Two, Three. A cuckoo clock features a flag-waving miniature figure of Uncle Sam while playing George M. Cohan’s “Yankee Doodle Dandy” every hour on the hour. This is an allusion to Cagney’s Oscar-winning portrayal of Cohan in the movie of the same name.
What’s more, a U.S. military policeman (Red Buttons) does an imitation of Cagney’s screen persona (just as another actor imitated George Raft’s screen image in Some Like It Hot). The MP hitches up his pants with his elbows and growls, “Okay, Buster!” Cagney pretends not to notice that Buttons is parodying his mannerisms while addressing him. Cagney in turn does an impersonation of his old pal Edward G. Robinson, who also got his start in gangster pictures at Warner Bros. in the 1930s. When Mac hears that Scarlett Hazeltine’s parents have learned that she is expecting a baby with her Communist husband, he mumbles, “Mother of mercy, is this the end of little Rico?” Cagney “renders that line of dialogue as an impromptu homage to Robinson,” who played mobster Rico Bandello in Little Caesar.11
Kevin Lally hazards that the screenplay for One, Two, Three “probably contains the highest number of gags per page” of any Wilder-Diamond script.12 The writers pitched their best jokes to Cagney’s character, since Mac is obviously the center of the movie. In defending Western civilization against Otto’s jibes, Mac pontificates, “Look at it this way, kid: Any world that can produce the Taj Mahal, William Shakespeare, and striped toothpaste can’t be all bad.” Endorsing Wilder’s audacious humor, Axel Madsen writes, “Only Wilder could have planted in James Cagney’s mouth,” when the Communists are hijacking a shipment of Coke, this line: “And they don’t even return the empties.”13
Some early coverage in the American press about Wilder’s movie criticized him for poking fun at the U.S. presence in Berlin, epitomized by MacNamara, who is a bona fide screwball. They even accused Wilder of being un-American for making this picture. “I am a very devout, naturalized American citizen,” Wilder replied; “I believe I can do more for my country with a healthy belly laugh than by waving the flag.”14
Having spent eight months writing the script for One, Two, Three with Diamond, Wilder launched into preproduction. He was looking for a young German actor who could play Otto Piffl. He managed to corral Horst Buchholz, who had already gained international recognition by appearing in a Hollywood Western, The Magnificent Seven (1961). At a casting meeting, Wilder declared, “I’m tired of clichéd typecasting—the same people in every film.” For the role of Mac’s wife, Phyllis, he continued, “let’s get someone whose face isn’t familiar to moviegoers. Why don’t we get Arlene Francis?” Francis was a television personality, known especially as a regular on the TV game show What’s My Line? Francis played Mac’s wife as “warm and sensible,” two things that Mac himself decidedly was not. Since she had not appeared in a movie for more than a decade, Francis felt like a newcomer when she arrived on the set. Wilder immediately put her at ease by saying, “Now that you’re here, we can start.”15
Behind the camera, Wilder secured the services of cinematographer Daniel Fapp, who had just completed the shooting of Let’s Make Love, a Marilyn Monroe vehicle. Because they had both done a picture with Monroe, Wilder felt that he and Fapp regarded each other with the camaraderie that characterized the survivors of the Titanic. Fapp was new to the Wilder camp, as was composer André Previn. Interestingly enough, Previn was himself a native of Berlin; he was born there in 1929. He studied music at the Berlin Conservatory before his family immigrated to the United States in 1939. Previn began writing film scores at MGM while still in his teens. By the time he came to write the background music for One, Two, Three, he had already won two Oscars: one for arranging the Lerner and Loewe score for Gigi (1958), and one for adapting the George and Ira Gershwin score for Porgy and Bess (1959).
Editor Daniel Mandell was working on his third Wilder picture, while Alexander Trauner was designing the sets for his fourth. One of Trauner’s significant contributions to the film was for the sequence set in a smoky East Berlin nightclub. The nightspot brings to mind the tawdry Hamburg cabaret that Trauner designed for a flashback in Witness for the Prosecution, not to mention the Club Lorelei in A Foreign Affair. In the present movie, the nightclub scene takes place in the sleazy ballroom of the Grand Hotel Potemkin (named after Wilder’s favorite silent film). In the scene as shot, there is a young man steering an older woman around the dance floor; this is an implicit reference to the Hotel Eden, where Wilder squired elderly matrons around the ballroom in 1929. Wilder also had Trauner reconstruct the arrival area of Tempelhof airport at the studio, since filming at the real airport proved impossible because of the noise of the planes passing overhead.
Principal photography was scheduled to run from June through August 1961, with exteriors filmed on location in Berlin and interiors shot in the Bavaria Film Studios in Munich. When Wilder arrived in Berlin in early June, he set up his production headquarters at the Berlin Hilton. He immediately dubbed the divided city of Berlin “Splitsville.” The Berlin Wall would not be erected until mid-August, however; the Brandenburg Gate was still open to traffic between East and West Berlin. Wilder arranged with the East German authorities to do a shot of Buchholz as Otto riding a battered motorbike through the Brandenburg Gate and into East Berlin, with the camera mounted on a truck following close behind Buchholz. Unfortunately, a downpour intervened, and Wilder was unable to complete the sequence. He shut down filming for the rest of the day, with a view to returning the following morning.
By late that same afternoon, however, the East German government had gotten wind of the fact that One, Two, Three was a comedy and that some of the humor in the picture would be at the expense of the Communist regime. When Wilder and his crew returned the next day to complete the scene, “he found the Soviet sector out of bounds, and the Gate bustling with uniformed guards.” Wilder moaned that this reversal was “Hitler’s last revenge.”16 He complained that the Communists had no sense of humor. “They raised no objection until they got the idea that we were poking fun at them. But we poke fun at everybody!”17
Wilder was informed by the Communist authorities that he could stage the shot with Buchholz riding his motorcycle up to the gate, but Wilder and his film unit could not cross the boundary into East Berlin. Wilder made a dry run of the scene. Then he sent word to the Communist officials that their heavily armed guards were all in the shot. “While it was all right with him, he was afraid that it would give audiences the impression that East Berlin was a police state”! That message “cleared the Gate of East German policemen very fast.”18 But Wilder’s troubles with the East German government were only beginning.
Much to Wilder’s consternation, the Berlin Wall was erected right in the middle of shooting. In the predawn hours of August 13, 1961, East German soldiers stretched a network of barbed wire across the boundary between East and West Berlin. The wire would soon be reinforced by a fifteen-foot-high concrete wall, creating a thirty-mile-long barrier separating the Communist sector from the capitalist. In this manner the East German authorities meant “to stem the flow of refugees defecting from East Germany to the West.”19 As Wilder put it, “They sealed off the Eastern sector and wouldn’t let people come across the border. It was like making a picture in Pompeii with all the lava coming down.”20
“Early the following morning,” Diamond writes, he and Wilder “drove out to the Brandenburg Gate and found thousands of West Berliners milling silently along the border, which had been closed the night before.” The reports of the Berlin crisis that reached the Los Angeles papers described the situation as a powder keg ready to explode. Accordingly, Harold Mirisch, president of the Mirisch Company, wired Wilder to bring his film unit home before there was an outbreak of violence. Wilder replied, “Don’t worry.” Referring to the fact that filming had been suspended, Wilder stated, “Nobody is shooting. Not even us.”21
The upshot of the erection of the Berlin Wall was that Trauner had to construct a full-scale replica of the Brandenburg Gate on the back lot at the Bavaria Film Studios, at a cost of $150,000. Although it was constructed out of papier-mâché, Trauner’s gate looked like the real thing. “When you’ve got the Brandenburg Gate, you don’t need East Berlin,” Wilder remarked. Exteriors originally scheduled to be shot in East Berlin could be filmed on the streets of West Berlin. No one would know the difference, because “East Berlin looks just like West Berlin.”22
Wilder and Diamond had to make continuous revisions in the script to keep up with the headlines as the grim political situation continued to deteriorate. Wilder said,
When refugees were killed trying to cross from East to West in real life, it made it harder for people to accept a comedy that took place in this setting. Filmmakers are vulnerable to this kind of risk. A situation, a political mood changes in the course of your making a film and things are not the same by the time you finish the picture as they were when you started. If you write a newspaper piece, it appears the next day. If you write a magazine article, it appears a week from Tuesday. But filmmakers who do a contemporary story have to pray that the situation that they are dealing with in the projected movie will still be valid a year in the future. Otherwise people may say that you are guilty of bad taste in treating a subject like the cold war that may have been quite different when you began.
Putting it another way, Diamond said, “A playwright can update his lines while his play is still running. But once a joke is frozen on film, you’re stuck with it, come what may.”23
Inevitably, Wilder and Diamond fell behind in revising the screenplay. One of the actors inquired flippantly, “Will we get some new pages today, or will we find them in our stockings next Christmas?”24 Wilder and Diamond revised dialogue wherever necessary. And they even added a prologue, to be spoken by Cagney, judiciously explaining the political situation in Berlin while illustrative shots of the city appeared on the screen. The new introductory voice-over places the action of the movie between June and August 1961, the same three months when Wilder was shooting the film in Germany.
Wilder and his film unit returned to the Bavaria Film Studios, where they had filmed interiors earlier in the summer, to continue shooting throughout the balance of August and into early September. Cagney continued to rattle off pages of dialogue at ticker-tape speed. One day Wilder thought Cagney had slowed down and asked him to speak faster. “I’ve always been told to slow down, never to speed up,” said Cagney.25
“Wilder asked me if I had ever played anything this fast before,” Cagney writes. “I said yes, Boy Meets Girl,” in which he costarred with Pat O’Brien. Cagney explained to Wilder that he learned on that picture “the absolute need for pacing,” to prevent the dialogue from being an “unadulterated rush.” He said to Wilder, “Let’s take our time for one spiel,” to give the audience a breather, “then pick it up and go like hell again.” Wilder went along with Cagney’s suggestion “to a degree,” according to Cagney.26
Buchholz recalled coming to the studio early one morning and finding Cagney doing a soft-shoe routine in a dark corner of a soundstage. “What the hell are you doing that for?” he inquired. Cagney answered that the only way that he could get “the damned dialogue up to speed was by warming up for his scenes with a tap dance routine.”27
Cagney reveals in his autobiography that he found Buchholz to be a headstrong young actor who attempted to upstage him. Buchholz would endeavor to maneuver Cagney around while shooting a scene with him, so that Buchholz alone would be facing the camera. Finally Wilder barked, “Stop it, Horst!” Cagney writes, “Horst Buchholz tried all kinds of scenestealing didoes, and I had to depend on Billy Wilder to take some steps to correct this kid. If Billy hadn’t, I was going to knock Buchholz on his ass, which at several points I would have been very happy to do.”28
By contrast, Cagney was impressed by Pamela Tiffin (Scarlett), who was appearing in only her second film; she seemed to be willing to profit by Cagney’s experience. He told her, for example, when she began a scene, “to plant yourself, look the other fella in the eye, tell the truth, . . . and always mean everything you say.”29 Cagney was gratified that she tried to do just that.
The movie’s opening credits are accompanied with a zesty rendition of “The Saber Dance” by the contemporary Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian, which had gained popularity throughout America around that time. The prologue, accompanied by Cagney’s voice-over, begins the movie. The narration explains that the action of the story takes place in the period leading up to the erection of the Berlin Wall. Meanwhile, the closing of the Brandenburg Gate is shown, as is a Communist youth parade with youngsters marching to “The Internationale.” They are carrying balloons with the motto “Yankees Go Home.”
“On Sunday, August 13, 1961, without any warning,” Cagney as MacNamara intones, “the East German Communists sealed off the border between East and West Berlin. They are real shifty; I am stationed in Berlin, and I know. Let us go back to last June: Traffic flow is normal through the Brandenburg Gate, and one could pass from one side of the iron curtain to the other. In the Eastern sector, under Communist domination, the people still held parades. In the Western sector, the people were under Allied protection, so they had democracy.” The prologue ends with a shot of a billboard displaying a pigtailed fräulein holding a bottle of Coke, with the slogan “Mach mal Pause” (The pause that refreshes). Wilder cuts to Mac walking through the huge office at the Coca-Cola headquarters in West Berlin. The clerks are working diligently at their desks, which are arranged in symmetrical rows, recalling the opening sequence in The Apartment.
Mac aims to expand the Coke market into Eastern Europe, which would win him the promotion to chief of European operations. “MacNamara plans to open the iron curtain just enough so he can introduce Coca-Cola to the huge untapped market in the East,” Wilder explained. “Cagney was short but aggressive; as MacNamara he comes across as ambitious and ruthless. Mac would do any goddamned thing to become the number one man for Coke in Europe.”30
Mac hopes to crack the market with the help of the three befuddled Russian trade commissars, Peripetchikoff, Borodenko, and Mishkin. He wines and dines them in the seedy ballroom of the Grand Hotel Potemkin, formerly the Grand Hotel Goering. For openers, he reminds them that their rival product, Kremlin Kola, is an abysmal failure with the Russian peasants, who use it for sheep dip.
The orchestra leader sings “Yes, We Have No Bananas” in German; a few couples dance. The band’s conductor is none other than Frederick Hollander, who accompanied Marlene Dietrich on the piano as she sang his songs at the Club Lorelei in A Foreign Affair. Mac brings along his sexy secretary, Ingeborg (Lilo Pulver), to the festivities. She is “a bubble-headed platinum blonde, a gum-chewing, hip-swinging Marilyn Monroe clone,” recalling the Monroe look-alike in The Apartment.31 “I’m bilingual,” Ingeborg assures MacNamara. “Don’t I know it!” he retorts. Mac addresses the Russian trade delegation at one point as “my old friends, Hart, Schaffner, and Karl Marx.” When Mishkin slaps Ingeborg on the behind, Mac adds, “I said Karl Marx, not Groucho!” Ingeborg obliges the three Russian stooges by executing a seductive dance on a tabletop, brandishing two flaming shish kebab skewers, accompanied by “The Saber Dance.” There is a hint of sadomasochism in Ingeborg’s dance routine as she swats the Russians with her black leather belt. The three commissars, whom Mac calls “Siberian wolves,” become quite boisterous watching Ingeborg’s gyrations.
Mac finds out that Scarlett Hazeltine, whom he was supposed to be chaperoning during her sojourn in Berlin, has not only secretly married Otto, a card-carrying Communist, but is expecting a blessed event. Then he learns that Scarlett’s parents are coming from Atlanta for a visit. So he immediately formulates a plan to recondition Otto into a worthy son-in-law for Wendell Hazeltine (Howard St. John). Mac discovers that a German aristocrat, Count von Droste Schattenburg (Hubert von Meyerinck), is currently the men’s room attendant at the Hotel Kempinski. (Sig Ruman, who appeared in Stalag 17 and other Wilder pictures, was engaged to dub the count’s lines.) The penniless count adopts Otto for four thousand marks. For an additional five marks, he throws in a sketch of his ancestral coat of arms and a photo of the ruins of the family castle. Mac summons a fleet of tailors to outfit Otto in a full wardrobe of formal attire. In this scene, Cagney had to race through two pages of dialogue while selecting various items of apparel for Buchholz’s Otto. Cagney kept blowing his lines. Each time, Wilder called for another take. “Take it a little slower, Jimmy,” Wilder would say; “let’s go again.” Finally, when Cagney had done more than forty takes, he at last got the dialogue perfect. Wilder remarked, “Send a cable to Marilyn Monroe,” who had done forty-seven takes on one scene in Some Like It Hot; “warn her that she’s got competition.”32
This episode illustrates why Cagney stated later that he thought Wilder 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.”33 For his part, Wilder acknowledged that Cagney was a “great actor” but agreed that he and Cagney just did not get along. Wilder found Cagney “very opinionated,” which was precisely what Cagney thought of Wilder. Whenever Wilder invited Cagney and his wife to a German restaurant, Cagney declined. “I did not socialize with him,” said Wilder, but ultimately “we said goodbye on very good terms.”34 Cagney retired from pictures after completing One, Two, Three. He writes in his autobiography, “When I drove through the studio gate, and the thrill was gone, I knew it was time to quit.”35
As the film nears its conclusion, Otto, “for love of his wife and unborn child,” permits himself to be seduced by Mac into the role of a capitalist, complete with morning coat and striped trousers.36 The movie’s last scene is at the Tempelhof arrival gate, where Otto and his new wife, Scarlett, along with Mac, meet Mr. and Mrs. Hazeltine’s plane. Only a couple of days before the scene was scheduled to be shot, Buchholz, while driving home from the studio, lost control of his car, spun off the road, and plowed into a clump of trees. Wilder rushed to the hospital with Buchholz’s wife, the French actress Myriam Bru. The physician on duty wanted to perform an exploratory operation on her husband to ascertain whether he had sustained internal injuries. But Myriam hesitated to give her approval because she thought her husband was set against “unnecessary surgery.” Wilder took her aside and said, “If there is something wrong, they will find it and fix it.” He persuaded Myriam to consent to the operation. “If she had not,” Buchholz maintained, “I would have died.” In fact, German radio newscasters were already pronouncing him dead. “I owe my life to Billy Wilder,” he concluded.37
Wilder’s lease on the Bavaria Film Studios had expired, so he had to bring Buchholz back to Hollywood after he convalesced to shoot the closing scene at the airport. Trauner rebuilt the Tempelhof arrival gate at the Goldwyn Studios. In all, Buchholz’s accident added another $250,000 to the budget.
After Wendell Hazeltine makes Otto’s acquaintance at the airport, he advises Mac that he is naming his eager son-in-law, whom he sees as a promising young executive, chief of European operations for Coca-Cola. This is precisely the position that Mac has been angling for all along. Mac is being posted back to the home office in Atlanta, to the delight of his wife, Phyllis, who has a hankering to stop traipsing around Europe and return home. But Mac is deeply disappointed at losing out to the likes of Otto Piffl. Mac cheers himself up by having a Coke. He is flabbergasted to see a bottle of Pepsi-Cola coming out of the airport Coke machine. Wilder subsequently received a note from Joan Crawford, at that time a Pepsi-Cola executive, in which she chided Wilder for ending the movie with a cheap shot at Pepsi’s expense. “How could you?” she asked.38
When One, Two, Three opened in December 1961, critical reaction was sharply divided. Reviewers “either loved it or hated it,” said Wilder; “there was no middle ground.”39 Brendan Gill’s review in the New Yorker was enthusiastic: “Diamond and Wilder have had the gall to manufacture a hundred outrageous wisecracks about the desperate duel Russia and the West are currently waging,” he wrote. “Mr. Wilder could no doubt wring a hearty yock from the bubonic plague.”40 Time magazine raved that Wilder’s “rapid, brutal, whambam style” had produced “an often wonderfully funny exercise in nonstop nuttiness.”41
By contrast, Andrew Sarris noted that the unrelenting one-liners in One, Two, Three “were more frenzied than funny”; only “Cagney’s presence” made the film worth seeing.42 Pauline Kael went further: “One, Two, Three is overwrought, tasteless, and offensive—a comedy that pulls out laughs the way a catheter draws urine.”43
“Pauline Kael and some other critics were shocked that we made fun of the cold war,” Wilder said. They thought the movie exploited up-to-date issues in a crass effort to be timely. They believed it was “a great miscalculation,” Wilder explains, “that we even made mention of the building of the Berlin Wall. They failed to realize that the Berlin Wall went up while we were shooting the picture.” He acknowledged that “people were killed trying to escape” from the Soviet sector, “and the subject of the film no longer seemed very funny.” The political climate in Berlin had conspired to make One, Two, Three a much darker comedy than A Foreign Affair, Wilder’s previous Berlin film. Because One, Two, Three pulls no punches and lands satirical haymakers on both sides of the iron curtain, Wilder feared that “both the Communists and the capitalists would put me up against the Berlin Wall and shoot me!”44
Kael’s acerbic review went on to assert that Wilder had been called a great director around Hollywood, when he was only a clever one. Indeed, she scolded, “His eye is on the dollar, or rather on success, on the entertainment values that bring in dollars. But he has never before . . . exhibited such brazen contempt for people,” except perhaps in Ace in the Hole.45 When Wilder was reminded subsequently of Kael’s diatribe, he responded in kind: “I don’t make pictures for the so-called intelligentsia,” like Kael; “they bore the ass off me. I think they’re all phonies, and it delights me to be unpopular with them. They are pretentious mezzo-brows.” Kael’s observation that Wilder was not a great director, just a filmmaker out to make a fast buck, particularly offended him. “I have at no time regarded myself as one of the artistic immortals. I am just making movies to entertain people, and I try to do it as honestly as I can.”46
One, Two, Three cost close to $3 million. Its domestic gross was only $2 million; its foreign gross was $1.6 million. So the picture did turn a profit, though a modest one.
The 1961 Berlin International Film Festival presented a retrospective of Wilder’s films on the occasion of his return to Germany to make One, Two, Three. The event climaxed on the final day of the festival with Wilder’s accepting an award for his achievements. He was delighted to be feted by the Germans, since his film career had begun in Berlin in the 1920s. The trophy was inscribed, “To Billy Wilder, a great artist and a great man.” Wilder responded to the accolade at the reception after the ceremony with his usual bravado: “I agree.”47
Two years after the release of One, Two, Three, screenwriter Abby Mann (Judgment at Nuremberg, 1961) took a cheap shot at the movie. Mann went to the Moscow International Film Festival in 1963 as part of the Hollywood contingent. He apologized to the Russians for movies like One, Two, Three and promised that “some of us will try to give you more films in the manner of Grapes of Wrath [1940],” a social protest movie about migrant workers in the Depression. Wilder fired off a response to the trade papers. “Who appointed Abby Mann as spokesman for the American Film World in Moscow?” Wilder inquired. “His remarks were both sophomoric and sycophantic.”48
The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, occasioned fresh interest in One, Two, Three. After the successful revival of the film at a Paris art house in 1989, the movie was rereleased in Germany, where it became a sensation and was likewise successful on German TV. Keller hazards that moviegoers and critics alike were not prepared in 1961 for a picture that combined Marx brothers slapstick and high-class wordplay with dark drama. “The public recognition that the film deserved” came only years later, when it met with “wide acclaim from young critics and audiences that had grown in maturity.”49
Wilder thought it was a “sporadically good picture.”50 Withal, because One, Two, Three was not a big moneymaker on its original release, he figured that he had to be careful in selecting his next project. He chose to make a film adaptation of Irma la Douce (Irma the sweet), a French musical play about a Parisian prostitute. The script for the stage play was by Alexandra Breffort, with songs by Marguerite Monnot. Irma premiered in Paris in 1956 and ran for five years. It was transplanted to Broadway in an English-language version in the fall of 1960 and ran for over a year.
Wilder decided from the get-go that the movie version of Irma would not be shot in the streets of Paris, as Love in the Afternoon had been. In the wake of the chaotic production history of One, Two, Three, Wilder had again become disenchanted with making films in foreign capitals. When he wound up having to rebuild the Tempelhof airport set on a Hollywood soundstage to shoot the movie’s final scenes, Wilder wondered why he had gone to the trouble and expense of filming the rest of the movie in Germany. He was convinced that Irma could be filmed more quickly and economically at the Goldwyn Studios in Hollywood than on location in Paris.
For Irma Wilder was able to reunite the two stars of The Apartment, Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine. Since the story focuses on Irma (Shirley MacLaine), a prostitute who falls in love with Nestor (Jack Lemmon), her pimp, Louella Parsons asked Lemmon in an interview how this unsavory tale could be laundered for the movie version. “Audiences are much more mature today, and they demand maturer subject matter,” Lemmon replied. “I think any subject can be handled on the screen today, provided that it’s done with good taste.”51 But since Wilder had been criticized by reviewers in the past for exhibiting bad taste in his films, Parsons was not entirely reassured.
Wilder was aware that a producer who was considering a film adaptation of Irma back in 1959 had submitted the play script to Geoffrey Shurlock, inquiring whether the play was suitable for filming. Shurlock responded with a letter that took a decidedly dim view of Irma. He declared, “It’s [sic] leading lady is a practicing prostitute who, additionally, falls in love with and lives with the leading man, bearing his child out of wedlock.” He continued, “She is also carrying on a second affair with the leading man who has disguised himself as somebody else. This relationship is not treated with any semblance of the compensatory moral values or voice of morality required by the Censorship Code.” In sum, “the general low and sordid tone of the story render[s] this property unacceptable” for film production.52
Shurlock’s letter thoroughly discouraged the producer in question. Nevertheless, Wilder was optimistic about Irma’s potential as a viable film project. “There’s no reason this film should not get” the industry’s official seal of approval from Shurlock’s office, Wilder asserted. “It has no orgies, no homosexuals or cannibalism.”53 Wilder was alluding to Mankiewicz’s film of Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly, Last Summer, in which a homosexual is killed and eaten by young cannibals he has previously engaged in sexual encounters. Mankiewicz’s picture was in fact granted the industry’s seal of approval by Shurlock.54
Wilder convinced Walter Mirisch that he could make Irma a sophisticated adult comedy. “We are doing it with taste and feeling,” he assured Mirisch. “It will strike a happy medium between Tennessee Williams and Walt Disney.”55
The Mirisch Company bought the screen rights of Breffort and Monnot’s musical play for $350,000. This was a sizeable sum, but the film rights to Witness for the Prosecution had cost $435,000, and that investment had paid off handsomely. Wilder opted to shoot the picture in color at the behest of Walter Mirisch. Irma would be Wilder’s first color film since The Spirit of St. Louis. Mirisch assigned to Wilder’s color production a budget of $5 million.
Wilder had not made a musical since The Emperor Waltz, which was a resounding flop. He knew that musicals were not his forte, so he planned to drop some of the songs from the original score of Irma and concentrate on the story. As things turned out, he wound up throwing out all of the songs. “I have nothing against music,” he explained, “but the more I went into that story, the better I thought it was. And for me, the numbers got in the way. So first, one of them went; then another one went. . . . More and more I could see that, if I really wanted to explore all the avenues of this story, there wasn’t going to be room for any numbers.”56 Wilder found that the characters were two-dimensional and the story was thin, so he aimed to fill out the characterizations and fill in the story.
Diamond heartily endorsed Wilder’s decision. “We saw the show in Paris” and liked the plot but not the songs, he stated. “The songs stopped the action and seemed to have nothing to do with the story.”57 Axel Madsen calls Wilder’s scuttling all of the songs “a daring piece of open-heart surgery that amputated his source material of part of its identity” as a musical comedy.58 But Wilder never regretted his decision. “I think it worked out very well,” he said.59
Other changes developed as Wilder and Diamond worked on the screenplay. They transferred the principal setting from the bohemian Montmartre district of Paris to the neighborhood of the bustling wholesale meat market of Les Halles. Just a step away from the marketplace, in Rue Casanova, is the red-light district inhabited by the poules (harlots). “Nobody ever mentioned the symbolism of the raw meat for sale,” Wilder observed.60 Nevertheless, the implication that “the Halles ‘meat market’ also applies to the prostitutes on display” is hard to miss.61
Wilder and Diamond “hit us over the head with the old rotten jest that prostitution is . . . a way of life like any other,” Pauline Kael smirked.62 Putting it another way, Kevin Lally notes, “For its time, Irma la Douce is remarkably non-judgmental about the oldest profession.”63 Moustache (Lou Jacobi), the worldly proprietor of the café Chez Moustache, where the poules and their mecs (pimps) hang out, glibly pontificates at one point, “Love is illegal, but not hate—that you can do anywhere, anytime, to anybody.” Moustache is the commentator on the action in the movie, as in the play. He makes constant references to his past adventures: as a soldier cashiered from the French Foreign Legion, as a croupier in a Monte Carlo casino, and so on. His hilarious recollections are always capped by the phrase, “But that’s another story!”
Wilder assembled a top cast for the picture, with Lemmon and MacLaine in the leads and reliable character actors like Lou Jacobi (as Moustache) and Joan Shawlee (as a hooker named Amazon Annie) lending strong support. Furthermore, Wilder was fortunate to have several veterans of his previous films working behind the camera: cinematographer Joseph LaShelle, production designer Alexander Trauner, film editor Daniel Mandell, and composer André Previn, not to mention cowriter I. A. L. Diamond and supervising editor Doane Harrison.
Most of the movie was filmed at the Goldwyn Studios, where Trauner took up all of stage 4 with his realistic reproduction of a Paris street. The mammoth set took three months to construct and cost $350,000. This main set consisted of the facades of forty-eight buildings, including the Chez Moustache tavern and the Hotel Casanova brothel. To a visitor to the set, “it could only look false,” Wilder observed, “but on the screen, believe me, everything fell into place with a stupefying authenticity.”64
Principal photography began in August 1962, with ten days of shooting exteriors in Paris. This footage would be carefully integrated throughout the film to enliven all of the material that was filmed on the Hollywood soundstages. The location footage included several shots of the Halles marketplace, including an aerial view, and scenes along the banks of the Seine River. This river footage was filmed across from Trauner’s own home on Rue des Saints-Peres.
One of the more curious plot contrivances involves a shot of Jack Lemmon in disguise emerging from the Seine. Wilder was unaware that the waters of the Seine were an unsavory mixture of mud and garbage. Lemmon contracted an intestinal virus as a result of being immersed in the river, and filming was suspended for a few days while he recovered.
Production resumed at the Goldwyn Studios on October 8 and continued until February. Wilder had to cope with the fact that, because Irma was set in Paris, all of the characters were French. Wilder abhorred the practice of having foreigners speak English with foreign accents. He contended that the audience would not tolerate Lemmon, MacLaine, and the other actors speaking English with a French accent for a whole movie: “It’s false; it just does not work,” he maintained. Wilder decided not to have the actors “simulate a French accent,” since they were plainly Americans. “We had a long talk,” says MacLaine, and decided that everyone in the cast should have the same American accent.65
Lemmon had developed a practice to soothe himself before shooting a scene. When the director was ready to shoot, Lemmon would close his eyes and say, “It’s magic time.” But MacLaine had no such mantra that worked for her when she was tense on the set. During the four-month shoot at the studio, Wilder followed his customary practice of endeavoring to defuse tension on the set with humor. While filming a tough scene in which Nestor and Irma discuss the possibility of her abandoning her profession, Wilder noted jokingly that Lemmon had won an Academy Award for Mr. Roberts and was nominated for his two previous Wilder pictures, but he “was twice screwed by very inferior talent.” Three takes were spoiled when MacLaine muffed her lines. “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing!” she exclaimed. Lemmon gave her a blank stare. After several more takes, Wilder again offered a witticism to break the tension: “This is the slowest company in Hollywood.” He pointed out that George Stevens had started his film of the life of Christ, The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), the week before, “and Jesus is bar mitzvahed already.”66
Principal photography wrapped in February 1963. Early in postproduction Wilder screened the rough cut of Irma for Previn. Wilder instructed him to “disregard all of the pratfalls” and compose a romantic score derived from the batch of songs that Marguerite Monnot had composed for the original stage production. Previn followed Wilder’s directions and produced lyrical background music that accented the romance between Nestor and Irma.67
Wilder insouciantly stated that he fully expected Irma to receive the official seal of approval from the industry censor, since, he noted disingenuously, it was fundamentally a love story as “innocent as a glass of milk.” In reality, Wilder had “slyly subverted the Code by making a comedy out of an otherwise taboo subject.”68 Be that as it may, Shurlock asked for only minimal cuts: the shot of MacLaine naked to the waist in the bathtub was replaced by a shot revealing only her head and shoulders, and a shot of an American GI leaving the brothel with a whore on each arm was excised.
Wilder remembered that Shurlock had demanded that Ariane and Frank marry at the end of Love in the Afternoon to give the movie a morally uplifting conclusion. He forestalled a similar complaint about the present film’s screenplay by retaining the wedding of Irma and Nestor from the stage play. These modifications overcame Shurlock’s initial objections to the scenario, as put forth in his 1959 letter. After all, Shurlock was aware of “the growing liberal climate in this country” during the “swinging Sixties,” writes film historian Dawn Sova. He observed that prostitution was no longer quite as objectionable a topic for film as it once had been.69
The Legion of Decency knew of the cuts made in Irma at the behest of the industry censor but still found the movie distasteful. Monsignor Little, speaking on behalf of the legion, explained that, “in developing the story of the redemption of one prostitute, the film concentrates on details of prostitution and upon suggestiveness in costuming, dialogue, and situations.” He continued, “It fails as a comedy and, as a consequence, tends to be a coarse mockery of virtue.”70 The legion therefore placed Irma in its morally objectionable category, where it had also relegated Some Like It Hot. Father Patrick Sullivan noted that the legion’s consultors came down hard on Irma because, in retrospect, they believed their positive rating of The Apartment was misguided. Be that as it may, Sullivan added, the legion could have been tougher on Irma than it was. Eleven of its consultors voted to condemn the movie, with only eight favoring the morally objectionable category and three favoring a rating for adults. Nevertheless, the movie was not condemned.71
Hal Wallis, the respected producer responsible for films like Casablanca (1942) and The Rose Tattoo (1955), attended an advance screening of Irma. Appalled that the film had been granted a code seal, he blasted off a blistering letter to Shurlock. Wallis pronounced Irma la Douce “a salacious, pornographic, distasteful, obscene, offensive, degrading piece of celluloid.” Audiences, he continued, could only respond to the picture in the same way that they did to stag films. “I have great admiration for Wilder’s talent in some of his work,” he wrote, “but this is without a doubt the filthiest thing I have ever seen on the screen.” Shurlock responded to Wallis that UA had assured him that the film “would be sold strictly as an adult movie.”72 In fact, the disclaimer “This picture is for adults only” appeared in advertising layouts for the movie and in the film’s trailer. Only on that condition did Shurlock, in concert with his advisory board, issue the code seal for Irma. UA was following the example of MGM, which received a code seal for Stanley Kubrick’s controversial film Lolita (1962) by stating in the ads that Lolita was “for persons over eighteen only.”73
Wilder was grateful to Shurlock for standing up to Wallis on his behalf; he saw signs that the guardians of film morality were becoming less strict in administering the censorship code. “We had tremendous problems in the past,” he recalled. “There was a man at Paramount in charge of censorship who would constantly be snooping around the set to see whether the decolletage was too deep, whether it was permissible. It was not easy, I assure you, because they were powerful, and you had to be very smart” to get around them. Those were different days, he concluded.74
The credit sequence of Irma la Douce opens “in a mean, narrow street just off Les Halles,” according to the screenplay, “and the prostitutes are out on their love patrol in full war paint.” The camera moves in on Irma, “stationed beside the dimly lit entrance of a shabby hotel. . . . A customer walks over to Irma and asks her a frank question—a ten franc question. Irma nods and leads him into the hotel,” the Hotel Casanova. Legend has it that Casanova slept there in 1763.75
There is a dissolve to a short scene that plays like a burlesque skit. Irma’s customer is putting money in her purse, which lies open on the night table. “To get her Johns to dish out more dough, Irma lays it on thick and spins tales of past misfortunes,” notes Heinz-Jürgen Köhler.76 She tells this particular client that she was a concert pianist until the piano lid fell on her hand and destroyed her career. He is touched by her sob story and drops an extra bill in her purse as a tip.
Wilder follows the credit sequence with a prologue that recalls the prologue at the beginning of Love in the Afternoon. This time the narrator is Louis Jourdan, another French actor who appeared in Hollywood films. Jourdan’s voice-over commentary accompanies a quick tour of Les Halles wholesale meat market. “This is the story of Irma la Douce,” he intones, “a story of passion, bloodshed, desire, and death—everything that makes life worth living.” This is one of the very few speeches in the screenplay that is taken verbatim from the stage play. The camera tracks along row after row of slabs of beef, pork, lamb, and veal. Then it moves on to a long line of harlots on the pavement. “If you are looking for some action, forget the high-rent district,” the narrator goes on; “come to our neighborhood. Just step around the corner to the Rue Casanova. That is where you will find the girls, better known as poules.” One of the girls, he points out, is named Lolita; she wears sunglasses with heart-shaped rims—the trademark of the title character in Kubrick’s film. The girls take their coffee break in the louche Chez Moustache bistro; so do the mecs. The proprietor is known as Moustache, but “according to police records,” the narrator points out, “Moustache is a Romanian thief named Constatinescu.”
The narrator acknowledges that the mecs regularly pay off the local gendarmes, or flics, to cast a blind eye on the girls plying their trade on the sidewalk. “It is what the politicians call ‘peaceful coexistence,’ trade on the sidewalk. Then one day disaster struck: an honest cop on the beat!” With that, the narrator bows out and Nestor bows in.
Nestor Patou, a rookie policeman patrolling the Rue Casanova, is shocked to find prostitution rife on his beat. He orders a raid on the Hotel Casanova, only to learn that Chief Inspector Lefevre himself has been caught in the raid. Lefevre, Nestor’s superior, personally sees to it that Nestor is kicked off the force. Nestor, out of a job, hangs around Moustache’s bistro. One night Hippolyte (Bruce Yarnell), Irma’s mec, roughs her up for holding back some of her earnings from him. Nestor intervenes and knocks Hippolyte’s block off. He thereby inherits Irma as his poule and becomes the number one mec on the block.
Irma in due course seduces Nestor. The Los Angeles Times reviewer employed this scene to compare Wilder to Ernest Lubitsch. “Lubitsch, who delighted in sex farces, stopped at the bedroom door. Wilder walks right inside.”77 Indeed, the camera follows Irma and Nestor right into the bedroom; then Irma shuts the door.
Nestor, who has fallen in love with Irma, soon becomes obsessed with the notion that she is still seeing other men. Nestor concocts a scheme whereby he masquerades as a wealthy Englishman, Lord X, who will provide her with sufficient funds so that he can have her exclusive services. He disguises himself with a goatee, a set of buck teeth, and a patch over one eye. Because Nestor initially wants to sleep with Irma only as himself, Lord X tells Irma that he is impotent and seeks only her companionship. He explains that, while he was a prisoner of the Japanese, the bridge on the River Kwai fell on him when it was hit by an explosion, leaving him “half a man.” Irma is incredulous: “You think you have run out of gas, but maybe you are just stalled”—a typical Wilder double entendre. In any case, to earn the francs that Lord X pays Irma for their weekly evening together playing double solitaire, Nestor must toil all night at the nearby Les Halles market. Suffice it to say that Irma eventually “cures” Lord X of his impotence.
When Nestor suspects that Irma prefers Lord X’s company to his, he becomes wildly jealous and “kills off” Lord X by dumping the wardrobe he wore as Lord X in the Seine. Wilder described the film as the story of a man who becomes jealous of himself. Nestor is soon imprisoned for drowning Lord X, the imaginary British peer, in the river. While in jail, Nestor gets word that Irma is pregnant, and he escapes to be with her. Nestor disguises himself as Lord X one last time to convince the police that he did not drown Lord X. The police hear that Lord X has been inexplicably hanging around under the bridge on the Seine. Indeed, they witness Lord X emerging from the Seine, claiming to be unable to remember what happened to him.
Nestor explains to Irma hurriedly that he impersonated Lord X and that she really loved him all along. Realizing this, the visibly pregnant Irma agrees to marry Nestor. They are wed in a solemn ceremony according to the rites of the Catholic Church, which is curious, since neither Nestor nor Irma is Catholic. Irma goes into labor during the ceremony and delivers the baby in the sacristy. Chief Inspector Lefevre is on hand to inform Nestor that, since he has been cleared of the murder charge, he will be reinstated as a police officer. So Irma is no longer a poule and Nestor is no longer a mec.
Meanwhile, a lone figure steps out of a pew in the church and proceeds up the aisle toward the exit. It is none other than Lord X, complete with eye patch and goatee. This Lord X cannot be Nestor in disguise, because Nestor is busy in the sacristy with Irma and the newborn babe. Spying this impossible reappearance of Lord X, Moustache can only exclaim to the audience, “But that’s another story!”
Wilder never explained the gimmicky gag with which the picture ends, but the plot has been far-fetched all along. As MacLaine puts it, the scenario does not bear close analysis, “because it was all artificial anyway.”78 Bernard Dick writes, “When a prostitute’s lover masquerades as a peer, . . . without her knowing his identity,” we are in the world of what the French call boulevard comedy, which flourished in the early twentieth century. The term refers to a small theater near a boulevard in Montmartre that specialized in “bedroom comedies” by the likes of Georges Feydeau. Dick explains, “These old-fashioned French farces subsequently influenced movie directors like Lubitsch and Wilder.”79
Although Irma was big at the box office when it was released on June 5, 1963, several critics dismissed the comedy about the proverbial harlot with a heart of gold as vulgar and lacking in true comic invention. Leo Mishkin in the New York Morning Telegraph quite by chance echoed Wallis’s angry letter to Shurlock, pronouncing Irma “a lewd film that belongs at a stag smoker.”80 Sam Staggs, a film historian who is usually in Wilder’s corner, writes, “If high schools put on plays about French hookers, Irma la Douce is the kind of low farce that might have the sophomore class in stitches.” He deplores “the gauche material, the facile dialogue, the in-your-face crudeness parading as wit.”81
Variety did not much mind the bawdy humor but did take Wilder to task for the movie’s excessive running time. The film is just under two and a half hours, “an awfully long haul for a frivolous farce. . . . A little snipping and splicing, particularly in the later stages, and the film’s occasional sluggishness” could have been reduced considerably.82 Variety was not alone in stating that “half-an-hour cut out would make it a better film.”83
Withal, the movie had its fans. Bosley Crowther in the New York Times endorsed Wilder’s “comic skill and his ability to handle raw material with deceptively silken gloves.”84 What’s more, André Previn received an Academy Award for his score, which seamlessly incorporated Marguerite Monnot’s original themes. That was the only Oscar accorded Irma, but Shirley MacLaine won a Golden Globe award for her performance.
Reflecting on Irma la Douce, Wilder noted, “I personally earned more out of that picture than any other picture I made,” since he received a whopping 17 percent of the gross plus his usual salary. “That doesn’t mean the best; it just means it made the most money.”85 The movie eventually grossed $25 million, which would be the equivalent of $80 million today. Irma was a huge hit, Wilder said, “but I’m not sure why.” It was not a film he was particularly proud of. “It didn’t come out quite the way I wanted it to. It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” but it was not a movie that he thought much of.86
“There is no guaranteeing audience reaction,” Wilder said at the time of Irma’s release. “I’ve been lucky; I’ve taken a lot of chances in treading new ground, which could have slipped out from under me. Though I’ve gotten away with it about 90 percent of the time, I don’t flatter myself that I can hit all the time. But I have to live in hope—or perhaps under the delusion—that if I like it, a great many other people will like it too.”87
The 1960s, which brought an increasingly liberal climate to America (in contrast to the buttoned-down 1950s), were in full swing. Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, and Irma la Douce all dwelled on sensitive sexual issues, and all three were severely criticized by the minions of morality. Yet they were all popular with the moviegoing public. Up to this point, Wilder had successfully tested the limits of what was acceptable to the mass audience in popular entertainment. There were industry insiders, like Hal Wallis, who believed that Wilder had already pushed the envelope too far. Nonetheless, Wilder, emboldened by the extraordinary success of Irma, was confident that he could make another crowd-pleasing sex romp. With Kiss Me, Stupid, however, he would finally overplay his hand.