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East and West and the cyclone in between, a pox on both your houses. "Is everybody in this world corrupt?" "I don't know everybody." Pace Smedley Butler, the "gangster for capitalism" now manages Coca-Cola in divided Berlin, thus James Cagney with waggish reference to The Public Enemy. A promotion to him means chaperoning the boss' daughter (Pamela Tiffin), a twangy ditz who promptly falls for a surly Bolshie (Horst Buchholz). Perpetually ready to fly back to the States, the executive's wife (Arlene Francis) observes wryly from the sidelines. "Have you ever made love to a revolutionary?" "No, I but once necked with a Stevenson Democrat." Companion piece to A Foreign Affair and forerunner to Dr. Strangelove, Billy Wilder's furioso Cold War hootenanny, a sour circus for an audience of missiles. The Ugly American has a buxom secretary (Liselotte Pulver) to help him "brush up on the umlaut," plus a heel-clicking assistant (Hanns Lothar) who can't quite hide "that old Gestapo training." His ideology is likened to a dead herring in the moonlight ("It shines, but it stinks!"), the Soviet opposition is embodied by a trio of kumrads straight out of Ninotchka, tasked with obtaining the magical syrup but instead hypnotized by the blonde's swirling rump. Easier to reshape a stubborn Communist than to explain a pregnant bride, the scruffy malcontent's aristocratic overhaul goes into Osborne's The Blood of the Bambergs. "Please. No culture, just cash." "Ausgerechnet Bananen" at the Grand Hotel Pomtekin, "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" in the torture chamber, Khachaturian's "Saber Dance" throughout as manic metronome. (Wilder deals in pure velocity as a farcical standard, Cagney's way with a smacked line is a master class in itself.) "Hopeless but not serious" is the global verdict, the closing gag vies with Andy Warhol. With Howard St. John, Leon Askin, Ralf Wolter, Peter Capell, Karl Lieffen, Hubert von Meyerinck, and Red Buttons. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |