Another Cold War Movie. A very, very Cold War Movie.

 Last week we saw a film about the Cold War as seen by a director who experienced it as a young teenager. The International situation may have been apocalyptic and grim, but none of that mattered as much as the newest monster movie.

This week is going to be another film about the Cold War, but viewed through the very different lens of a director in his mid-fifties who had lived through the eras of World War Two and The Holocaust.

Billy Wilder may be (quite rightly) remembered for films like Sunset Boulevard, Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Some Like it Hot etc. but One, Two, Three is one of his most cynical, savage and unforgiving comedies.

Berlin in 1961 was a divided city. The East and West were controlled by the Russians and Americans respectively, but travel between the two regions was still possible. It was in fact during the making of this film that the infamous wall went up, sealing East Berlin off from the West for almost thirty years.

I'm not going to attempt to explain the plot of One, Two, Three, except to say that no one in the story is spared Billy Wilder's wrath. Capitalists or Communists, men or women, East Germans or West Germans, Americans or Russians, captains of industry or serving staff; everyone is thoroughly eviscerated by the film's merciless gaze.

Billy Wilder had grown up in a small town in what is now modern Poland (he later described it as about "half an hour from Vienna. By Telegraph."). Although he escaped to the US, most of his family were killed in the Holocaust. By 1960 he was watching Europe being torn apart all over again by Cold War paranoia, which was simultaneously destroying the lives of many of his colleagues in Hollywood. Meanwhile, the US was being rocked by racial unrest, with half the country trying to re-do the Civil War while the other half was busy trying to inflict Capitalism on the entire world.

This is no fuzzy recollection of a 1960s childhood spent watching monster movies and learning how to "duck and cover"; One, Two, Three is the product of someone who has witnessed the absolute worst that humanity can offer. But this is Billy Wilder; one of the sharpest and deadliest wits of Twentieth Century film-making. Far from bemoaning the destruction of society, he is doing what he does best: standing over it all and laughing.

We'll be screening One, Two, Three on Thursday, the 4th of November at 7.30 at the Victoria Park Baptist Church. 

Brace yourselves.