One, Two, Three is overwrought, tasteless, and offensive—a comedy that pulls out laughs the way a catheter draws urine…. [It] was actually shot in Berlin and Munich (where the Brandenberg Gate was reconstructed), but the real location is the locker-room where tired salesmen swap the latest variants of stale old jokes…. If you find these jokes fresh and funny, then by all means rush to see One, Two, Three, which will keep shouting them at you for two hours. It's like you-know-what hitting the fan. (p. 63)

In Hollywood it is now common to hear Billy Wilder called the world's greatest movie director. This judgment tells us a lot about Hollywood: Wilder hits his effects hard and sure; he's a clever, lively director whose work lacks feeling or passion or grace or beauty or elegance. His eye is on the dollar, or rather on success, on the entertainment values that bring in dollars. But he has never before, except perhaps in a different way in Ace in the Hole, exhibited such a brazen contempt for people. (p. 64)

Perhaps a diabolic satire could be written on the theme of Coca-Cola haves and have-nots, but Wilder's comedy isn't black and there are no disjunctions: his method is as mercenary as the characters…. There is one nice touch—an old man singing "Yes, We Have No Bananas" in German, and there's also the dance of a behind on a table that's quite a "set piece." But even the portrait of Khrushchev slipping from its frame, revealing Stalin's picture behind it, was a reprise of a dimly remembered gag. And the three Commissars whom Wilder revived from his earlier script for Ninotchka have become coarsened with the years—another indication of the changing climate of Hollywood. They were grotesquely pathetic and sentimental in 1939; now they are even more grotesquely crude than the Cagney character.

This being the age of the big production and the big promotion, there is a tie-in with Coca-Cola which provides truck-banners, super-market ads, contests, and window displays. Who is laughing at whom? The target has been incorporated in the profits of the joke. Perhaps Wilder (who owns 90 per cent of the picture) is closer to his Coca-Colonizer than one might have expected. Is this dollar diplomacy?

I felt that we in the audience were all being manipulated in some shameful way, and that whenever this feeling might become conscious and begin to dry up the laughs, Wilder showed his manipulative skills by throwing in little sops to sentiment—even more ugly in their way than the "wisecracks." Arlene Francis has said of her role, "My character is a warm, sensible woman who has a good marriage." That's better satirical dialogue than anything I heard in One, Two, Three—a movie that shovels on the wit. (pp. 64-5)