An opportunity for change finally presents itself when he receives a call from his boss back in Atlanta, Mr. His family life isn’t too great either the constant sarcasm and patronization from his wife Phyllis (played brilliantly by Arlene Francis) has driven him into the arms of his young secretary. MacNamara, however, is unhappy– he’s got his eyes on a bigger prize: a cushy life in London as the head of Coca-Cola’s entire European operation. He’s Coca-Cola’s man on the ground in Berlin, tasked with overseeing the region’s market and actively inflating the influence of American capitalism in West Germany. Gangster-genre icon James Cagney plays the ambitious motormouth CR MacNamara, a soft drink executive with a leadership style so authoritarian that his underlings (and his own wife) jokingly refer to him as “Mein Fuhrer”.
#Cabin fever 2002 box office update
Diamond update the story to a contemporary Berlin that, as is explained to us in the now-requisite opening voiceover, has been torn asunder as competing political interests and economic philosophies struggle to fill the power vacuum left behind by the collapse of the Nazi regime. Wilder and his late-career writing partner I.A.L.
Titled ONE, TWO, THREE (1961), the film derives its story from a 1929 Hungarian play as well as a 1939 film co-written by Wilder called NINOTCHKA (1). Wilder’s follow-up to THE APARTMENT would constitute the first work of his twilight era– a perfectly enjoyable film that still failed to connect with audiences despite his best efforts. Their relative obscurity is something of a tragedy, especially in our current content-saturated age where supposedly “anything” is available on demand. Indeed, the pop footprint of many of these late-career works is so small today that one can would have substantial difficulty finding most of them on home video. Wilder would continue with a string of fairly successful films for the next twenty years, but none would rival the cultural staying power of THE APARTMENT, or even SOME LIKE IT HOT (1959). For many masters of the monochromatic era– Wilder included– this would signal a long, inevitable period of decline. An emergent generation of auteurs, born under the aura of flickering projector lights and the first to be bred with a formal education in the trade, were poking and prodding at the boundaries of content and style in a bid to make the medium their own. The film’s success would rightly become the capstone to a career that was emblematic of the Golden Age of Hollywood, but unfortunately for Wilder, the shimmering era of the glamorous silver screen was coming to an end. Riding the wave of critical adoration for 1960’s THE APARTMENT all the way to Oscar glory, director Billy Wilder entered the decade at the utmost peak of his powers as a filmmaker.
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