The movie that sent James Cagney into Hollywood exile: “The experience disturbed him”
In 1961, gangster movie icon James Cagney was in his early 60s, and his acting career had already begun to wind down. When he was a younger man, it wouldn’t have been unusual for him to star in five pictures in a year, but in the late 1950s, this was reduced to two films per year, before reaching one per year with The Gallant Hour in 1960 and One, Two, Three in 1961.
However, after shooting the latter film, which the iconic Billy Wilder directed, Cagney decided enough was enough, and announced his retirement from acting and dancing. What had happened to make him walk away from the business that had given him so much? Well, One, Two, Three was a horrible experience for Cagney, who struggled to keep up with Wilder’s directorial approach to the film. He also met the only actor he ever outwardly disliked – Horst Buchholz – on that movie, once claiming he would have been delighted to knock the German performer on his ass.
One, Two, Three was a political comedy about a Coca-Cola executive in West Berlin tasked with keeping a watchful eye on his boss’s socialite daughter. The film was actually shot in Germany, and that was a big draw for Cagney, who loved growing up in the Yorkville area of Manhattan, which he said was “teeming with German immigrants.” Amazingly, the film was actually being shot in Berlin on August 13th, 1961, the very morning work on building the infamous Berlin Wall began. This forced the production to move to Munich.
Tangential associations with devastating historical developments aside, Cagney wound up hating making One, Two, Three. He found Wilder, the acclaimed director of classics like Some Like it Hot and Double Indemnity, to be a “dictator” who was “overly bossy” and “full of noise.” Worse, though, was Wilder’s insistence on a breakneck pace in the film’s comedy, never staying still for a second to let a joke breathe. “The general idea was, let’s make the fastest picture in the world,” Wilder mused in Conversations with Wilder. “We did not wait, for once, for the big laughs.”
Unfortunately for Cagney, he found this relentless pace hard to keep up with, and it made the shoot an ordeal. “He was not happy with Wilder at all, and the pace of the film got to him, too,” admitted Ralph Bellamy, a fellow actor and one of Cagney’s closest confidantes. “He was not a young man at the time, and it was a nonstop picture in which he had long speeches and was on camera for almost the whole time.” Indeed, all Cagney would tell Bellamy about how One, Two, Three made him feel was that “the experience had disturbed him,” but he didn’t elaborate further.
Compounding Cagney’s misery was Buchholz, who went down in history as the only actor Cagney believed was deliberately uncooperative with him. “I never had the slightest difficulty with a fellow actor until the making of One, Two, Three,” the White Heat star groused in Cagney on Cagney. He accused Buchholz of trying “all kinds of scene-stealing didoes” – presumably making use of the “stupid or ridiculous person” definition of that word – “and I had to depend on Billy Wilder to take some steps to correct this kid.”
In the end, Cagney couldn’t have been happier to leave Germany when the shoot ended, and when he returned to the States, he decided once and for all that he was too told for this shit. He acknowledged that, despite the production being torturous, One, Two, Three was a “good picture,” and by the time he later discovered that Wilder “didn’t like” him, he was too retired to care. He quipped that Wilder’s disdain “was fine as far as I was concerned, because I certainly didn’t like him.”
Ultimately, Cagney’s Hollywood exile lasted two decades, but even when he came out of retirement for 1981’s Ragtime, it was a short-lived return. One more TV movie followed in 1984, before the iconic star, whose health was failing, decided to call it a day for good.
