- In West Berlin during the Cold War, a Coca-Cola executive is given the task of taking care of his boss' socialite daughter.
- Berlin is the epitome of political and economic polarization. A microcosm of that polarization is the life of American C.R. MacNamara, known as Mac to his friends. He is Coca-Cola's head of West Berlin operations, although he feels he deserves to be Coca-Cola's head of European operations based in London. His wife Phyllis wants him to get a steady, stable job back in head office in Atlanta. His West Berlin staff is still used to treating him like their old master, the Führer. The one exception is his secretary Ingeborg, who is the latest in his long line of secretary mistresses. And he's working on a trade agreement of getting Coca-Cola into the Russian market. His life goes into a tailspin when he hosts Scarlett Hazeltine, 17-year-old spoiled partygirl daughter of his Atlanta-based boss, Wendell Hazeltine. Unlike most of the stops she's made on her European trip, Scarlett seems to like West Berlin and stays longer than expected. On the day that Mac learns that Mr. and Mrs. Hazeltine will be in Berlin in 24 hours to retrieve their daughter, he learns that Scarlett has married Otto Ludwig Piffl, a staunch East German Communist. Mac feels this marriage will ruin his career and does whatever he can to get rid of Otto for good and wipe any record of the marriage off the official books. But when Mac further learns that Scarlett is pregnant, he must get Otto back, which is more difficult than getting rid of his was, and to make him respectable in Mr. Hazeltine's eyes. Meanwhile, Phyllis has her own ideas of what is right and wrong in both Scarlett's and Mac's lives and takes appropriate action.—Huggo
- C.R. "Mac" MacNamara is a high-ranking executive in the Coca-Cola company, assigned to the corporate office located in West Berlin. Mac's dreams are to climb the corporate ladder in the company to eventually become the head of Western European Coca-Cola Operations. One day, Mac receives a call from his boss, W.P. Hazeltine, to look after his 17-year old socialite daughter, who is coming to West Berlin, while he is on a trip. Soon enough, Mac finds himself in the undesirable circumstances of trying to take care of this young whirlwind and manage all of the problems she causes.—Kyle Perez
- In 1961, C.R. MacNamara is the manager of Coca Cola's West Berlin branch. His boss's daughter is on a European tour and ends up staying with MacNamara and his family for several weeks. One day she reveals that she has married an East Berlin communist. This will not be good for MacNamara's career, so he sets out to undermine the relationship.—grantss
- In his last starring film, James Cagney plays Coca-Cola executive C.R. MacNamara. Assigned to manage Coke's West Berlin office, MacNamara dreams of being transferred to London, and to do this he must curry favor with his Atlanta-based boss, Hazeltine Thus, MacNamara agrees to look after Hazeltine's dizzy, impulsive daughter, Scarlett, during her visit to Germany. Weeks pass, and on the eve of Hazeltine's visit to West Berlin, Scarlett announces that she's gotten married. Even worse, her husband is a hygienically challenged East Berlin Communist named Otto Piffl. The crafty MacNamara arranges for Piffl to be arrested by the East Berlin police and to have the marriage annulled, only to discover that Scarlett is pregnant. In rapid-fire "one, two, three" fashion, MacNamara must arrange for Piffl to be released by the Communists and successfully pass off the scroungy, doggedly anti-capitalist Piffl as an acceptable husband for Scarlett. MacNamara must accomplish this in less than 12 hours, all the while trying to mollify his wife, who has learned of his affair with busty secretary Ingeborg. Seldom pausing for breath, Billy Wilders film is a crackling, mile-a-minute farce, taking satiric scatter shots at Coca-Cola, the Cold War (the film is set in the months just before the erection of the Berlin Wall), Russian red tape, Communist and capitalist hypocrisy, Southern bigotry, the German "war guilt," rock music, and even Cagney 's own movie image. Not all the gags are in the best of taste, and most of the one-liners have dated rather badly, but Cagneys mesmerizing performance holds the whole affair together.
- C.R. "Mac" MacNamara (James Cagney) is a high-ranking executive in the Coca-Cola Company, assigned to West Berlin after a business fiasco a few years earlier in the Middle East (about which he is still bitter). While based in West Germany for now, Mac is angling to become head of Western European Coca-Cola Operations, based in London. After working on an arrangement to introduce Coke into the Soviet Union, Mac receives a call from his boss, W.P. Hazeltine, at Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta. Scarlett Hazeltine, the boss's hot-blooded but slightly dim 17-year-old socialite daughter Scarlett (Pamela Tiffin), is coming to West Berlin. Mac is assigned the unenviable task of taking care of her.
An expected two-week stay extends into two months, and Mac discovers just why Scarlett is so enamored of West Berlin: she surprises him by announcing that she's married to Otto Piffl (Horst Buchholz), a young East German communist with ardent anti-capitalistic views. When the Southern belle is confronted about her foolishness in the matter of helping him blow up anti-American "Yankee Go Home" balloons (how the couple met) she simply replies with, "It's not anti-American, it's anti-Yankee. Where I come from, everybody's against the Yankees."
Mac tries to come to terms with letting his boss's daughter marry a Communist and learns the horrible truth: the couple are bound for Moscow to make a new life for themselves ("They've assigned us a magnificent apartment, just a short walk from the bathroom!"). Since Hazeltine and his wife are coming to Berlin to collect their daughter the next day, Mac deals with the disaster by bribing East German officials to steal Scarlett's marriage certificate from the archives. Mac also frames the young Communist firebrand Otto, resulting in his being arrested by the East German police, by planting on his motorcycle a "Russky Go Home" balloon and presenting him with a wedding present of an Uncle Sam cuckoo clock wrapped in the Wall Street Journal. After Otto, during interrogation, is forced to listen endlessly to a cover of the song "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" (which is intentionally badly distorted as it plays) he cracks and signs a confession saying that he is an American spy.
Under pressure from his exasperated and disapproving wife Phyllis (Arlene Francis) (who wants to take her family back to live in the US), and with the revelation that Scarlett is pregnant-and, worse, unmarried with her East German marriage certificate gone-Mac must now fix the mess he has created. He must restore the marriage certificate and bring Otto back with the help of his new Soviet business associates on whom Mac uses all his wiles, as well as his sexy secretary, Fräulein Ingeborg. With the boss on the way, he finds that his only chance is to turn Otto into a son-in-law in good standing-which means, among other things, making him a capitalist with an aristocratic pedigree (albeit contrived by adoption).
Mac arranges to have Otto adopted by an impoverished count, who now works as a washroom attendant and includes a photo of the ruins of the family castle with the price of adoption ("U.S. Air Force, 1944?" "No,Turkish Cavalry, 1683."). Scarlett is dubious that her father will be fooled by the ruse, but is reassured that her baby will now be part of a long line of bleeders, which will please her snobbish mother. In a frenetic race against time and the arrival of the Hazeltines' plane, Mac outfits Otto in complete paraphernalia befitting his new aristocratic status, while Otto rails against being forced to join the detested bourgeoisie (his Communist Party membership is paid up through the year). Meanwhile, Scarlett and Mac coach Otto on how to speak to her conservative Southern father ("The Civil War was a draw...").
In the end, the Hazeltines approve of their new son-in-law, Otto, who Mac learns from Hazeltine will be named the new head of Western European Operations, with a disappointed Mac getting a promotion to VP of Procurement back in Atlanta. Mac reconciles with his family at the airport, and to celebrate his promotion, buys them Cokes from a vending machine. After handing out the bottles, he discovers that the last one actually is a Pepsi-Cola.
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