This has been a good week for remakes (or a bad week, depending on how you feel about them), but while announced redos of our beloved Weather permitting, I should be at Yankees Stadium this afternoon for opening day. So, I figured I’d share one of my favorite jokes from Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three (a film I also wrote about last week). James Cagney plays a Coca-Cola executive in West Berlin who’s supposed to be making sure his boss’ 17-year-old daughter, Scarlett (Pamela Tiffin), stays out of trouble. He does a bad job, though, because Scarlett sneaks into East Berlin, marries a young communist and gets pregnant with his child. When Cagney’s character asks the girl why she’s been helping to blow up balloons featuring the words, “Yankee Go Home”, she replies that where she comes from (Atlanta), everyone hates Yankees.
I know it’s not meant to be baseball-related, but I sometimes like to pretend that Scarlett has foreseen the ‘96 and ‘99 World Series (the film takes place a few years after the Braves beat the Yankees in the 1957 World Series, but the team wasn’t yet in Atlanta at that time). And I wonder if most Yankees fans would appreciate that line or see it as a reason to hate One, Two, Three. I’ve encountered a lot of fans of the team who are just that serious that they would probably boycott a movie that makes their Bombers sound or look bad. Here’s five such films I figure no “true” Yankees fan can admit to enjoying:
- Damn Yankees - Obviously it’s in the title that this is anti-Yankees propaganda. Adapted from a stage musical of the same name, the 1958 film is about a Washington Senators fan who sells his soul to the devil in order to play for the team and help them defeat the Yanks for the league pennant. …Read more
