Irma La Douce
by Billy Wilder
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Actor: Bruce Yarnell, Herschel Bernardi, Jack Lemmon, Lou Jacobi, Shirley MacLaineDirector: Billy Wilder
Producer: Billy Wilder
Writer: Billy Wilder
Producer: Alexandre Trauner
Producer: Doane Harrison
Producer: Edward L. Alperson
Writer: Alexandre Breffort
Writer: I.A.L. Diamond
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; Spanish (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 147 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2001-09-18
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
DVD Reviews of Irma La Douce
DVD Review: Sweet Irma from Paris, Hollywood
Summary: 3 Stars
Irma La Douce is a curious film with a curious history. Originally a French musical, it was translated and tranferred to Broadway where it was a modest success. Hollywood liked the play's premise but not its songs so, when Billy Wilder came to make the film version, all the songs were dropped and it was done as a comedy (although some of the music was reworked by Andre Previn as themes for his background score).
The story is the stuff of farce. Jack Lemmon is a too honest policeman who gets fired for being overly zealous. He promptly falls in love with the cause of his misfortune - a prostitute played by Shirley MacLaine. Almost by accident, Lemmon becomes her pimp but he is so in love with her that he resents her clients. So he devises a scheme in which he impersonates a rich English lord who buys all of Irma's time. To pay for this, Lemmon must work all day while MacLaine sleeps. Before long, crazy with exhaustion and jealous of himself, he decides to do away with his alter ego. At which point he is arrested for the murder of someone who does not exist.
Amazingly, the film is not as funny as it might sound. Or, at least, it's not as funny as it might have been forty years ago. When it was released, Irma La Douce was quite a racy film. But now it seems rather tame and almost naive. And at nearly two and a half hours, there seems to be quite long gaps between highlights. It is probably a sacrilege to suggest Billy Wilder was slightly lacking his trademark golden touch. But much of the style and pacing of the film seems uncertain. The colors are so garish and unreal that you wonder if black and white might have suited the material better. The main sets are obvious sound stages yet the camera occasionally wanders into realistic locations, further confusing the look of the movie. And some more editing would have helped the film's pace.
Even so, there are a number of fun moments. Lemmon is always watchable, especially in the days before he began to take himself too seriously. His character of Nestor is right up there with some of his best. But his impersonation of the English lord is so broad and such a caricature that it blunts the intended humor. As Irma, Shirley MacLaine is bubbly and strangely sexy - just as she was in a whole series of silly films in the Sixties. Legend has it that she researched her role by hanging out with real Parisian prostitutes. She needn't have bothered as her Irma is the typical Hollywood tart with a heart of gold. The supporting cast - especially the girls - do their bits well enough. Trivia lovers will enjoy spotting a pre-Incredible Hulk Bill Bixby as a French sailor. Lou Jacobi, as the owner of the local bistro, gets most of the film's best lines. But that's another story...
Irma La Douce is an enjoyable enough comedy but everyone involved has done better work elsewhere. Still, it's a lot better than most of the more modern and allegedly more sophisticated "romantic comedies" made these days.
Description of Irma La Douce
In 1963, Billy Wilder's Irma La Douce was one of the biggest box-office hits of the year, grossing twice as much as The Great Escape and The Birds. Yet this popular movie has been almost completely forgotten by film history, even to fans of Wilder or stars Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine (the same trio had made a masterpiece, The Apartment, three years earlier). It doesn't represent the best work of those legends, but Irma provides tart entertainment. At least some of the movie's popularity can be chalked up to its subject, which was pretty risqué for the time: Lemmon plays a Paris policeman who falls in love with a prostitute (MacLaine). The script was adapted from a stage musical, but Wilder decided to cut the songs, instead developing the humor and romance into his own blend of bittersweet perversity; this Technicolor-fantasy Paris is kind of a dark cousin to Gigi. Lemmon is in his prime period of hand-wringing self-doubt, and MacLaine is perfectly in tune with his rhythms, especially in scenes that add tenderness to the sometimes queasy mix of moods. Ironically--given the nixing of the songs--the film won its only Oscar for André Previn's adaptation of the stage play's music into a wordless orchestral score. --Robert HortonBestsellers in DVD
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