Irma La Douce (1963) Director Billy Wilder and his longtime screenwriter collaborator I.A.L. Diamond found an unlikely source for their next sardonically cynical romantic comedy..........a bubbly French musical which they proceeded to de-musicalize........
Though stripped of its songs, Wilder and Diamond's always effervescent wit kept the movie as bubbly and semi-naughty as if it were still a musical........with enormous help from Wilder's "Apartment" co-stars Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine and a riotous supporting turn from veteran character actor Lou Jacobi.
Unlike Wilder's black-and-white comedies taking place in the real world as we know it, "Irma La Douce", filmed in gorgeous, ripe color, is set up as kind of a fairy tale for grown-ups, taking place in a very Hollywood-ized French red light district.......
To describe what it looks like, imagine if Disneyland included 'French Whore-World' among their fantasy attractions.......complete with a fully ourfitted, meticulous re-creation of a sleazy Parisienne neighborhood populated with PG-13 sanitized hookers and their pimps who look dropped in from a Gallic version of 'Guys and Dolls'........
Into this colorful never-neverland comes a dedicated cop (Lemmon) who falls for the film's titular heart-of-gold streetwalker Irma La Douce (MacLaine)......(her name isn't 'Irma The Sweet' for nothing'....)
In the plot's wild ups 'n downs, Lemmon, besotted with MacLaine, ends up as her insanely jealous pimp. To keep her unsullied and unplowed by visiting horny sailors (including a very young Bill Bixby and James Caan), Lemmon's forced to masquerade as 'Lord X', Irma's one and only sugar-daddy British Lord client.
And to perpetuate this frantic double life, he has to put in brutal extra hours toiling in a meat market in order to afford 'Lord X's generous payments to Irma........(and he's aided in this elaborate deception by the neighborhood saloonkeeper (Jacobi) whose ridiculous array of past life experiences he shrugs away with..."...but that's another story....."_
The film's off-the-wall 3rd act twist sends it into the realm of complete, antic farce......and we'll not spoil the fun for those of you who haven't seen the film by revealing it.
Before anyone starts raging about how un-woke and politically incorrect this all is, yeh, we get it. But lighten up, it's 1963 after all. And Wilder and Diamond still managed to push the envelope in their typically sarcastic but sentimental view of romance........(and keep in mind, Wilder might have been the only major filmmaker who could get away with making a major studio comedy about whores.)
Overlong and obvious, it's still pure Wilder. a silly yet knowingly mature farce from a master of the genre,,,...only Wilder could envision a comic book-like view of prostitution and somehow make it look quaint and charming......3 & 1/2 stars (***1/2).....how it got past the still pruish studio system......well, that's another story........
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