• Irma la Douce

7/26/24 (Fri)

Billy Wilder’s film of the long-running French musical, stripped of its music, about a happy hooker and a clumsy admirer who wants to keep her to himself. It reunites Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine from The Apartment (after Marilyn Monroe, the original choice and Lemmon’s Some Like It Hot collaborator, passed away). The stage musical, which also had a healthy run on Broadway, was scored by one of Edith Piaf’s collaborators and has some great tunes, but Wilder kept them only as underscoring other than a brief snatch of “Dis-Donc”. The film had some impressive musical talent, including MacLaine and Bruce Yarnell (a terrific foil for Ethel Merman in the subsequent revival of Annie Get Your Gun), and some musical numbers were supposedly filmed. But Wilder evidently felt the songs slowed down the action and canned all the footage. Still, André Previn did a more-than-capable job of offsetting this. Wilder should have cut some of the protracted would-be comedy instead, especially involving the faux British guy. The film could easily lose half an hour from its 140-minute running time.

The setting is Paris. A serious-minded policeman (Lemmon) trying to clear prostitutes from the street runs into trouble when other cops see a threat to their lucrative scam, which involves bribes from those very women. Lemmon is sacked, but ends up falling in love with one of those very women of the night. She refuses to give up her trade on the promise of mere love, especially when that comes with no money. So Lemmon devises a scheme in which he dresses up as an English lord and pays her to be his exclusive girl. That works for a while but naturally falls apart at a certain point, prompting Lemmon to abandon the pretend character, throwing his clothes into a river. Unfortunately that leads to accusations that Lemmon murdered the man. The story is resolved after a few more twists until the inevitable happy ending.

MacLaine and Lemmon are a pleasure as always, and Lou Jacobi pretty much steals the show as a bartender with an ever-shifting past (“But that’s another story”). The farce as usual requires some pretty questionable assumptions, not least accepting that MacLaine can sleep with Lemmon’s alter ego without realizing who he is. Modern sensibilities aren’t going to be happy with the subject matter (the NY Times’ woke theater reviewer called the stage version repulsive), and it does skirt the boundaries of good taste in its treatment of women. But it’s too silly to get worked up over. Fun for what it is.