Irma la Douce (1963) - film review

The rue Casanova offers rich pickings for Parisian prostitutes, especially Irma la Douce, who never fails to extort a little extra from her clients.   Most of the local gendarmes turn a blind eye to what goes on, in return for a small bribe, but the impeccably honest Nestor Patou takes a different line.  Unfortunately, his attempt to clean up the district merely loses him his job.  Penniless, he accepts Irma’s offer of a place in her cramped rented room and work as her business manager, and it isn’t long before he finds he is in love.  Unable to accept that Irma should earn her living by prostitution, Nestor disguises himself as a rich English lord and gives her five hundred francs, loaned to him by the friendly owner of a bar, every time they play solitaire together.  Nestor quickly realises the flaw in his scheme, and to earn the money to pay Irma he has to get a job in Les Halles market.  Of course, Nestor’s mysterious absences and constant fatigue merely make Irma suspicious that he is seeing other women, and in the end she decides to run away to England with her rich lord.   At this point, things get very complicated...

Of all the great filmmakers working in Hollywood in the 1960s, surely none was better suited to making a bubbly French farce than Billy Wilder, whose previous sex comedies The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Some Like It Hot (1959) had enjoyed great success on both sides of the Atlantic.  Irma la Douce started out as a hugely popular French musical play by Alexandre Breffort and Marguerite Monnot, which ran for seven hundred performances in Paris.  Wilder removed the songs, André Previn rewrote the score, but the film still manages to capture the essence of that mythical City of Lights where romance is etched on every paving stone.

Irma la Douce may not be Wilder’s best film (it is clearly too long and flabby, its humour relying far too heavily on tacky double entendre) but it still has great entertainment value and manages to evoke some of the poetry of earlier great French films by René Clair and Marcel Carné.  The film’s unmistakable Gallic feel is largely down to its set designer Alexandre Trauner, who had cut his professional teeth working on some of the greatest French films, such as Hôtel du Nord (1938)  and Les Enfants du paradis (1945).

The film features a memorable rematch of Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine, who had previously appeared together in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960).  MacLaine was in fact a last minute replacement for Marilyn Monroe, who died tragically shortly before the film went into production.  Jack Lemmon was a favourite of Billy Wilder and starred in seven of his films, most famously in Some Like it Hot.  Much of the appeal of Irma La Douce is down to the sizzling on-screen rapport between Lemmon and MacLaine.  The latter may catch our eye with her famous emerald green stockings but it is Lemmon who shines brightest, particularly with his hilarious portrayal of an England lord, which owes a great deal to Terry-Thomas.

© James Travers 2008

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