Irma La Douce

Made at a time when the Hollywood studios were churning out sanitized sentimentality in gaudy colours this "adult" MGM comedy about an innocent gendarme, Nestor Patou (Jack Lemmon), who becomes a pimp to Parisian streetwalker, Irma La Douce (Shirley MacLaine), re-teams the stars of Wilder's hit, The Apartment (1960) and was adapted by the direcotor with I.A.L. Diamond from a play by Alexandre Breffort which itself had been transformed into a successful Broadway musical.

It is unfortunate that Wilder did not run with the musical version and returned to the original play for there is very little left here but a thin story and equally thin characters spread even thinner over an excessive running time. the director himself deeming the film a dud. The subject of prostitution of course appealed to an audience having lived through the sublimated domesticity of the 50s and the movie was a huge commercial success but Wilder's coy treatment of it, massaged by Andre Previn's Oscar-winning score, now appears laboriously fake and tiresomely irrelevant. A bit of chorus line kick would have gone a long way to amending this .

FYI: The role of Moustache, played by Lou Jacobi was originally intended for Charles Laughton; Tura Satana, star of Russ Meyer's Faster, Pussycat, Kill! Kill! (1966) appears as one of the hookers; and a very young James Caan gets a walk-on as one of the customers on the Rue Casanova.

 

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