Irma La Douce (1963)

Irma La Douce: 1963, dir. Billy Wilder. Seen on DVD (Jan 9).
Irma La Douce was Billy Wilder’s most commercially successful film (on initial release, anyway). It also appears to be his silliest film. I’m not saying that like it’s a good thing, either.
I didn’t expect much from Irma La Douce. This is what happens when you read too many film books, I suppose. Also, I tend to dislike Sixties “sophisticated” sex comedies … which might explain why I have this completely inexplicable affection for Kiss Me, Stupid, Wilder’s anti-sophisticated sex comedy.

In fact, I have to wonder if Kiss Me, Stupid was a reaction to Irma La Douce—that Wilder had to create an antidote to the pastel colors and tired sexual stereotypes and acceptable-to-Production-Code script alterations and so forth. Irma La Douce is one of the very few Wilder films in color (I can’t remember if he made a color film before this one, but if he did, it wasn’t a memorable film).
I have to wonder also why Irma La Douce was Wilder’s most commercially successful film. I didn’t find it particularly wonderful. I like the opening sequence, in which Irma (Shirley MacLaine) tells these tales of woe about how she became a prostitute, in order to get bigger tips from her clients. I like the other streetwalkers (Tura Satana is in this movie, all too briefly), I like the dog, I like the hideous wallpaper that rivals even the wallpaper in Amelie.
The story is trite and full of cliches. Irma is one of those prostitutes with a heart of gold that populate so many Hollywood movies. She meets Nestor, an ex-policement who inadvertantly beats up her pimp (these words like “prostitute” and “pimp” are all in French so they would be acceptable to American audiences of the time) so she decides that this means he is her new man. She won’t let him earn any money, but he hates the work she does and the idea of being supported by it, so he disguises himself as an English lord who pays Irma so much money that she needs no other clients.
Which brings me to one of those plot devices that I have never been able to swallow. Even if someone is wearing a heavy disguise, if you’ve slept with him before, you’re going to recognize him when you sleep with him again. I mean, you are. There are smells and sounds and other distinguishing characteristics. And while Irma claims she has a poor memory for faces, it seems entirely implausible that she would not be able to recognize her pimp/lover/roomie in an intimate situation.
Plus, the whole disguise-as-English-lord plot twist is not very interesting. Great, we get to see Jack Lemmon in disguise again, but he was a whole lot more fun in drag in Some Like It Hot. “Lord X” is fairly dull, and his constant hints about being “only half a man” are not particularly diverting. What does Irma see in this man? And Nestor is only a likeable character because Jack Lemmon is playing him.
Irma La Douce was originally a musical, and you can get away with a thin and implausible plot in a musical. The plot is really just there to string along a bunch of musical numbers, of course. When you take away the musical numbers and try to make something out of the plot … well, you cannot expect anything substantial. Although the plot is silly and slight, the movie still lasts over two hours.
I would rank this movie down with The Seven Year Itch and Stalag 17 on the Wilder list. It’s not bad, and it is worth seeing once, but not much more.