Although it proved to be one of the biggest commercial successes of director Billy Wilder's long career, for me "Irma La Douce" is one of the rare misfires in his catalogue. Obviously seeking to capitalise on the chemistry between stars Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine, so good together in "The Apartment", Wilder here adapts and anglicises a contemporary French-language musical, stripping out the songs, although Andre Previn is back for Wilder, providing an entertaining, Gallic-flavoured soundtrack to add local colour. It has to be said too that the street settings of Paris are vividly rendered, the better for being filmed in colour.
Of course, societal attitudes towards the subject matter here of a group of assorted pimps profiting from putting women to work in the oldest profession have changed, not, I'd like to think, that they were ever wholly in favour in the first place. There's an argument for saying it's not really a suitable subject for film entertainment at all, as much as I will say is that I'm not expecting a Hollywood remake any time soon.
Although credible plotting rarely goes hand in hand with musical entertainments, it has to be said that this one is particularly hairbrained as sad-sack-become-sad-sacked French cop Lemmon falls for the green-stockinged top prostitute MacLaine, but now unemployed himself, relies on her to support him financially by doing what she apparently does best after he moves in with her. This however is too much for his jealous pride so to get her off the street, with the help of the local benevolent cafe-owner, he concocts a cock-eyed plan to reinvent himself as a wealthy eccentric English Lord with no interest in sex, who hooks up with MacLaine and then pays her generously for sitting through their assignations playing cards all night. To make the money to pay her though, he has to flog himself doing manual labour at the local meat-market (no pun intended!), which makes him irritable and her jealous so that he decides the only thing to do is to kill off his creation. This too backfires spectacularly leading to a pretty daft denouement and a silly resurrection scene at the end.
I didn't feel that the two leads sparked as well here as before and the plotting was just too ridiculous for words. Wilder may have thought he was further pushing back the permissive boundaries of screen entertainment at the time but I personally found the premise of the film, requiring MacLaine and her fellow actresses to regularly disrobe and put-out (as well as having Irma suffer a slap in the face and enter into a cat-fight with a fellow-worker) to be off-puttingly objectionable.
Overlong and lacking in real humour, this was one French Fancy whose taste I didn't really savour.
Of course, societal attitudes towards the subject matter here of a group of assorted pimps profiting from putting women to work in the oldest profession have changed, not, I'd like to think, that they were ever wholly in favour in the first place. There's an argument for saying it's not really a suitable subject for film entertainment at all, as much as I will say is that I'm not expecting a Hollywood remake any time soon.
Although credible plotting rarely goes hand in hand with musical entertainments, it has to be said that this one is particularly hairbrained as sad-sack-become-sad-sacked French cop Lemmon falls for the green-stockinged top prostitute MacLaine, but now unemployed himself, relies on her to support him financially by doing what she apparently does best after he moves in with her. This however is too much for his jealous pride so to get her off the street, with the help of the local benevolent cafe-owner, he concocts a cock-eyed plan to reinvent himself as a wealthy eccentric English Lord with no interest in sex, who hooks up with MacLaine and then pays her generously for sitting through their assignations playing cards all night. To make the money to pay her though, he has to flog himself doing manual labour at the local meat-market (no pun intended!), which makes him irritable and her jealous so that he decides the only thing to do is to kill off his creation. This too backfires spectacularly leading to a pretty daft denouement and a silly resurrection scene at the end.
I didn't feel that the two leads sparked as well here as before and the plotting was just too ridiculous for words. Wilder may have thought he was further pushing back the permissive boundaries of screen entertainment at the time but I personally found the premise of the film, requiring MacLaine and her fellow actresses to regularly disrobe and put-out (as well as having Irma suffer a slap in the face and enter into a cat-fight with a fellow-worker) to be off-puttingly objectionable.
Overlong and lacking in real humour, this was one French Fancy whose taste I didn't really savour.