In 1963, Billy Wilder’s Irma La Douce was one of the biggest box-office hits of the year, grossing twice as much as The Great Escape and The Birds. Yet this popular movie has been almost completely forgotten by film history, even to fans of Wilder or stars Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine (the same trio had made a masterpiece, The Apartment, three years earlier). It doesn’t represent the best work of those legends, but Irma provides tart entertainment. At least some of the movie’s popularity can be chalked up to its subject, which was pretty risqU for the time: Lemmon plays a Paris policeman who falls in love with a prostitute (MacLaine). The script was adapted from a stage musical, but Wilder decided to cut the songs, instead developing the humor and romance into his own blend of bittersweet perversity; this Technicolor-fantasy Paris is kind of a dark cousin to Gigi. Lemmon is in his prime period of hand-wringing self-doubt, and MacLaine is perfectly in tune with his rhythms, especially in scenes that add tenderness to the sometimes quasy mix of moods. Ironically–given the nixing of the songs–the film won its only Oscar for Andre Previn’s adaptation of the stage play’s music into a wordless orchestral score. –Robert Horton
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Irma La Douce was affable! You have to see that this movie! A astonishing performance by Jack Lemmon & Shirley MacLaine make Irma La Douce a “have got to settle” movie!
The strange cast includes Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Lou Jacobi, Bruce Yarnell, Herschel Bernardi. This cast just make Irma La Douce the more extraordinary!
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