Irma the Sweet

TCM ran a night of Shirley MacLaine's films not too long ago. One of the films they ran then but that I hadn't posted on before is coming up again: Irma La Douce, tomorrow (June 10) at noon.

A narrator (apparently an uncredited Louis Jourdan) tells us about a particular working-class section of Paris that's up all night as opposed to some of the more well-to-do parts; the reason it never sleeps is because, well, the women there sleep for money. (OK. Sorry for the terrible pun.) Intersperesed throughout the opening credits is one such prostitute, Irma (Shirley MacLaine), whom we see giving different clients different reasons on why she became a prostitute.

The prostitutes are able to ply their trade mostly because the cop that patrols the beat looks the other way. Well, at least he looks the other way for a price, being on the take. He goes to the café run by Moustache (Lou Jacobi), where a lot of the prostitutes and their pimps, including Irma's pimp Hippolyte, gather; it's there that the cop gets his bribes paid. At least, until the police commanders go through the regular schedule of assigning rookie cops to their beats.

Nestor (Jack Lemmon) has been assigned to this particular part of Paris, and he's a decidedly honest cop. But one who's also a bit of a naïf, as he seems to believe Irma's excuses when he asks her about what she does. When he figures out what the women do, he has a whole bunch of them arrested and taken down to the station. Things don't go quite the way Nestor expects, however, as somebody higher up apparently wants to use the prostitutes as a safety valve. Nestor gets framed for bribery and summarily fired.

And yet, Nestor decides he's going to return to the neighborhood where everything went wrong. Then, in a wacky twist, he becomes friens with Irma, and tries to "save" her from her pimp. He does, but at a price of becoming a kept man. He moves in with Irma, but she insists that it's unbecoming for a prostitute not to be able to support herself, or even the man she's with. She very much believes that Nestor shouldn't have a job.

So Nestor comes up with a bizarre scheme of his own. He'll take an overnight job at the butcher's market, while also coming up with an alter ego, the British "Lord X". As Lord X, he'll become the sole client of Irma, with the money he makes at the meat market going to pay for Lord X's dalliances with Irma. Of course, Hippolyte is still in the background, and Irma wonders why Nestor is always so tired. And Nestor has not yet thought of a way to end this scheme. The way he picks, however, doesn't quite work....

It's a wonder how director Billy Wilder was able to get Irma La Douce made, since the Production Code was still in effect, even though it was beginning to weaken. It's based on a French stage musical, and you can see why Wilder would have liked the material, although the songs were more or less excised from the movie. (My understanding is that composer André Previn's musical themes here are based on the songs from the musical, but there's no singing of note.)

However, Irma La Douce is a bit of a one-joke movie, and unlike Some Like It Hot where the joke is only stretched to two hours, and the joke doesn't really begin until a good 20-30 minutes in, Irma La Douce runs over 140 minutes and the joke gets staler much more quickly. It also doesn't help that both Lemmon and MacLaine seem a bit miscast here. They both try hard and are definitely professional, but I'm sorry to say that Irma La Douce is not one of Billy Wilder's greatest movies.