Irma la Douce [Media Notes 27]

I watched Irma la Douce (“Irma the Sweet”), from 1963, a couple of days ago. It stars Shirley McLaine in the title role of a Parisian street-walker and Jack Lemon as her strait-laced ex-cop lover and eventual husband ¬– sorry about the spoiler, but really, anyone who watches these kinds of movies knows that that’s how they flow. I watched it for those two, and the fact that I’d read about the film when it first came out but didn’t see it. Where’d I read about it? Possibly in Playboy, though I don’t really know.

It is a musical comedy directed by Billy Wilder, a legendary director and producer. The music on the sound track was so insistent that it felt like a Fred Astair musical without Fred and Ginger (or Cyd Charisse or any other female altar), though there was one dance scene, and without any singing. It was highly stylized in a way I don’t remember having seen before. That is to say, the musical score seemed prominent in a way I don’t recall seeing/hearing in a film that wasn’t a musical. The most obvious aspect of that mismatch is the volume of that music in relation to the rest of the sound in a given scene.

Whatever.

As for the plot, it’s complicated and I’m not going to attempt to summarize it. What that plot is about is obvious, in a vague and confused way. It’s about sex, love, the social order, and bending the rules in order to maintain that order. MacLaine is clearly and obviously and unashamedly a prostitute. Lemon is clearly head over heals in love with her, but he cannot stand the fact that she IS a prostitute. The complicated plot has Lemon living with MacLaine as a cop who’s been cashiered from his job for busting a bunch of prostitutes who’d been paying protection to his boss. MacLaine, of course, is one of them. In order to keep her from having to sell her body, while he’s sleeping in her bed and living off her income, he concocts and elaborate (and incoherent) scheme in which he borrows money from the owner of a bar so that he can pretend to be a British lord who’s willing to pay MacLaine a goodly sum, twice a week, to spend the night playing solitaire with him. The scheme collapses, naturally, thereby generating farcical plot complications.

Still, I enjoyed watching it, absurd though it is. FWIW it was a hit at the time and was the fifth highest grossing film of 1963. I think it would repay painstaking description, analysis, and decoding. But that’s more than I’m willing to undertake at this time.