Irma la Douce (1963)

Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

an ambitious but ultimately ineffective debut endeavor.

Luckily she's much younger here.This show is not bad, not bad at all. It has some eye candy AND while it's no French tickler, it's more fun than getting the pimp-hand.Irma is worth seeing but I can't watch this more frequently than every 7 - 10 years.

Anyone who liked The Apartment will love to see Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine paired up again in Irma la Douce. As a kid, I saw this one much more often than their black-and-white counterpart. I loved the colors and fashions, and I remember wishing I would grow up and naturally sport Shirley's adorable haircut.In Irma la Douce, Shirley plays a streetwalker, and Jack plays a policeman. A match made in heaven! In Paris, the red light district is a very corrupt place, and all the cops usually look the other way. Not Jack Lemmon! He's a very moral guy, and after he gets fired from the force, he tries to convince her to quit her job. She's a very experienced and successful prostitute, and without her income, they'll have no bread and butter. What's the young couple to do? I know it doesn't really sound like a very funny plot on paper, but it's quite hilarious. A lovely screwball sex comedy of the 1960s without showing anything inappropriate, Irma la Douce is a total classic. Watch it for the jokes, watch it for Shirley's darling look, or watch it for the inventive plot. Just watch it!

So let's try and put things right,shall we? Billy Wilder had intended to film "Irma La Douce" as a musical.He even went so far as to have MacLaine and Lemmon record vocal tracks(which still,presumably,lie is some Hollywood vault?) However,when it came to actually start the filming Wilder found that (strangely) the songs slowed down the action.So what did he do?Tighten up the script,drop an odd song or two? NO! He ditched ALL the songs,thereby negating the movie as a musical. He just used the music(tinkered with by Andre Previn) as a background track. To add insult to injury Previn got the Oscar for best score,when the greatest majority of the music was by Marguerite Monnot,who wrote ALL the original music of the stage musical. It may be a great comedy as it is,but it is a travesty of the musical, and it's a great shame that we will never now see a movie with the songs included. Billy Wilder,hang your head in shame!

I was enchanted by the stage musical comedy on which the film is based. I saw the stage production with fabulous long-legged dancer Juliette Prouse in the role of Irma. As I recall, it was done as a fantasy, with sets that were deliberately non-realistic, sort of cartoonish. In other words, nothing was meant to be taken too seriously, which was just the right tone for the story. Miss Prouse and the production were marvelous.When I saw the film version, I was very disappointed. Not only was it n longer a musical, it had lost all the lightheartedness of the original. Shirley MacLaine once was also a great dancer, making her mark in the stage production of Pajama Game in which she performed the dance for "Steam Heat" (choreographed by Bob Fosse) as the stand-in for Carol Haney who was injured. But there is no dance in the film version.If I hadn't seen the stage production first, perhaps I might have enjoyed the film version better.