Irma la Douce (1963)

Written by CinemaSerf on January 15, 2024

I love the first half hour of this film. It's all about the fastidious policeman "Patou" (Jack Lemmon) who is unwittingly transferred into a Parisian red light district where he encounters the eponymous hooker (Shirley MacLaine) plying her trade with her little dog. He smells a rat and immediately calls for a police raid on the hotel in which she works. Bad mistake! Not least because one of his bosses is enjoying the hospitality of the house - so he gets fired. Now pretty much resident in the café of "Moustache" (Lou Jacobi) across from her workplace, he becomes increasingly frustrated that this woman that he is now enamoured of is still working, so he concocts a cunning plan to adopt the identity of a visiting British lord and to woo her into a relationship that's exclusive. Initially this is a success - paid for by borrowed money from his new best friend, but when "Moustache" starts to want repaying, "Patou" has to start working overnight in the adjacent meat market and his burning of the candles at both ends soon causes consternation with "Irma". Eventually he concludes that his lordly lark isn't sustainable and so fakes his suicide. The razor-sharp mind of "Insp. Lefevre" (Herschel Bernardi) takes a different view though, and soon "Patou" in in jail for murder! Now he has to escape, prove his innocence (quite innovatively as it happens) and hope that his gal hasn't got bored of all of these shenanigans and found true love elsewhere. MacLaine puts her heart and soul into this - dancing, teasing and playing the game for all it's worth - and she's entertaining to boot. Lemmon was never my favourite comedy actor, but here he uses her and a strong screenplay from Billy Wilder and IAL Diamond to create an engaging character that, for the most part, manages to stay on the right side of farce as the plot proceeds from the sublime to the ridiculous. It does drag a little in the middle, and the preposterous does start to overwhelm it then too, but it rebounds well for a last half hour of quirky, entertaining cinema with a twist in its tail.