Irma la Douce (1963) – DVD

***½/**** Image A Sound B
starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Lou Jacobi, Bruce Yarnell
screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond
directed by Billy Wilder

by Walter Chaw Until Irma la Douce (1963), movie prostitutes were of the touch-me-not variety, the Holly Golightly breed who invariably paid the (sometimes ultimate) price for the oldest profession–they were never happy, bright, and chirpily philosophical. The casting of Shirley MacLaine as the titular poule makes sense in that just three years after Billy Wilder's The Apartment, it brought her and Jack Lemmon back together as lovers divided by sordid circumstance (and cohabiting an apartment again, as it happens), but Wilder's wish to cast Marilyn Monroe instead would have been the better choice. She is, after all, far less burdened by the weight of intelligence and melancholy than MacLaine (or, at least, her screen persona is)–qualities that serve MacLaine extremely well in the darkly-hued The Apartment, and much less so in what is literally a gauzy Technicolor slapstick musical sans song-and-dance numbers. Still, what works about Irma la Douce is the sprightliness of the interplay between the elfin Irma and her arguably more elfin beau/benefactor Nestor (Lemmon), both finding in Wilder the sort of director who understood the quality of the "attractive goons, winsome losers, and sympathetic heels" Ethan Mordden described as comprising the prototypical Wilder hero. And it is that marriage of paradoxes, particularly the one which finds MacLaine cast as the bimbo, that gives Irma la Douce the kind of dark, self-reflexive undercurrent that defined the unrest of '60s cinema.

So Irma the Sweet and her pimp Hippolyte (Bruce Yarnell, whose checked suit's moiré problems the DVD never solves) have a falling out after recently-fired gendarme Nestor bests Hippolyte in a drunken brawl. In need of a new "mec," Irma vows her allegiance to Nestor, who in turn disguises himself as wealthy Lord X so that his beloved need not sell her body to the night. Described by Wilder as the story of a man jealous of himself, Irma mistakes Nestor's graveyard shifts at the local butcher and fish market for indiscretions, and conspires to run away with Lord X, leading to a murder, a prison term, and the unlikeliest of contrivances, a Catholic wedding that takes less than three hours.

The prescribed happy ending of Irma la Douce comes with a metaphysical twist that undermines at once the picture's knowledge of itself as theatre and underscores the elasticity of cinema in creating illusion–the kind of directorial megalomania generally associated with Alfred Hitchcock. An inopportune birth is preceded by the Falstaff character Moustache (Lou Jacobi, in a role earmarked for the ailing Charles Laughton) hilariously motioning for the priest performing a wedding to speed it up a little in what could sub for a director's cameo, both events attended by the entire company in a way that is merely puzzling before becoming invasive. The idea of the viewer as voyeur–from the crowd gathered around the closed door behind which Irma is experiencing labour to the closing shots where a door is thrown open and we, the audience, play the invading throng–is explored with a sort of sugar-coated viciousness by Wilder here, pinging off the sleazy travelogue carnival façades of his previous film, One, Two, Three. Irma and Nestor's first night together is preceded by Nestor blocking off the window's to Irma's room and even asking Irma to don a blindfold while we sit amused by his humiliation at having to strip before his heart's desire. Irma herself strips several times, each seen illicitly in a mirror, Wilder inviting us to participate in the sort of leer that Hitchcock's Psycho (the quintessential Sixties picture) introduced to our cinematic vocabulary: Wilder the pimp, Irma the whore, and we the John.

Ostensibly a light-hearted farce of the Indiscreet variety, the picture has moments of hilarity; with Lemmon at the peak of his lovable loser, cross-dressing game, the picture is more obviously a companion to Some Like it Hot than The Apartment. A montage of Nestor at work is perversely cheerful, laying André Previn's jaunty, Oscar-winning score over scenes of Nestor, soaked in blood, carrying carcasses around with Wilder comparing his hero's head first to a severed boar's, then to a head of cabbage. Nothing about Irma la Douce can be taken at face value, however, with Wilder ever caustic and unsympathetic as the film itself moves along with a blithe airiness. The interest of the director's films can usually be defined in terms of that discomfort: the tension between a film in a familiar genre and a director who delights in delivering a draught of acid as chaser.

THE DVD
The hyper-reality of Irma la Douce is brought to eye-catching life in MGM's release of the film, offered in its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio in a 16:9 anamorphic video transfer that only really fails in the abovementioned moiré problems with Hippolyte's suit and, in chapter 11, during a brief shot of a similarly-patterned garage door outside Irma's hotel. A couple of moments of edge enhancement don't distract from the fact that this film, with its expansive sets and mattes, deserves to be seen in its widescreen incarnation. The original English mono track is absolutely adequate, as spare and impressive/unimpressive as the disc's sole special feature: a long trailer that includes an animated film synopsis.

143 minutes; NR; 2.35:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 2.0 (Mono), French DD 2.0 (Mono), Spanish DD 2.0 (Mono); CC; French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; MGM