Irma la Douce (1963)

Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

best movie i've ever seen.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

At two and a half hours, Billy Wilder's soufflé falls flatter than a crepe in this laborious comedy about a naive ex-cop and a hooker with a heart of gold.The snail-paced story dies fast as the plot plods along. Jack Lemmon is the ex-cop who ends up as a pimp to Shirley MacLaine's Irma la Douce, a Parisian prostitute. He falls in love with her and decides the only way to have her to himself is to disguise himself as a rich British lord who pays her only to play cards. To earn the money to pay her, he works nights in a meat market schlepping huge slabs of meat.Eventually he decides, with the help of the local bar owner (Lou Jacobi) he hatches a plan to "kill off" the lord and go straight. When he symbolically throws the disguise (which isn't very good) into the Seine, his rival pimp sees him and reports the murder of the lord. From there, the plot churns on for another 30 minutes to resolve the situation.Comedy needs quick pacing; farce needs even sharper pacing. If it lumbers along as this film does, the spark simply dies out, leaving a fizzled pile of ashes.MacLaine and Lemmon try hard, but it just doesn't work. Jacobi becomes annoying, and even his final "to the audience" line is a dud. Among the co-stars are Bruce Yarnell as Ox, Herschel Bernardi as the police inspector, Joan Shawlee as the Amazon, Grace Lee Whitney as Kiki, Hope Holiday as Lolita, Cliff Osmond as the police sergeant, and Howard McNear as the concierge. Brief bits by James Caan and Bill Bixby.

Billy Wilder's shark-jumping screwball romp set in le quartier rouge of Paris, couples for the second time the riveting pair from THE APARTMENT (1960), Lemmon plays a goofball cop Nestor Patou, only soon to be discharged from his duty by dint of his impetuous intervention of the local sex industry, and becomes a pimp of the numero uno streetwalker, our titular Irma la douce (MacLaine).Poules and their mecs, this is the basic bundle of the oldest profession, Nestor's foolhardiness and knight errantry conquers Irma right on the spot, not to mention that he also physically defeats her abusive (now ex-)pimp Hippolyte the Ox (Yarnell), a set piece reminiscent of the early silent comedy sketches, rough-hewn, clumsy but laboriously funny. So now Nestor is the red-hot new mec, even been elected as the chairman of the MPPA (Mec's Paris Protective Association), but like any man who has his manhood to protect, as much as he loves Irma, and vice versa, he cannot get over the fact that many a customer can share his darling love's company and body for sexual pleasure, and he in fact lives off her for all the income.A highly specious plan has been hatched with the aid of Moustache (Jacobi), the genial proprietor of the bar around the corner, whose past experiences enlivens the story with its running joke "and that's another story" until a pretty nonsensical but zany finish to leave audience in utter astonishment and amusement. What is the plan? Nester disguises himself as an ageing British gentleman Lord X, who will patronize Irma twice a week, each time offers her 500 francs (the money he would borrow from Moustache), so that, Irma doesn't need to see any other customers thanks to the munificent gestures from Lord X, when Irma gives the money to Nestor, he will return the money back to Moustache.Of course, the plan only sounds plausible on paper, the very first time, almost all the 500 has been squandered on champagnes for celebration. In order to earn extra money to pay back to Moustache, Nestor has to sneak out of their flat in the middle of night every day to work in the local food market, dealing with fish, pork, vegetables and fruits, which exhausts him and he must sneak back in the morning before Irma wakes up. That's where the story goes berserk like a folly propelled by absurd incidents and drollness, up to a point, rationality will be completely thrown out of the window.Marvellously, the viewer will not feel too much of being cheated or exasperated by the outright cop-out into a spuriousness-prone farce, mostly owing to two leading stars' comic aptitude, Lemmon engages in with unswerving gusto, from strictly choreographed slapstick to onerous physical labor, to invite audience to stand by him and pat him on the back no matter how ridiculous the story-line unwinds; MacLaine, on the other hand, oozes deadly sexiness in the common working-girl-with-a-golden-heart formula, it is strange that she receives an Oscar nomination while Lemmon misses, the competition in these two categories are usually not on the same level, especially after Hollywood's Golden Age, the quality of female roles has been drastically dwindled ever since. Moreover, Lou Jacobi should have walked away with at least an Oscar nomination for his firmly supportive but equally opportune scene-stealing act.Among Wilder's tremendous body of work, IRMA LA DOUCE doesn't have any single chance to claim best, but instead, it preserves itself in a niche as an odd experiment whose sole objective is to give audience a buzz, and it has accomplished its goal with admirable dash, no one can deny, that's something only can be manufactured with the help of a master-hand and intelligent-mind.

A sweet street soliciting girl of the Red Light District in Paris (the delightful Shirley MacLaine) meets a young and naive police officer (Jack Lemmon) who becomes her new pimp after a big turmoil in which he arrested all the "girls" thus spoiling the understanding in force between the police and the pimps union. Because of that he is expelled from the police on a false accusation of bribery, returns to the Red Light District, has a comic fight with Irma's current pimp, defeats him with much luck and replaces him. But since he has fallen in love with Irma he's not happy seeing her going with other men all the time while practicing her "profession". Therefore he concocts a plan with the help of a friendly bar owner (Lou Jacobi) to take her off the street and disguises himself as an English lord who as a "client" keeps Irma busy for hours playing cards with him under a generous payment with money he earns by hard work in a market at night while her is asleep to prevent her of becoming aware of the whole situation. But from then on the story gets complicated and unfolds itself in a series of funny episodes and varied gags to which we cannot demand logic or likelihood since we are in the presence of a comedy. The performance of both main protagonists is brilliant and the movie is quite enjoyable.

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.