I saw Irma la Douce almost in its entirety this weekend, and I have to ask – how did this flick get made? I have this image of Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond and whoever else from the rest of that hard-boiled crew getting together and saying something like:
“I’ll bet we can make a movie about Paris Hookers and their mecs and sell it to the American Public.”
"Go on. You’d never get it past the censors.’ (They’re still boiling over what they would have cut out of the old Adolphe Menjou version of “The Front Page”)
“No, I bet I can do it. We play it as a light romantic comedy. There’s this Fernch play we can redo…”
“Romantic? Get outta here.”
“I’ll bet you three pictures I can do it. We’ll get Jack Lemmon to play an innocent cop – he does innocents well. Look how good he did in our “The Apartment”. we won’t mention what the girls do at all. A lot of 'em won’t even realize it. And the ones who do will feel as if they’re in on the joke.”
The fact that it’s set in Paris (where naughtiness is a given, among other misconceptions) likely made it more acceptable to American audiences. It would have been bolder to set it in, say, Boston.
I realize that’s a factor (I figure that’s how they got away with making Gigi), but I’m still surprised – you can kinda sorta rationalize Gigi away, but it seems harder to me to sugarcoat Parisian streetwalkers.
I loved the sets on that movie, particularly that street where all the hookers hung out. It’s a gorgeous thing to look at - the cinematography is terrific. In fact, I love 2/3 of Irma la Douce. It’s when Jack Lemmon starts in with the hokey veddy British customer routine that I must turn it off.
That sort of movie (a story of a prostitute saved by love, done as a romance) was actually common at the time. Irma La Douce came out in 1963 and Breakfast at Tiffany’s came out in 1961. In Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the hero and the heroine are both prostitutes, although they both try to pretend that they aren’t. The hero pretends that he’s a writer suffering writer’s block who picks up money on the side as a rich woman’s gigolo. The heroine pretends that she’s a party girl who earns a little extra cash passing messages from a gangster in jail and (apparently) having one-night stands for money. That sort of story was considered very sophisticated and romantic at the time.