Jack Lemmon makes me laugh. My weakness at the movies is slapstick comedy and as Billy Wilder’s Irma la Douce opens, he’s just a cop named Nestor twirling his nightstick while walking his beat on the Rue Casanova in Paris. Already I was snickering at his loose gait, the slow turn of his head and the slight scrunch of his round, open face when he realizes something is awry. It’s the rubbery expressions and tics of Jim Carrey combined with the aw-shucks stammers of Jimmy Stewart.
Nestor’s brand new on the job and slow to gather that his street is favored by the local prostitutes, who lounge on the sidewalk outside the by-the-night hotel for convenience’s sake. He’s honest and naive, and calls a raid, for which he’s chewed out and fired by his boss, a coincidental “guest” in the hotel at the time.
The real goofiness takes off after Nestor defends the honor of the most popular girl by dusting her abusive pimp in a barfight. She’s Irma (Shirley MacLaine), known for her green underwear and Coquette, her small, Champagne-drinking dog that she takes with her everywhere. She’s in high demand and expertly raises her take with tales of woe that she fabricates on the spot. She welcomes Nestor in as her flatmate and de facto manager, but as a man smitten with her and unhappy with her line of work, he schemes to get her off the streets and with him exclusively: by disguising himself as an eccentric and anonymous British lord who hires her into a room for 500 francs a night, during which time they only talk and play double solitaire.
It’s an exhausting and costly ruse that Nestor must soon supplement by working in the wee hours at the local outdoor market, stacking produce and lugging meat. I laughed watching him stagger across the cobblestones with a beef carcass slung over his shoulder, like an ant attempting to make off with a hot dog bun.
Nestor’s “Lord X” persona incorporates a bowler hat, gray suit with cravat, dandy walking stick and a pair of large false teeth and bushy eyebrows both of which Lemmon waggles overtime in concert with a hilarious mock British accent, complete with all the sticky wickets and capital!s. It’s childish, ridiculous, and an excuse for scene-seizing by Lemmon, but I enjoyed it immensely, laughing those laughs that make one euphoric for having expelled them.
The movie itself goes on far too long—nearly two and a half hours!—dashing over a brief imprisonment for Nestor and an even faster wedding ceremony, after which Irma births their child right there in the sacristy. Irma la Douce is middling as a technicolor fairytale of prostitution, but it’s Lemmon’s over the top performance I’ll recall most fondly.