Irma La Douce

Set mainly in a bawdy-house that is never in the least bawdy, Billy Wilder's Irma La Douce is the kind of fantasy much favoured by Hollywood -- a sex comedy from which sex has been carefully eradicated.

Though Irma's 143-minute length is more than a little too much of a very good thing, it's hard to dislike a movie that keeps giving you more good stuff.

Lemmon and Maclaine fail to reproduce the chemistry from The Apartment but this slight film is not as ignorable as reputation suggests.

Irma also misses on several important counts, and the fact that it does illustrates the sizable problems inherent in an attempt to convert a legit musical into a tuneless motion picture farce.

A good example of how a movie can be utterly characteristic of its maker and still fall with a resounding thud...

Wilder's soft-centred cynicism provides frequent enough laughs without too many longueurs.

Billy Wilder is a great director and you can't find too many actress es better than Shirley MacLaine, so when Jack Lemmon appears on the screen, the triple-treat is complete.

The latest Wilder-Diamond-J.L. gagorama has everything: lovely color shots of Paris, lots of laughs, tears, action, and two of our best film actors, Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine. Everything but charm and style, the essentials for its genre

A magical and beguiling tale of love of the mean streets of Paris.

One of Billy Wilder's lesser films, Irma La Douce relies entirely on its two stars, Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine, neither of whom is particularly good or funny, despite the masks and the accents.