Just Lucky, I Guess

Irma La Douce. "How did a nice girl like you get into a racket like this?" a customer asks. "Well," says Shirley MacLaine, pulling on green silk stockings, "I was studying music at the Paris Conservatory, and on the night of my first recital, the piano lid fell on my hand, and . . ."

For the world's oldest question, Shirley has this and assorted other heart-tugging answers. But there is no need to feel sorry for her; she loves her work, and so does Director Billy Wilder (The Apartment). With his favorite writer, I. A. L. Diamond, and his favorite Apartmentmates, Jack Lemmon and Shirley, Wilder has turned the Paris-London-Broadway musical show of several years ago into a raffishly sophisticated screen comedy that makes streetwalking seem almost as wholesome as the 50-mile hike. The score has been reduced to background music, and Wilder has wisely done away with all of the original verr-ee French accents. But he has added an ingredient that was perhaps mercifully lacking on the stage: where the theater's Irma was the only girl on view, the screen now swings with poules on parade--Kiki the Cossack in fur-topped boots, Lolita in heart-shaped sunglasses, the Zebra Twins, and a nameless tart with a cantilevered bust.

All is going well at the Casanova Hotel ("They charge by the hour; nobody could afford to live there") near Paris' Les Halles. The girls are busy and happy, and Irma the Sweet is the busiest and happiest. Then disaster strikes. A new flic comes on the beat--Lemmon playing a flatfoot so square that he even pays for the apples he filches. He is scandalized by the hustlers' bustling and phones headquarters for a raid. Soon the arrondissement is ringing with the soldo, soldo, soldo klaxon of the police wagon, and the minuscule lobby of the Casanova looks like a coeducational locker room as the guests are herded downstairs in angry dishabille.

But at the station, instead of being decorated for valor, Lemmon is fired: the chief inspector had been caught in the raid. Creeping sheepishly back to Les Halles, Jack gets an I-told-you-so from Moustache (Lou Jacobi), a philosophical bistro keeper: "To be overly honest in a dishonest world is like plucking a chicken against the wind: you'll end up with a mouthful of feathers."

Irma bubbles and struts through every Technicolor foot. Shirley MacLaine is an adorable golliwog in green lingerie and inky wig; her flamboyant self-assurance is the perfect foil for the bumbling Lemmon. With a face that can twinkle like a terrier's or crumple into bloodhoundish gloom at the first unkind word, Jack makes the most (once he's fired as a cop) of being Shirley's mec--the only pimp in Paris with the principles of an eagle scout.

Irma La Douce is no animated French postcard; its sexiness is played for belly laughs, not snickers. By pruning the script of prurience, Wilder and Diamond have managed to treat the sale of sex with vulgar good humor. Irma has no moral, of course; yet as an essay on virtue v. venery, it is as uplifting as a graduation address--and ten times funnier.

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