On Sunset Boulevard

by Ed Sikov

  Billy himself had begun working on Irma la Douce, his first musical since The Emperor Waltz. Having been terribly disappointed with the way The Emperor Waltz turned out, particularly in terms of its visuals, Wilder’s original idea was to film Irma la Douce in black and white. By 1962, color technology had been in wide use for over twenty years, and Billy still detested it. It wasn’t only Technicolor that irritated him, of course. Many things rankled. One of Billy’s recurrent offscreen themes during this period was the new emphasis on Hollywood deal making, particularly on the part of stars. He railed repeatedly against the proliferation of independent production companies, a trend from which he himself tended to profit. (One, Two, Three was coproduced by his own Pyramid company in association with the Mirisches, and even though it bombed, he was paid handsomely and retained complete artistic control.) Hollywood filmmakers don’t talk about making movies anymore, Billy declared. Instead, it’s all about whether to incorporate in Liechtenstein or Liberia. “Deals are so complicated it takes five lawyers eight weeks at Romanoff’s to work them out. They ought to have an Academy Award for the ‘Best Deal of the Year.’”

  Jack Lemmon was different, or so Billy said. “Jack comes to a picture to do a job. He isn’t spending months with his lawyers over billing clauses and whether or not he gets a chauffeur-driven Cadillac on the set and a masseuse every day.” Jack Lemmon signed on to Irma la Douce in early February 1961. He let his lawyers do the talking for him, and they spoke impressively. For his participation, Lemmon got an unspecified salary up front, a hefty 15 percent of the profits, and a deferred salary of $100,000. Added to the deals already finagled by Wilder and MacLaine, United Artists and the Mirisches were left holding the bag. If Irma la Douce did poorly at the box office, the financiers would be out of luck but the stars and the director would still walk away with piles of cash in their various accounts. If the film was a hit, most of the profits would go to Wilder, Lemmon, and MacLaine. (By 1961, the fourth Mirisch brother had a sizable stake in the Mirisch Company itself. The Mirisches owned 86 percent of the capital stock, Wilder owned 10 percent, and the remaining 4 percent was divided among a few other employees.)

  Commercial considerations (which is to say the Mirisch brothers’ insistence) convinced Billy to scuttle his plans for a black-and-white musical. “I’m going to do Irma la Douce in color,” he was forced to admit shortly before the film began to roll. “I hope to capture the gray and blue of Paris. I hate violent colors. I wish the cinema would find black and white once again.”

  A more drastic revision was forced upon him when his close friend Charles Laughton fell ill in August. Laughton pretended it was an ulcer. Wilder knew it was cancer. Back in Hollywood after an August trip to Paris, Wilder stopped by to visit Laughton every few days and sat by his bed, going over dialogue for Irma la Douce, though each of them knew that Laughton would never live to play the part. On December 15, 1962, Laughton died. Billy was supposed to be one of the pallbearers but at the last moment had to bow out; he was replaced by Jean Renoir.

  Lou Jacobi took over the role of Moustache from Laughton, a decision announced on August 8. Unfortunately, Irma la Douce suffers for it. Jacobi is sometimes amusing delivering Billy’s affably world-weary pronouncements, but without any of Laughton’s exquisite timing and comportment he ultimately wears thin. Laughton would have been brilliant, and Irma would have been better.

  As the start date loomed closer, Wilder filled in the gaps in casting. The role of a tubby, corrupt, dumb-looking policeman went to Dartmouth graduate Cliff Osmond. Billy saw him on TV; Irma la Douce was his first film role. Herschel Bernardi, recruited to play Inspector LeFevre, was currently playing a cop on the television series Peter Gunn. Billy didn’t confess to watching Peter Gunn, but he did think Bernardi had been very funny in a Screen Writers Guild skit about a Spanish ambassador. Hippolyte, Irma’s first mec (or pimp, the first in the course of the film’s action, since she chronicles a string of mecs for an appalled Nestor), would also be played by a TV actor—Bruce Yarnell, of the series The Outlaws. And for the minor character role of the Hotel Casanova’s concierge, Billy turned to The Andy Griffith Show for inspiration: fumbling, fussy Howard McNear, Mayberry’s beloved barber Floyd, mans the desk at the Casanova.

  One of the aspects Billy found lacking in the Broadway musical was the presence of other prostitutes. The show was overloaded with mecs, but it lacked whores. Irma is the only one with any significant lines in the show, and for Billy, one prostitute wasn’t nearly enough. So he and Diamond added a number of women’s roles, some of which were jokes on current events and movies. There is Lolita, a Sue Lyon look-alike complete with heart-shaped sunglasses and a frosted fall; she’s played raucously by Hope Holiday (of Mrs. MacDougall fame). There is an Asian streetwalker, too—Suzette Wong. Kiki the Cossack and Mimi the MauMau serve as political humor, and Amazon Annie was as good an excuse as any to rehire Joan Shawlee.

  To prepare for her role, MacLaine personally got to know some Parisian working girls. In August, she spent four days in Les Halles talking to them in bars. “I always do this kind of research,” she explained. On stage, Irma was brassy; Shirley and Billy saw her differently. “Irma is still a woman of the streets,” MacLaine said, “but it is now a love story, and I am playing it straight—more humanly. You see, Irma is touched, really touched for the first time. Sure, she’s all used up physically, but it’s the first time she is touched emotionally by love.”

  As Nestor, Lemmon honed his skill at playing the jittery, butterfingered everyman most men wish they weren’t. “He has the greatest rapport with an audience of anyone since Chaplin,” Billy insisted. “Just by looking at him people can tell what goes on in his heart.” Before teaming up with Lemmon, Wilder’s connection to his comedy characters tended to be more detached. Now, with Lemmon, he could reveal (however hesitantly and cruelly) some of his own hidden sweetness and bumbling insecurity.

  Shirley MacLaine remarked years later that she and Lemmon hadn’t performed a single kiss in Irma la Douce but that the love they expressed on-screen scarcely required it. She also pointed out that “he was like my Aunt Bertie. I could depend on her completely, and that’s the way it is with Jack.”

  Irma la Douce is a play about prostitutes, pimps, and johns, and yet there is little payoff; nobody really gets laid. As Billy once said of this movie, “We are doing it with taste and feeling. It will strike a happy medium between Tennessee Williams and Walt Disney.” Irma la Douce is also a musical without songs. As Wilder and Diamond developed their adaptation, they gradually concluded that Marguerite Monnot’s tunes only cramped their style. “I have nothing against music,” says Wilder, “but the more I went into that story, the better I thought it was. And for me, the numbers got in the way. So, first, one of them went. Then another one went. And, one day, I made the decision, and we threw the whole score out and made it a straight picture.”

  When Wilder acknowledges that he “used some of the music for underscoring, but that was all,” he underrates his own inspiration. There’s a strained quality to Irma la Douce, one that the film’s detractors tend to dwell upon at some length, and part of it results from the inability of any of the characters to let their emotions ring out through song. The wonderful (if often-remarked) thing about Hollywood musicals is that characters can tap immediately into their emotional lives by opening their mouths and singing. The drab constraints of everyday life give way to melody, and often the more sentimental the song the more affecting the moment. Wilder does not permit his characters such easy access. Love, joy, regret, despair, bliss, triumph—these are the mainstays of musical comedy, but for Billy they’re too quick, easy, and pretty. In Irma la Douce he uses orchestral themes literally to underscore what’s going on in his characters’ hearts, but he doesn’t give those hearts the freedom to express it directly.

  Shirley MacLaine seems to have had mixed feelings about all of this. She is, after all, a musical comedienne—a dancer, too—and sparkling spontaneity is one
of her trademarks. But Wilder kept her strictly under control. Although in recent years she has expressed some irritation about Wilder, in 1970 she said that “he directs every eyelash” and she meant it as a compliment: “I feel more secure with Wilder because he will be there as a finite judge of your performance. With Hitchcock you have to be your own editor.” (This is a remarkable assertion.) William Wyler, on the other hand, “is totally inarticulate. If you ask him what the time is, he will be quite stuck for an answer—and that’s the way he directs.”

  In some ways, Irma la Douce is the opposite of One, Two, Three. Contemplation, not speed, is Wilder’s goal. There are long stretches of near silence as Wilder’s camera explores characters’ inner lives to a greater degree than ever. If box office success is any indication, he got a lot of laughs with Irma la Douce. But Billy was looking for something more—a peculiar mix of laughs and soft, languid romance. Until Irma la Douce, the mature, fully resolved love relationships Wilder created either began in the final moments of the film or else the characters shot or knifed each other. Having lived for almost sixty years, now Billy wanted to see how various not-so-young lovers behaved toward each other over the long haul.

  Only a few shots were taken on location in Paris—the scenes on the banks of the Seine across from the rue des Saints-Pères, near Alexander Trauner’s own residence, some master shots of Les Halles, and an aerial view, and the street cleaners. The markets of Les Halles, two Parisian streets, Moustache’s bistro, and Irma’s top-floor studio were constructed on a single Goldwyn set, courtesy of Trauner. “To a visitor, it could only look fake,” Wilder said, “all the wrong proportions, the ridiculous perspectives, but on the screen, believe me, everything fell into place with a stupefying authenticity.” As Trauner recalled, “I always ask directors to explain their film in a single sentence, and Wilder simply told me, ‘It’s a marvelous subject—it’s the story of a man who is jealous of himself.’”

  One of Wilder’s most cherished images appears at the beginning of Irma la Douce—a set of street-washing trucks to express Wilder’s abiding appreciation of the nighttime gutter and its dependable, every-morning cleansing. Marking the end of a long day and the simultaneous beginning of another, three street washers ride in a wide figure around the Arc de Triomphe. A young waiter from Maxim’s hoses down the sidewalk (it’s a glorified former bordello, after all); the narrator notes that the restaurant has been closed for many hours. Drawing an odd parallel, he goes on to note that “if you want to jump off the Eiffel Tower, it’s too early.” There’s a pause. “So,” the narrator explains, “if you’re looking for a little action, forget the high-rent district. You better come into our neighborhood.” Les Halles, “the stomach of Paris”—“vulgar, smelly, but alive.”

  He takes us on a tour of the meat market. Technicolor carcasses float by as the camera tracks lovingly along row after row of “brains and kidneys and tripe, pigs’ feet and calves’ heads waiting for sauce vinaigrette.” Then fish and fruit and vegetables, a progression ending with a stack of cabbages. “But man does not live by cabbage alone.” Billy cuts to a long line of cheap whores on the sidewalk. “And if that’s what you’re in the market for, just step around the corner into the rue Casanova.”

  At the local bistro, Wilder introduces us to his surrogate, the film’s expedient moral arbiter, or arbiter of expedient morals: “This is the owner. He is known as Moustache. According to the police records, he is a Romanian chicken thief named Constantinescu.” (This is a Wilder in-joke—a reference to Was Frauen träumen.) Still, perhaps because of the loss of Laughton, Wilder is less engaged with Moustache than he might have been. Moreover, Wilder’s empathy lies, surprisingly, with Irma. She is a woman who first gives her johns what they think they want, then calculatingly extracts sympathy from them—and ups her income accordingly. Irma is literally a five-dollar hooker (a Texan pays her in dollars), but thanks to the pathos she inserts into her work she earns much, much more. For instance, she tells the Texan a phony story about the United States Air Force bombing her own little French village: “If you could see those poor little orphans sleeping on the floor, the rain coming in, there are no beds yet and no roof.…” He gives her the extra tip in traveler’s checks. These men don’t pay her tips despite the tales of woe she tells them. They pay her tips because of them. Irma knows what Billy knows: people like to feel guilty, sleazy, base, and bad, particularly when they’re out to have a good time. Not only that, they enjoy paying for it.

  The comic tone of Irma la Douce is quite peculiar, especially when it mixes with violence. At one point, Hippolyte yanks Irma’s arm around behind her back because she tried to hold out on him for the Texan’s ten-dollar traveler’s check. Taunting her, Hippolyte cruelly invites her to find herself another mec: “Why don’t you leave me now?” he snarls as he twists her arm tighter. That’s when the one-armed midget pool player arrives on the scene. He strolls over from the pool table and, with a distinct swagger, says to Hippolyte, “I’d take her any time.” Hippolyte yanks the dwarf up by the collar and holds him aloft. “It was just a joke, Hippolyte!” the midget cries. “A joke? Then how come nobody’s laughin’?” he asks, whereupon he tosses the midget away. The little man flies out of the image. There is a thud—and a new shot of the midget, now unconscious, sliding across the floor. The camera pans with the body until it glides to a halt. Moustache sprays him with seltzer, ending the farce. Hippolyte immediately takes a swing at Irma’s ass, hitting her squarely. “Now go back to work,” he barks. “Ox,” she snarls under her breath.

  Dirty jokes provide ongoing amusement. Nestor meets Irma on the street as she walks her dog:

  NESTOR: Pardon me, mademoiselle, but do you have a license?

  IRMA: A license? No.

  NESTOR: That’s a violation of ordinance number fifty-six.

  IRMA: Oh, well (she giggles conspiratorially), usually they let us get away with it.

  NESTOR: Not me. And another thing, according to the law you’re supposed to keep it on a leash.

  IRMA: On a leash?! Oh.

  Irma la Douce is a sex comedy, but the jokes turn cold in the police van when Nestor attempts to arrest what appears to be the entire population of the rue Casanova. He is no match for these aggressive women, who turn on him. Lolita is particularly cruel: to the tune of “Alouette,” she sings a mocking little song expressly for him: “Little birdie, pretty little birdie, little birdie, fly away with me.” The meanest thing a woman can do in Billy’s eyes is to call attention to a man’s weakness. Nestor loses his gun in the struggle.

  What Nestor finds with Irma, however, is a form of redemption—not only for her as a woman, but for him as a man. Blending jokes that aim lower while the emotions run deeper, Wilder begins the scene in which they spend their first night together with a throwaway, a minor Borscht Belt groaner, and moves on to one of the loveliest scenes of the film. (Irma refers to a poor painter who cut off his ear. “Van Gogh?” Nestor asks. “No, I think his name was Schwartz,” says Irma.) Nestor begins fussing with newspapers, placing them demurely over the windows to shield Irma from the world’s gaze, all to a delicate waltz on the soundtrack. Wilder raises Nestor’s touching if pathetic gesture to a kind of nobility. Irma comments on his shyness. “Me? Shy? Not particularly. It’s just, uh, the kind of world we live in. What I mean is, if you hate somebody you can do that any time, any place. But if you like somebody, you’ve got to hide in dark corners.” He catches himself, knowing he’s let something intimate slip out. Wilder knows it, too; there is a real delicacy to the moment. Irma then climbs into bed, pulls the covers up, takes a puff on her cigarette, and asks the man she is about to sleep with what his name is.

  In a way, Wilder’s quest is complete: from The Major and the Minor, in which a young, smart-alecky girl whips out a cigarette and signals the dawn of a new era of forthrightness, to Irma la Douce, where a somewhat older woman does the same thing, except that now she’s a naked whore in bed with a former policeman standing by ready to
climb in with her. “Well, don’t take all night, Nestor Patou,” she says, urging him in. For better or worse, American mass-culture morality had been transformed, and Billy Wilder led the charge.

  Jack Lemmon in the act of undressing is indescribably graceful and sad, especially when he asks her to put on her eye mask. “You’re really something,” she says as she covers her eyes. He has a particularly sick look on his face as he pulls open his pants. At that point Irma’s little dog, Coquette, begins to growl menacingly. He picks it up. It squeals. He puts it in the hall.

  “Why do you have to have anybody at all?” Nestor asks (referring to Hippolyte). “Everybody needs somebody,” Irma answers. “Like Coquette needs me. Who wants to be a stray dog? You’ve got to belong to someone, even if he kicks you once in a while.”

  Wilder’s world is full of disguises. His characters are often flexible nearly to the point of schizophrenia; for Billy, some personalities are best revealed by the masks that cover them. In Nestor’s case, this priggish failure of a policeman becomes a mec by accident and, since the role of neighborhood stud is such a fraud, he is compelled to concoct yet another persona—the half-castrated Lord X, who pays Irma, who then turns her earnings over to Nestor, who returns to Irma as Lord X, all to keep Irma happy as a wage earner. (Lord X’s partial emasculation is said to have occurred during an accident at a Japanese prison camp on the River Kwai.)