Wilder's Biggest Hit...And The Beginning of the End

In 1960, Billy Wilder won Oscars for Best Director, Co-Writer, and Picture for "The Apartment." A presenter whispered in his ear, "Time to stop, Billy." The suggestion being: he'd peaked ("Some Like It Hot" was the year before), the sixties were here, younger directors were coming, he'd have nowhere to go but down.

But you don't stop when you're peaking. Wilder wanted to make as his next film "Irma La Douce," but learned he had to wait two years for travelling road productions of the stage musical to play out before he could release the movie.

So he made "One, Two, Three," (1961) without Lemmon or Curtis or Monroe or MacLaine...he had a great older James Cagney, but little else...and he flopped.

Worried he might be ("Time to stop, Billy"), but Wilder persevered. He made "Irma La Douce," re-teaming Lemmon and MacLaine from "The Apartment" (MacLaine got her rather-standard-to-be hooker role after Marilyn Monroe died and Liz Taylor dropped out.)

"Irma La Douce" became Billy Wilder's biggest hit. It is also nowhere near the achievement of "The Apartment" (a point made painfully clear with Lemmon and MacLaine reteamed.) Or "Some Like It Hot." Or "Sunset Boulevard." Or "Double Indemnity." And it signalled a new direction for the work of Billy Wilder: blatantly sexual, broad and crass, and rather dated even as it broke new sexual ground.

"Irma La Douce" was a big hit in 1963, I would opine, for a very simple reason: it was about hookers and johns and pimps and couples living together without benefit of clergy and sex, sex, sex. It was, in short, a dirty movie (without sex shown, nor any nudity save MacLaine's back.)

Might as well compare it to the biggest hit of Billy Wilder's peer, Alfred Hitchcock: Psycho of 1960. Hitchcock had scored big with a horror movie (drawing the drive-in crowds and teenagers "normal" Hollywood disdained.) Wilder now scored big with a "blue movie" (drawing salacious suburbanities to a MOVIE that Hollywood disdained. Producer Hal Wallis called it "pornograhy...filth.") Hitchcock and Wilder were "respected auteurs," but then and now: to make a hit, sometimes all you need to do is use sex and/or violence in big doses.

But "Psycho" was also a classic. "Irma La Douce" is not. Oh, its not terrible. Wilder's brash wit shines through here and there. MacLaine is a sexy number in her way, and Lemmon's elfin-loser schtick heads towards Chaplin-ville at times.

But there is a disconcerting broadness to "Irma La Douce", and an inability to plumb the realities of "The Apartment" (how could it? This is a musical with the SONGS REMOVED, in which people still move around in stylized motions like they are about to sing or dance.) The opening montage of scenes showing MacLaine, after sex with each john, telling some sob story that triggers additional payment is (a) incredibly frank for its time and (b) incredibly unfunny in the set-up of MacLaine's dumb stories and the dumber reactions of the men.

From what I gather, Billy Wilder knew that "Irma La Douce" was beneath his greatest works. But it was a big hit, and it made Wilder richer than ever, and he followed it up with an even "dirtier" (and better, IMHO) picture called "Kiss,Me Stupid" (1964) that was pretty much refused regular studio release, going out as an "art film blue movie."

As they would for Hitchcock and Hawks and others, the 60's caught up with Billy Wilder. "Irma La Douce" was a false alarm for Wilder. He wasn't going to rise higher than this hit; it was really a swan song. Attempts to recapture that "Apartment" magic with "Kiss Me Stupid" and the drab "Fortune Cookie" (Matthau: great; movie: not so great) led to what he called "my downfall."

Good news: from that later period came two movies that are better than "Irma La Douce": the lyrical and sad "Private Life of Sherlock Holmes" of 1970 and the brash and poignant sex comedy "Avanti" (complete, FINALLY, with some real sex and actual nudity, circa 1972, including Juliet Mill's fine chest and Jack Lemmon's fit middle-aged bottom.)

Wilder struggled his way on through the 70's to 1981. He needed old friends Lemmon and Matthau for two of his final three pictures ("The Front Page" and the awful and final "Buddy Buddy.") and old friend William Holden for the other ("Fedora," a weak sister to "Sunset Boulevard" of which Holden said, "I shouldn't have been in it to generate those memories OF "Sunset Boulevard".)

Still, rewind the projector to 1963 and it looks like the beginning of the end for the grand run of Billy Wilder's career was, ironically, his biggest hit: "Irma La Douce," a movie in which sex is moved so front and center (and so leeringly so), that it never has time to be truly erotic or enticing or entertaining.

Too bad. But Lemmon and MacLaine were as good as could be expected (and both joined Billy Wilder in making more in gross-percentages off of this "Hooker Hit" than from most of their other films.)

And there's something to be said for one of the first movies of the Hays Code that just came out and said it: people have sex. For money. Without marriage. All the time.

P.S. Billy Wilder loved black-and-white, and only grudgingly made this film in color. But it LOOKS like a black-and-white movie anyway. Faded, weird colors all around. Weird.