Wo wurde Irma la Douce gedreht?

Marie Torre was mad. The newscaster began her latest Saturday Report on Pittsburgh’s KDKA-TV with a condemnation of a “disturbing trend” in movies: “this preoccupation with undressed women.”

There was Cleopatra, Torre noted, the hot historical epic that included “views of Miss Taylor which would have done justice to any girly girly magazine.” There was also the forthcoming Carpetbaggers starring Carroll Baker, who had promised “to appear in the altogether” for the sake of realism. “Now how gullible do they think we are?” Torre asked.

But she was especially harsh on Irma La Douce, the irreverent comedy that was making heaps of money in the summer of 1963. Torre took issue with the film’s opening narration, which described the story as one of “passion, bloodshed, desire and death — everything, in fact, that makes life worth living.” “Whose life?” Torre countered. The journalist found little to like in the movie’s Parisian sex workers or compromised cops, much less the tiny dogs drunk on champagne. “Irma La Douce is, in fact, a story about sordid characters,” she declared, “and it is neither worthwhile nor funny.”

While Irma La Douce received decent reviews, Torre wasn’t alone in her ire. Paramount producer Hal B. Wallis sent a fiery letter to PCA chief Geoffrey Shurlock over Irma, labeling it the “the filthiest thing I have ever seen on screen.” The Legion of Decency graded it a B, or morally objectionable in part, but the Catholic publication The Evangelist rated it “completely objectionable” for moviegoers. The Maryland state censors would later use Irma to rally for stricter guidelines, insisting a law was necessary to keep teens out of “adult” fare with undressed women. (You just never knew when they might show up.)

Despite what this outcry might imply, Irma La Douce passed the PCA without a problem. The brash and bawdy comedy illustrated yet again the power of cloaking controversy in humor — and director/writer/producer Billy Wilder’s unique talent for winning over Hollywood censors.

Irma La Douce began life as a French musical. Through songs like “She’s Got The Lot,” it told the story of Irma, a popular sex worker in Paris who falls in love with Nestor, a broke law student. Nestor can’t handle Irma’s profession, so he disguises himself as a wealthy older client to book her time exclusively. He takes on multiple menial jobs to actually pay her rates but when he becomes too exhausted to carry on the charade, he “kills” Irma’s generous benefactor. In a series of farcical events, he’s convicted of murder, sent to jail, and finally busts out to be with Irma, who’s pregnant with his child.

When Irma arrived on Broadway in 1960, LIFE called it “a French fairy tale for wicked grown-ups who want to believe in love.” Billy Wilder was determined to make it an even wickeder film. His script, written with frequent collaborator I.A.L. Diamond, would feature no musical numbers but a lot more sex workers. Nestor would be a disgraced police officer, rather than a struggling student. And Irma wouldn’t give birth to their kid on Christmas in the strangely wholesome number “Christmas Child” — she would do that in a church, right after her shotgun wedding to Nestor.

Wilder cast his go-to leading man of late, Jack Lemmon, to play Nestor. For Irma, he considered both Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe before ultimately signing Shirley MacLaine, reuniting his Apartment leads. The production would spend a few days in Paris shooting scenes along the Seine, but most of the movie was filmed on a sound stage, where a construction crew recreated the famed Les Halles food markets and the surrounding cafes and hotels for $250,000. The team nicknamed the set “Disneyland for adults.”

Stationed along these fake French streets were roughly a dozen women in garish, low-cut, midriff-baring, and, in one case, nipple-tasseled costumes. Wilder and Diamond didn’t just expand the musical’s cast of sex workers from one (Irma) to several — they gave these women distinct names and personas. There was 6-foot-tall Amazon Annie, the “Zebra twins” in matching animal print, and even a “Lolita” in her heart-shaped sunglasses. These women were all open and unapologetic about what they did for a living, and no one around them seemed to care much, either. When pure-hearted, naive Nestor wonders what all these women are doing in a cheap hotel, a bartender shrugs and tells him they’re “making love.” “That’s illegal!” Nestor exclaims. “Shows you the kind of world we live in,” the bartender continues. “Love is illegal — but not hate. That you can do anywhere, anytime, to anybody.”

Wilder jokingly called the exchange his “Gettysburg Address of prostitution.”

This cavalier attitude towards paid sex translated into multiple scenes of MacLaine in nothing but a bright green bra or nude beneath her bed covers. In the movie’s opening vignettes, she feeds her johns various sob stories to guilt them into more money — her sister is very sick, or maybe it’s her dog, or maybe it’s all the kids at the orphanage she called home. (The Allies accidentally bombed it during the war, you know.) Irma is never called a prostitute, but the script uses the words “streetwalker” and “poule,” and dances around the word “pimp” in this winking narration:

“Do you know what a mac is? How do you say it in English? A protector? A consort? A business manager? Well, stick around. You’ll get the idea.”

The honesty was a marked departure from how Hollywood handled prostitution in the past. Thanks to the Production Code clauses which banned adultery and “white slavery” (a very archaic and very fraught term for sex trafficking), the subject had to be implied, but never named, and treated with moral disgust. When Marlene Dietrich played a heavily suggested harlot who milks men for money in 1935’s The Devil Is a Woman, Joseph Breen suggested an ending where her former paramour chokes her to death. For the 1937 adaptation of Dead End, Francey is transformed from a sex worker with syphilis into a woman with a vague cough and equally vague (but disgraceful) job. Donna Reed and Audrey Hepburn couldn’t possibly play characters who took cash from male suitors, so they became a hostess and a socialite in From Here to Eternity and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, respectively.

But the Code had eroded so much by 1963 that Irma La Douce encountered little resistance from the PCA. Shurlock was likely just relieved Irma kept her chest covered. That same year, Jayne Mansfield was causing controversy with her indie comedy Promises! Promises!, released without a seal but with a much-discussed topless scene. The PCA approved Irma La Douce easily, while the Legion exercised restraint with its B rating.

United Artists released Irma with an “adults only” advertising tag, and the promotional campaign to match. The trailer began with a crass cartoon of women with stenciled cleavage hauling men into a hotel, bending over the bistro bar, and arguing with their “macs” over money. This goes on for a solid three minutes, before the teaser transitions into clips from the film, showing Nestor hauling the half-dressed girls into a police van. On the radio, the studio ran spots with kissing sound effects and saucy translations. “Irma La Douce est sexy,” one man would say, followed by an English interpreter. “Irma La Douce is… spicy.” A movie theater in Connecticut showing Irma opened a French pop-up cafe next door, where patrons could order “le glaces” (ice cream), listen to foreign music, or get their portrait drawn in charcoal.

Audiences ate it up. Irma La Douce was such a hit for United Artists that the studio planned its first ever “golden showcase” for the film, essentially a wide second release in 25 theaters. In the midst of all these ticket sales, detractors like Wallis could easily be dismissed. “It is mostly men who complain about it,” Shurlock wrote back to Wallis. “Women generally seem to find it hilarious.” The PCA chief’s defense here echoes his response to the enraged Monsignor Little over Some Like It Hot — in both cases, Shurlock told an offended critic to cool it because Billy Wilder was funny and, implicitly, a respected purveyor of filth. He wasn’t like those craven exploitation filmmakers, or lusty directors abroad. Wilder was seen as an industry veteran and team player, even as he continued to fly in the face of basic Code principles.

The Code’s stance on prostitution — and nudity — would be tested further the following year, by an even more respectable and artistically significant film. The Pawnbroker breached a major screen barrier when it became the first PCA-approved film to feature bare breasts in 1964. Except the movie was far from sexy. The Pawnbroker cut this brief flash of nudity into a Holocaust flashback, wherein a survivor recalls his wife’s degradation and assault. We’ll discuss the disturbing drama next week on Hollywood Codebreakers.

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