Some Like It Wilder Read online

  Kael’s acerbic review went on to assert that Wilder had been called a great director around Hollywood, when he was only a clever one. Indeed, she scolded, “His eye is on the dollar, or rather on success, on the entertainment values that bring in dollars. But he has never before . . . exhibited such brazen contempt for people,” except perhaps in Ace in the Hole.45 When Wilder was reminded subsequently of Kael’s diatribe, he responded in kind: “I don’t make pictures for the so-called intelligentsia,” like Kael; “they bore the ass off me. I think they’re all phonies, and it delights me to be unpopular with them. They are pretentious mezzo-brows.” Kael’s observation that Wilder was not a great director, just a filmmaker out to make a fast buck, particularly offended him. “I have at no time regarded myself as one of the artistic immortals. I am just making movies to entertain people, and I try to do it as honestly as I can.”46

  One, Two, Three cost close to $3 million. Its domestic gross was only $2 million; its foreign gross was $1.6 million. So the picture did turn a profit, though a modest one.

  The 1961 Berlin International Film Festival presented a retrospective of Wilder’s films on the occasion of his return to Germany to make One, Two, Three. The event climaxed on the final day of the festival with Wilder’s accepting an award for his achievements. He was delighted to be feted by the Germans, since his film career had begun in Berlin in the 1920s. The trophy was inscribed, “To Billy Wilder, a great artist and a great man.” Wilder responded to the accolade at the reception after the ceremony with his usual bravado: “I agree.”47

  Two years after the release of One, Two, Three, screenwriter Abby Mann (Judgment at Nuremberg, 1961) took a cheap shot at the movie. Mann went to the Moscow International Film Festival in 1963 as part of the Hollywood contingent. He apologized to the Russians for movies like One, Two, Three and promised that “some of us will try to give you more films in the manner of Grapes of Wrath [1940],” a social protest movie about migrant workers in the Depression. Wilder fired off a response to the trade papers. “Who appointed Abby Mann as spokesman for the American Film World in Moscow?” Wilder inquired. “His remarks were both sophomoric and sycophantic.”48

  The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, occasioned fresh interest in One, Two, Three. After the successful revival of the film at a Paris art house in 1989, the movie was rereleased in Germany, where it became a sensation and was likewise successful on German TV. Keller hazards that moviegoers and critics alike were not prepared in 1961 for a picture that combined Marx brothers slapstick and high-class wordplay with dark drama. “The public recognition that the film deserved” came only years later, when it met with “wide acclaim from young critics and audiences that had grown in maturity.”49

  Wilder thought it was a “sporadically good picture.”50 Withal, because One, Two, Three was not a big moneymaker on its original release, he figured that he had to be careful in selecting his next project. He chose to make a film adaptation of Irma la Douce (Irma the sweet), a French musical play about a Parisian prostitute. The script for the stage play was by Alexandra Breffort, with songs by Marguerite Monnot. Irma premiered in Paris in 1956 and ran for five years. It was transplanted to Broadway in an English-language version in the fall of 1960 and ran for over a year.

  Irma la Douce (1963)

  Wilder decided from the get-go that the movie version of Irma would not be shot in the streets of Paris, as Love in the Afternoon had been. In the wake of the chaotic production history of One, Two, Three, Wilder had again become disenchanted with making films in foreign capitals. When he wound up having to rebuild the Tempelhof airport set on a Hollywood soundstage to shoot the movie’s final scenes, Wilder wondered why he had gone to the trouble and expense of filming the rest of the movie in Germany. He was convinced that Irma could be filmed more quickly and economically at the Goldwyn Studios in Hollywood than on location in Paris.

  For Irma Wilder was able to reunite the two stars of The Apartment, Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine. Since the story focuses on Irma (Shirley MacLaine), a prostitute who falls in love with Nestor (Jack Lemmon), her pimp, Louella Parsons asked Lemmon in an interview how this unsavory tale could be laundered for the movie version. “Audiences are much more mature today, and they demand maturer subject matter,” Lemmon replied. “I think any subject can be handled on the screen today, provided that it’s done with good taste.”51 But since Wilder had been criticized by reviewers in the past for exhibiting bad taste in his films, Parsons was not entirely reassured.

  Wilder was aware that a producer who was considering a film adaptation of Irma back in 1959 had submitted the play script to Geoffrey Shurlock, inquiring whether the play was suitable for filming. Shurlock responded with a letter that took a decidedly dim view of Irma. He declared, “It’s [sic] leading lady is a practicing prostitute who, additionally, falls in love with and lives with the leading man, bearing his child out of wedlock.” He continued, “She is also carrying on a second affair with the leading man who has disguised himself as somebody else. This relationship is not treated with any semblance of the compensatory moral values or voice of morality required by the Censorship Code.” In sum, “the general low and sordid tone of the story render[s] this property unacceptable” for film production.52

  Shurlock’s letter thoroughly discouraged the producer in question. Nevertheless, Wilder was optimistic about Irma’s potential as a viable film project. “There’s no reason this film should not get” the industry’s official seal of approval from Shurlock’s office, Wilder asserted. “It has no orgies, no homosexuals or cannibalism.”53 Wilder was alluding to Mankiewicz’s film of Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly, Last Summer, in which a homosexual is killed and eaten by young cannibals he has previously engaged in sexual encounters. Mankiewicz’s picture was in fact granted the industry’s seal of approval by Shurlock.54

  Wilder convinced Walter Mirisch that he could make Irma a sophisticated adult comedy. “We are doing it with taste and feeling,” he assured Mirisch. “It will strike a happy medium between Tennessee Williams and Walt Disney.”55

  The Mirisch Company bought the screen rights of Breffort and Monnot’s musical play for $350,000. This was a sizeable sum, but the film rights to Witness for the Prosecution had cost $435,000, and that investment had paid off handsomely. Wilder opted to shoot the picture in color at the behest of Walter Mirisch. Irma would be Wilder’s first color film since The Spirit of St. Louis. Mirisch assigned to Wilder’s color production a budget of $5 million.

  Wilder had not made a musical since The Emperor Waltz, which was a resounding flop. He knew that musicals were not his forte, so he planned to drop some of the songs from the original score of Irma and concentrate on the story. As things turned out, he wound up throwing out all of the songs. “I have nothing against music,” he explained, “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. . . . More and more I could see that, if I really wanted to explore all the avenues of this story, there wasn’t going to be room for any numbers.”56 Wilder found that the characters were two-dimensional and the story was thin, so he aimed to fill out the characterizations and fill in the story.

  Diamond heartily endorsed Wilder’s decision. “We saw the show in Paris” and liked the plot but not the songs, he stated. “The songs stopped the action and seemed to have nothing to do with the story.”57 Axel Madsen calls Wilder’s scuttling all of the songs “a daring piece of open-heart surgery that amputated his source material of part of its identity” as a musical comedy.58 But Wilder never regretted his decision. “I think it worked out very well,” he said.59

  Other changes developed as Wilder and Diamond worked on the screenplay. They transferred the principal setting from the bohemian Montmartre district of Paris to the neighborhood of the bustling wholesale meat market of Les Halles. Just a step away from the marketplace, in Rue Casanova, is the red-light district inhabited by the poules
(harlots). “Nobody ever mentioned the symbolism of the raw meat for sale,” Wilder observed.60 Nevertheless, the implication that “the Halles ‘meat market’ also applies to the prostitutes on display” is hard to miss.61

  Wilder and Diamond “hit us over the head with the old rotten jest that prostitution is . . . a way of life like any other,” Pauline Kael smirked.62 Putting it another way, Kevin Lally notes, “For its time, Irma la Douce is remarkably non-judgmental about the oldest profession.”63 Moustache (Lou Jacobi), the worldly proprietor of the café Chez Moustache, where the poules and their mecs (pimps) hang out, glibly pontificates at one point, “Love is illegal, but not hate—that you can do anywhere, anytime, to anybody.” Moustache is the commentator on the action in the movie, as in the play. He makes constant references to his past adventures: as a soldier cashiered from the French Foreign Legion, as a croupier in a Monte Carlo casino, and so on. His hilarious recollections are always capped by the phrase, “But that’s another story!”

  Wilder assembled a top cast for the picture, with Lemmon and MacLaine in the leads and reliable character actors like Lou Jacobi (as Moustache) and Joan Shawlee (as a hooker named Amazon Annie) lending strong support. Furthermore, Wilder was fortunate to have several veterans of his previous films working behind the camera: cinematographer Joseph LaShelle, production designer Alexander Trauner, film editor Daniel Mandell, and composer André Previn, not to mention cowriter I. A. L. Diamond and supervising editor Doane Harrison.

  Most of the movie was filmed at the Goldwyn Studios, where Trauner took up all of stage 4 with his realistic reproduction of a Paris street. The mammoth set took three months to construct and cost $350,000. This main set consisted of the facades of forty-eight buildings, including the Chez Moustache tavern and the Hotel Casanova brothel. To a visitor to the set, “it could only look false,” Wilder observed, “but on the screen, believe me, everything fell into place with a stupefying authenticity.”64

  Principal photography began in August 1962, with ten days of shooting exteriors in Paris. This footage would be carefully integrated throughout the film to enliven all of the material that was filmed on the Hollywood soundstages. The location footage included several shots of the Halles marketplace, including an aerial view, and scenes along the banks of the Seine River. This river footage was filmed across from Trauner’s own home on Rue des Saints-Peres.

  One of the more curious plot contrivances involves a shot of Jack Lemmon in disguise emerging from the Seine. Wilder was unaware that the waters of the Seine were an unsavory mixture of mud and garbage. Lemmon contracted an intestinal virus as a result of being immersed in the river, and filming was suspended for a few days while he recovered.

  Production resumed at the Goldwyn Studios on October 8 and continued until February. Wilder had to cope with the fact that, because Irma was set in Paris, all of the characters were French. Wilder abhorred the practice of having foreigners speak English with foreign accents. He contended that the audience would not tolerate Lemmon, MacLaine, and the other actors speaking English with a French accent for a whole movie: “It’s false; it just does not work,” he maintained. Wilder decided not to have the actors “simulate a French accent,” since they were plainly Americans. “We had a long talk,” says MacLaine, and decided that everyone in the cast should have the same American accent.65

  Lemmon had developed a practice to soothe himself before shooting a scene. When the director was ready to shoot, Lemmon would close his eyes and say, “It’s magic time.” But MacLaine had no such mantra that worked for her when she was tense on the set. During the four-month shoot at the studio, Wilder followed his customary practice of endeavoring to defuse tension on the set with humor. While filming a tough scene in which Nestor and Irma discuss the possibility of her abandoning her profession, Wilder noted jokingly that Lemmon had won an Academy Award for Mr. Roberts and was nominated for his two previous Wilder pictures, but he “was twice screwed by very inferior talent.” Three takes were spoiled when MacLaine muffed her lines. “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing!” she exclaimed. Lemmon gave her a blank stare. After several more takes, Wilder again offered a witticism to break the tension: “This is the slowest company in Hollywood.” He pointed out that George Stevens had started his film of the life of Christ, The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), the week before, “and Jesus is bar mitzvahed already.”66

  Principal photography wrapped in February 1963. Early in postproduction Wilder screened the rough cut of Irma for Previn. Wilder instructed him to “disregard all of the pratfalls” and compose a romantic score derived from the batch of songs that Marguerite Monnot had composed for the original stage production. Previn followed Wilder’s directions and produced lyrical background music that accented the romance between Nestor and Irma.67

  Wilder insouciantly stated that he fully expected Irma to receive the official seal of approval from the industry censor, since, he noted disingenuously, it was fundamentally a love story as “innocent as a glass of milk.” In reality, Wilder had “slyly subverted the Code by making a comedy out of an otherwise taboo subject.”68 Be that as it may, Shurlock asked for only minimal cuts: the shot of MacLaine naked to the waist in the bathtub was replaced by a shot revealing only her head and shoulders, and a shot of an American GI leaving the brothel with a whore on each arm was excised.

  Wilder remembered that Shurlock had demanded that Ariane and Frank marry at the end of Love in the Afternoon to give the movie a morally uplifting conclusion. He forestalled a similar complaint about the present film’s screenplay by retaining the wedding of Irma and Nestor from the stage play. These modifications overcame Shurlock’s initial objections to the scenario, as put forth in his 1959 letter. After all, Shurlock was aware of “the growing liberal climate in this country” during the “swinging Sixties,” writes film historian Dawn Sova. He observed that prostitution was no longer quite as objectionable a topic for film as it once had been.69

  The Legion of Decency knew of the cuts made in Irma at the behest of the industry censor but still found the movie distasteful. Monsignor Little, speaking on behalf of the legion, explained that, “in developing the story of the redemption of one prostitute, the film concentrates on details of prostitution and upon suggestiveness in costuming, dialogue, and situations.” He continued, “It fails as a comedy and, as a consequence, tends to be a coarse mockery of virtue.”70 The legion therefore placed Irma in its morally objectionable category, where it had also relegated Some Like It Hot. Father Patrick Sullivan noted that the legion’s consultors came down hard on Irma because, in retrospect, they believed their positive rating of The Apartment was misguided. Be that as it may, Sullivan added, the legion could have been tougher on Irma than it was. Eleven of its consultors voted to condemn the movie, with only eight favoring the morally objectionable category and three favoring a rating for adults. Nevertheless, the movie was not condemned.71

  Hal Wallis, the respected producer responsible for films like Casablanca (1942) and The Rose Tattoo (1955), attended an advance screening of Irma. Appalled that the film had been granted a code seal, he blasted off a blistering letter to Shurlock. Wallis pronounced Irma la Douce “a salacious, pornographic, distasteful, obscene, offensive, degrading piece of celluloid.” Audiences, he continued, could only respond to the picture in the same way that they did to stag films. “I have great admiration for Wilder’s talent in some of his work,” he wrote, “but this is without a doubt the filthiest thing I have ever seen on the screen.” Shurlock responded to Wallis that UA had assured him that the film “would be sold strictly as an adult movie.”72 In fact, the disclaimer “This picture is for adults only” appeared in advertising layouts for the movie and in the film’s trailer. Only on that condition did Shurlock, in concert with his advisory board, issue the code seal for Irma. UA was following the example of MGM, which received a code seal for Stanley Kubrick’s controversial film Lolita (1962) by stating in the ads that Lolita was “for persons over eighteen only.�
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  Wilder was grateful to Shurlock for standing up to Wallis on his behalf; he saw signs that the guardians of film morality were becoming less strict in administering the censorship code. “We had tremendous problems in the past,” he recalled. “There was a man at Paramount in charge of censorship who would constantly be snooping around the set to see whether the decolletage was too deep, whether it was permissible. It was not easy, I assure you, because they were powerful, and you had to be very smart” to get around them. Those were different days, he concluded.74

  The credit sequence of Irma la Douce opens “in a mean, narrow street just off Les Halles,” according to the screenplay, “and the prostitutes are out on their love patrol in full war paint.” The camera moves in on Irma, “stationed beside the dimly lit entrance of a shabby hotel. . . . A customer walks over to Irma and asks her a frank question—a ten franc question. Irma nods and leads him into the hotel,” the Hotel Casanova. Legend has it that Casanova slept there in 1763.75

  There is a dissolve to a short scene that plays like a burlesque skit. Irma’s customer is putting money in her purse, which lies open on the night table. “To get her Johns to dish out more dough, Irma lays it on thick and spins tales of past misfortunes,” notes Heinz-Jürgen Köhler.76 She tells this particular client that she was a concert pianist until the piano lid fell on her hand and destroyed her career. He is touched by her sob story and drops an extra bill in her purse as a tip.