Irma la Douce

This is the first Billy Wilder movie that feels overlong and unfocused, barely missing the mark. There’s a lot to really enjoy in Irma la Douce, but at two and a half hours, the movie doesn’t effectively fill its runtime creating distractions while inefficiently telling what should have been a rather simple story.

Jack Lemmon plays Nestor Patou, an earnest and honest police man who takes up his new beat at Les Halles, a large food market in Paris, where he meets Irma, played by Shirley...