Metacritic reviews

Mr. Lemmon is little short of brilliant — vigorous, incisive and deft.

On a scene-by-scene basis, this picture has so much to offer in terms of some fairly unhinged and wild work from a bunch of artists at the height of their powers.

A fairly ordinary (for Wilder) adaptation of a play with a great performance by Lemmon as a French cop who falls for hooker Shirley MacLaine. [18 Jul 2003, p.11E]

Far from the home-run laughs of “The Apartment” and “Some Like it Hot,” Irma La Douce is still a fun if G-rated tour of the seedy Parisian underbelly, but coming in overlong at close to 2 1/2 hours, would have benefited from some tighter editing.

If not exactly an endearing experience on the whole, Irma la Douce is a fine example of Billy Wilder’s mid-career eccentricity and cosmopolitan curiosity.

Lemmon and Maclaine fail to reproduce the chemistry from The Apartment but this slight film is not as ignorable as reputation suggests.

Wilder's soft-centred cynicism provides frequent enough laughs without too many longueurs.

Far too long for a lighthearted farce, with dull patches that outnumber the high spots, the film is really about Maclaine and Lemmon striving to rise above the fat Diamond-Wilder script and Wilder's lethargic direction.

Two hours and 23 minutes is an awfully long haul for a frivolous farce.

Billy Wilder’s soggy and uninspired 1963 adaptation of the hit Broadway musical, minus the songs.