Word: irma
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...years Shirley MacLaine has starred in a series of hectic comedies and adventures, often playing the heart-of-gold hooker (Irma La Douce, Two Mules for Sister Sara). Now, in a jaunty memoir, she puts forth the proposition that her own life has really been a lot more interesting. Most movie stars think that way, actually, and not a few of them have committed it all to paper. What makes "Don't Fall Off the Mountain" different from the usual drivel is that Shirley wrote it herself-no ghost, no collaborator, no pix and, alas, no visible editor. Though...
...handle; then Elliott took odd jobs?as a rug-cleaner salesman, a theatrical-school teacher, night elevator man in a residential hotel. Around this time, things seemed to pick up. He got a summer job in Hit the Deck, which led to a chorus job in Irma La Douce, which led to an audition for lead understudy in I Can Get It For You Wholesale, which led to that girl who stole the show, Barbra Streisand...
Shirley MacLaine's screen career careens from pillow to lamppost. She specializes in playing lovable, indomitable whores (Some Came Running, Irma La Douce, Sweet Charity), a role she sashays through once again in Two Mules for Sister Sara. In this one, Shirley is supposed to be a nun but the fact that she is a hooker in disguise comes as more of a surprise to Co-Star Clint Eastwood than it does to the audience...
...three later pictures, The Apartment (1960), Irma La Douce (1963), and The Fortune Cookie (1966), Wilder again provides nice sympathetic victims (Jack Lemmon in the first two, Ron Rich in the latter). But, perhaps to counteract this, he makes the victimizers increasingly grotesque. Walter Matthau's conniving lawyer Whiplash Willie in the recent Fortune Cookie is Wilder's most terrifying caricature of humanity. Matthau, constantly shifting his eyes trying to locate the quickest buck, fails to say one generous thing during the entire picture. The cruelties of this character, as you might expect, contrast sharply with the mild evils...
Sweden's Response. The Farm Workers may have lost one round in the case, but the hearings gave them ammunition for a larger suit to ban the use of DDT in California. The most damning charge came from Dr. Irma West of the state department of public health. She testified that in 1965, one California farm worker died of pesticide poisoning, and between 200 and 300 had been nonfatally poisoned. In addition, some 1,000 workers had experienced "dermatitis, chemical burns of the skin and eyes, and other miscellaneous conditions resulting from contact with pesticides...