GC Film Series - Spring 2001
The Apartment ('60)
[From Leonard Maltin's Movie & Video Guide]:
Superb comedy-drama that manages to embrace both sentiment and cynicism. Lemmon attempts to
climb corporate ladder by loaning his apartment key to various executives for their extramarital
trysts, but it backfires when he falls for his boss's latest girlfriend. Fine performances all
around, including MacMurray as an uncharacteristic heel. Oscar winner for Best Picture, Director,
Screenplay (Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond), Editing (Daniel Mandell), Art Direction-Set Decoration
(Alexander Trauner, Edward G. Boyle). Later a Broadway musical, Promises, Promises. Panavision.
NOTE: If you do not wish to have certain elements of the plot revealed, please wait to read these until after you have seen the film!
I. [From www.filmsite.org]:
A classic, caustically-witty, satirically cynical, melodramatic comedy about corporate politics - and a bitter-sweet romance. In a bid to get ahead, an ambitious, lowly, misguided and young insurance clerk C. C. Baxter (Lemmon) generously lends out the keys to his NYC apartment to his company's higher-up, philandering executives for romantic, adulterous, extra-marital trysts, including to his callous married boss J. D. Sheldrake (MacMurray). Baxter's own budding crush toward his building's elevator operator - melancholy, and vulnerable Fran Kubelik (MacLaine) turns ugly when he discovers he has been outsmarted - she is the latest conquest of his boss - and has attempted suicide in his apartment. Baxter's next-door, philosophizing doctor/neighbor Dr. Dreyfuss (Kruschen) convinces Baxter to confront the craven ethics of his superiors - and he wins the affections of Fran. Academy Award Nominations: 10, including Best Actor--Jack Lemmon, Best Actress--Shirley MacLaine, Best Supporting Actor--Jack Kruschen, Best B/W Cinematography, Best Sound. Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Story and Screenplay, Best B/W Art Direction/Set Decoration, Best Film Editing.
II. [By George Perry (BBC)]:
A common thread in Billy Wilder's best films is that it is the women who are the catalysts. Think of Stanwyck's Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity, or Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, Monroe in The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot. Even, for that matter, in Ninotchka it is the women who are driving the plot. In this masterly social comedy the self-deluding hero CC Baxter (Jack Lemmon) thinks he has some control over the events in his life. In reality Baxter is put upon nastily by the oily executives who like to use his handily located Manhattan apartment for extra-marital trysts, and nicely by the elevator girl Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine) who sees him as the one decent male in a pool of piranhas. Baxter wants advancement in the huge insurance company where he works, and Sheldrake, a slimy boss (Fred MacMurray), dangles promotion before him in exchange for the apartment key. Disastrously he discovers that Fran is Sheldrake's mistreated side attraction, placing him in an intolerable dilemma. Should he ditch his upward mobility for the girl he loves? Wilder and IAL Diamond's brilliantly witty screenplay has a serious undertow as it savages corporate ethics and conjugal infidelity. The humanity of the film resides in the sweet interplay between Lemmon and MacLaine, and the development of their relationship from initial awkwardness to binding trust is beautifully acted out. Savour too the great last line which, as so often with Wilder and Diamond, was only thought up at the eleventh hour.
III. [From The Films of the Sixties by Douglas Brode (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1980)]:
No filmmaker ever combined sentiment and cynicism in quite the same manner as Billy Wilder. In Sunset Boulevard, he lambasted the mythology of the Old Hollywood, kicking off the 1950s with the decades first great film. In The Apartment, he provides an equally strong starting point for a new era.
The story, concocted by Wilder and his constant collaborator, I.A.L. Diamond, offered the sort of ironic morality play which is typical of their best work. C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) is the most popular employee in a major New York city office building, simply because he is a bachelor who can loan out his apartment to the various middle level executives he comes into contact with so they may enjoy their current mistresses without resorting to tacky hotel rooms. In return, they promise to put in a good word with the boss, the aloof Mr. J.D. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray). But Baxter has begun to doubt he will ever enter the executive suite, and instead concentrates on trying to make a date with an attractive, elusive elevator operator named Fran Kubelic (Shirley MacLaine). Then, Baxter suddenly receives the promotion he's been waiting for: large office, bowler hat, personal secretary, the works - - and is amazed his friends were actually able to exert such a strong influence on Sheldrake. In fact, Sheldrake has caught on to the little game, and wants Baxter to loan the fabled apartment only to him. Baxter's victory quickly proves a hollow one, for Mr. Sheldrake's mistress is none other than the lovely Fran Kubelik.
The resultant problems range from sophisticated situation comedy to strong social satire. As i n all their films, the collaborators opted for a highly moralistic ending to their seemingly easygoing fable about immoral characters. The old values are reaffirmed when Ms. Kubelik, after a near-tragic suicide attempt in the apartment, spends a bittersweet holiday season with Baxter, where Fran gradually gets over her feelings for her cool but contemptible boss, falling in love instead with the sycophant schlemiel who strains spaghetti through tennis rackets. Shirley MacLaine had already established her elfin character in several popular pictures, but the role of Fran particularly suited her peculiar talent; she was, of course, nominated for the Academy Award, but that year the Best Actress Oscar was handed to Elizabeth Taylor for Butterfield 8, one of that actress's lesser performances; it was clearly a case of sentiment, since Taylor had been suffering from various illnesses all that year. Interestingly enough, though Taylor won for her portrait of a prostitute, a clear sign that the industry was already able to accept - - and respect - - more mature screen roles. Lemmon was likewise passed over, despite the fact he delivered the most exquisite variation he would ever do of his own particular screen character: the button-down executive hero of the Sixties, trying desperately to get in on the good life and never realizing that it is his basic warmth as a human being that keeps him from ever succeeding. If the performers were slighted, the film and its director were not: both the Best Picture of the Year Award and the Best Director statuette went to The Apartment and Billy Wilder, respectively.
Wilder introduced the "new morality" of the Sixties to films by dealing with such matters as adultery is a light, rather than sombre, tone, and by suggesting such things were not so much tragic as comic, he poked fun at the absurdity of amoral behavior. Audiences of the early Sixties could cheer for a little-guy hero like Baxter in much the same manner that audiences of the thirties could cheer for Frank Capra's Mr. Deeds and Mr. Smith; instead of to town or Washington, the protagonist now went to New York to work in advertizing and was not nearly so innocent as Gary Cooper or James Stewart. But he was still the little guy, the common man as we then still liked to believe in him.
GC Film Series - Spring 2001
Return to GC Film Series Main Page