The Apartment

The Apartment; satire / tragicomedy, USA, 1960; D: Billy Wilder, S: Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray, Ray Walston, Jack Kruschen, David Lewis, Hope Holiday, Joan Shawlee

"On November 1, 1 9 5 9, the population of New York was 8,042,783. If you laid all these people end to end, figuring an average height of 5'6 and 1/2 inches, they would reach from Times Square to the outskirts of Karachi, Pakistan". Insurance clerk C. C. Baxter loves statistic data, but often feels just like a wheel in a machine. Still, he developed a sly method for success in his career: he gives his bosses the keys of his apartment in order for them have a place where they can have extramarital affairs anonymously, and is thus promised promotion as a favor. Baxter loves the elevator girl Fran Kubelik, but is saddened when he finds out she sees his boss Sheldrake in his own apartment. He even saves her from suicide. On New Year's eve, he quits his job and starts a relationship with Fran, who dumps Sheldrake.

A great example of classic, good old-school filmmaking, Billy Wilder's "The Apartment" combines drama with comedy and romance virtually flawlessly, gives both a subtle critique of Capitalistic deficiency and social relationships at the same time, is wonderfully simple, accessible and it even won several awards justifiably, even though looking at it today, movie buffs could complain that it would have been better if Hitchcock had won the best director award that year for his brilliant "Psycho". Jack Lemmon is once again slightly coiled as the main protagonist C. C. Baxter, while the jokes are not particularly hilarious, not by a long shot, yet it's still an amazingly touching, humane and moderately funny story (Baxter using a tennis racket to strain spaghetti) that questions the system of values since its protagonist gets promoted just for giving his superiors a place where they can have an affair in peace, and even today one must get stunned by such a subversive concept—what a story! Moreover, the story plays towards the end of December, making it a very unlikely Christmas movie, since in the end the characters realize that their humanity is the most important to them. This helps alleviate the main plot hole: why would rich managers go to some shabby apartment when they could simply rent a luxurious hotel room?

In the opening act, Baxter narrates how he stays to do overtime at work, sitting in an empty office, to give his superiors time to have affairs in his apartment—yet later on, he even does unofficial "overtime" at home when he is awakened by a phone call in the middle of the night by a manager who demands his apartment to have an affair with a "Marilyn Monroe-like" woman he met at a party, and thus Baxter has to sit on a bench in freezing temperatures the entire night. The subliminal observation is sharp—Baxter has no private life or free time, he has to serve his job 100% of his time, one way or another, even when he wants to go to bed in his own home. Another sly jab at Capitalism is the notion that those on the lower end of the hierarchy have to use what they have to climb up the social ladder, and thus gain some influence on those on top in order to make it in their interest to get promoted. Wilder's direction is conventional since all of his scenes that cause astonishment are simple character interactions—in one scene, Baxter is alone in a pub and doesn't even notice how some interested woman is "hitting" him with the paper wrappers by blowing through the straw. Or just take the scene where he spots the almost dead Fran who tried to commit suicide in his apartment: moving over to the bedroom door, he opens it, tosses the clothes toward the bed inside not even looking at it, then freezes in a delayed reaction to turn back and spot her lying there unconscious; or when Kirkeby says to Baxter: "So you hit the jackpot, eh kid? I mean Kubelik-wise." However, the scenes between Sheldrake and Kubelik today feel a bit tiresome and uninspired, playing out like a soap opera, and thus drag whenever they appear. The movie also becomes less funny the longer it lasts. Nontheless, it presents Wilder in a triumph mode.

Grade:+++