The Apartment (1960, Billy Wilder)
The Apartment won a whole slew of Oscars in 1961, not least of which was the Best Picture gong. I had never seen it and didn’t really know what to expect. I have enjoyed many of Wilder’s movies before (both Stalag 17 and Sunset Blvd. are among my favourites), but he always manages to surprise me, somehow. Here, he managed it once more.
This movie is not an all-out comedy, but not a true drama either. It’s a bit of both, actually, with a bunch of romance thrown in. Jack Lemmon plays C.C. Baxter, a clerk among many at a New York insurance company. His days are repetitive, and there’s no question he’s a lonely man. The executives at the company where he works use his apartment as a getaway for their extramarital affairs, meaning Baxter can’t even always go home to his own place at the end of a stressful day, but is forced to jealously pace the pavement outside, waiting for his various bosses to emerge and hand him back his keys.
When Baxter’s boss Mr. Sheldrake find out about this arrangment, he too wants to borrow the apartment for his secret meetings with his girlfriend, promising Baxter a promotion for his troubles. However, the girlfriend turns out to be the pretty elevator operator Miss Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine, cute as a button), whom Baxter himself likes. But something goes awry between Mr. Sheldrake and Miss Kubelik; and ends with the latter trying to take her own life.
This is where the comedy phases out and the drama takes over. It’s a bold move on Wilder’s part, but I can’t say I wholly cared for it. I found it a little too depressing for a movie I had until that point been thoroughly enjoying. I wasn’t particularly interested in the turn the story took and the movie seemed to suffer a bit from the loss of momentum in those parts.
However, it picks up the pace again later on, which is when the romance bit kicks in. It’s everything you want it to be, and the end feels very satisfactory, if not entirely original.
Performance-wise, Lemmon and MacLaine both shine (and are irresistibly adorable together), in their comedic parts as well as in the more dramatic moments. They have such excellent chemistry that I wanted to run out immediately and rent Irma la Douce, the only other movie the two made together (and again directed by Wilder).
The movie has also aged very well. If it wasn’t for the dated clothes and the lack of colour, you could believe this movie was made today just as well as you could believe it was made 47 years ago. The themes running through it — money, loneliness, corporate greed, love, depression — still ring true today. That’s an impressive feat.
With the small reservation I mentioned above, I did really love this movie. It was wonderful - romance-wise, comedy-wise, and otherwise-wise.
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Didn’t know about Irma la Douce before — added that to the Queue…