The Apartment

It's that time of year for my annual look back at what was happening in film fifty years ago, by focusing on the films nominated for the Best Picture Oscar (plus a few more). Last week I wrote about Spartacus, which was not nominated (though it did win four other Oscars), and earlier this year I wrote about arguably the two films that had the greatest impact from 1960, Breathless and Psycho.

I'll start with that year's winner, the great Billy Wilder's The Apartment. Today it's rightly thought of as a classic, but surprisingly it was not unanimously praised when it was released. It seems that people weren't ready for the depiction of middle-class men as a cohort of philandering cretins, something that would be much easier to portray almost fifty years later in Mad Men. One critic, giving faint praise, said that Wilder had "grown a rose in a garbage pail."

The film has been misinterpreted as a comedy for years. Indeed, one of the working titles for it was Who's Been Sleeping In My Bed?, which makes it sound like a Rock Hudson-Doris Day picture. And there are certainly funny moments, and a hopeful ending. But to me the film has always been an examination of loneliness, of being in a sea of people yet feeling utterly alone. It's also notable that though this was 1960, and comedies were usually shot in color, this one, photographed by Joseph LaShelle, is lit like a noir film.

The story concerns an everyman hero, C.C. Baxter, memorably played by Jack Lemmon. He is a bachelor, and works as one of 31,000 employees for a massive insurance firm in Manhattan. He has a desk in an office the size of an airplane hangar, just another cog in the machine. The first few shots, in fact, recall scenes from King Vidor's much bleaker film about urban alienation, The Crowd.

But Lemmon is on the way up, because he has been lending his apartment out to middle-managers for use as love-nests for their assignations. These guys, played by TV actors like Ray Walston and David White (Larry Tate from Bewitched) are crass, vulgar, and exploitative. As a character says later on, there are some people who take and some who get took. Lemmon gets took.

He does this to get ahead, even though it means he has to occasionally wander the streets, or occupy a bench in Central Park during freezing weather, while his bosses use his place. Wilder, who wrote the script with I.A.L. Diamond, was inspired by two things: the David Lean film Brief Encounter, in which two married people have an affair, and use a friend's apartment (he was interested in the friend--what motivated him to lend his apartment); and a Hollywood scandal in which an agent was shot by a Hollywood producer for sleeping with his wife. The agent had been using an underling's apartment.

When the boss, Fred MacMurray, gets wind of what's going on, he muscles in. He's a serial philanderer, but has been lately keeping time with Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), a winsome elevator operator. Lemmon, of course, fancies her, and when he finds out that she's the one that MacMurray has been seeing in his apartment, he's devastated. Then things take a near tragic turn, and this presumably bouncy romantic comedy suddenly veers into much darker domain.

That MacMurray plays such as arrogant shit-heel was somewhat shocking, considering he was then known for My Three Sons and The Absent-Minded Professor. A woman accosted him at Disneyland and hit him with her pocketbook, saying he had ruined the Disney image. But he is so good as a thoroughly reprehensible figure that at times it's chilling. Also good is Jack Kruschen, as the kind-hearted doctor who lives down the hall from Lemmon. Because Lemmon's apartment is frequented by partying adulterers, Kruschen has assumed that Lemmon is some kind of sexual athlete. Lemmon doesn't dissuade the doctor of this notion, perhaps because he wants to protect his bosses, and perhaps because he likes the idea of being seen as a Lothario. Krushen gives the film its spine, as he urges Lemmon to be a mensch.

What makes the film for me is MacLaine's Miss Kubelik. I must admit I haven't always admired her kooky persona that emerged in the late 1960s, but in this film, when she was only 25, she played one of those female characters that I just know, if I had been in the film, I would have done grand and foolish things for. She makes bad choices with men, and then makes a worse choice when thrown over by one, but my heart can't help but going out to her every time I watch this film. MacLaine's pixie face is able to register a kind of resigned sadness with exquisite skill, and the closing scene, in which Lemmon tells her he loves while she's shuffling cards, is one of the classic endings in Hollywood history (Wilder, after the great one-line ending of the previous year's Some Like It Hot--"Nobody's perfect," felt pressure to top himself, and he almost did with "Shut up and deal.")

I think the negative response to this film stemmed mostly from the difficulty in categorizing the film. In those days, people went to a film knowing what they were going to see: comedy, romance, detective story, Western. When films slipped in and out of categories, especially as effortlessly as they did here, it confused them, even critics. Over the years there would be more of this type of picture, one that would replicate the inconsistencies of life.