March 2004

The Apartment

• Starring: Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray, Ray Walston, Jack Kruschen
• Written, produced, and directed by: Billy Wilder
• Theatrical release: 1960
• DVD release: 2001
• Video: Widescreen (anamorphic)
• Sound: Dolby Digital 2.0 mono
• Released by: MGM Home Entertainment

There is one very important reason that several of the corporate executives at Consolidated Life of New York love C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) -- he’ll loan them his apartment for their extramarital trysts. C.C.’s goal is to bypass the other schlubs and move up the corporate ladder, and he figures that helping the bigwigs will get him there faster. When Jeff Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), the man at the top of the personnel heap, finds out about it, he calls C.C. into his office and asks for a key for himself, slyly promising a promotion. C.C., jubilant about his rising star though unhappy about being used by the execs, happily rationalizes away the inconvenience to himself. Feeling emboldened by his new status, C.C. works up the courage to ask for a date with the girl he secretly loves, elevator operator Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine). He then finds out that she is Sheldrake’s mistress. Fran, caught in the oldest trap of all -- dating a married man who’s always about to ask for a divorce and never does -- is still willing to wait, despite feeling that she’s being used. C.C. and Fran are attracted to each other, but are prepared to forgo the possibility of love and live through their indignities for a shot at something they believe is more important.

The Apartment poses difficult questions about the way people in charge exert power; about the foolish search for status; and about the importance of love and honor. Life had made these issues important to Billy Wilder, who wrote, produced, and directed the film. Already successful in Germany by the early 1930s, Wilder had fled when Hitler came to power (Wilder’s mother and stepfather eventually died in concentration camps). He showed up in the United States unable to speak English and with no real job opportunities. Peter Lorre and a few other German immigrants helped him meet some people, and Paramount finally bought one of his scripts in 1937.

By 1938, Wilder was working with the most sophisticated comedy director of the day, and perhaps of all time -- Ernst Lubitsch. Wilder learned at the foot of the master, absorbing his witty and urbane style. Wilder later wrote Ball of Fire for Howard Hawks (director of His Girl Friday) and would go every day to observe Hawks and his economical, virtually transparent camera style. Then, after writing three films for director Mitchell Leisen, whom he didn’t like, Wilder decided to take a cue from another great writer of the day, Preston Sturges, and demand the right to direct his own films.

Wilder immediately started making some of Hollywood’s greatest films: Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard, Stalag 17, The Seven Year Itch, Witness for the Prosecution, and Some Like It Hot. By the time The Apartment was released in 1960, Wilder was an acknowledged master, with three Oscars on his mantelpiece and 16 nominations. But close watchers were noticing a change in Billy Wilder. His early comedies had some acerbic moments, but always featured enough belly laughs to keep you from paying too much attention to the sarcasm between the lines. His caustic wit had begun as ironic and fun; now, it was moving into more biting cynicism.

The Apartment was his most mordant film to date. Watch it on the surface and it’s a sweet comedy in which two people find each other and fall in love. But note how Wilder makes all of the executives into unfeeling lotharios running around behind their wives’ backs. Wilder was a notorious hater of business types -- one of the reasons he began producing his own movies in 1951. Even more subtle is his less-than-gallant writing for the two lovers. Given other stars of the day -- say, Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor -- The Apartment could have come off as the work of a contemptuous man. Wilder subverted that bitterness by offering the ever-lovable Jack Lemmon as the man willing to connive his way to the top.

By 1960, Lemmon had three big films on his résumé (Mister Roberts, Bell Book and Candle, Some Like It Hot), but he was known mostly as a light comedy actor. C.C. Baxter was his first starring role with an edge. Lemmon plays a sad-sack nebbish that you feel sympathy for, but Wilder undermines the viewer’s compassion by making C.C. a man willing to aid his bosses’ infidelity just to get ahead in the business world. Any problems that come C.C.’s way are not only of his own making, they also stem from his personal desire for rank. Willing to ignore his bosses’ shortcomings, Lemmon seems to be ready to stop the enterprise. We think it’s out of honor, but he’s actually just tired of being locked out of his apartment and not getting a promotion for it. Once he gets what he wants, he drops all his rationalizations and falls headlong into the trap. Still, Lemmon’s characterization throughout softens Wilder’s barbed quips, making them as easy to swallow as chocolate-covered kumquats.

The choice of Shirley MacLaine also softened the script’s sting. Wide-eyed and prettier than ever before, she exudes a working-class style and dependability that the upper-crust managers lack. The scene in chapter 5, in which Fran has a drink with Sheldrake, shows the kind of vulnerable sweetness that caused Sinatra, Martin, Davis, Lawford, et al., to adopt MacLaine as an honorary member of the Rat Pack. Wilder works with that sweetness to make Fran seem a sympathetic character -- until he pulls the rug out from under us by revealing that she’s been sleeping with the married Mr. Sheldrake.

Fred MacMurray’s Sheldrake is also a surprise. Wilder had used him before, in Double Indemnity, where he played a dumb salesman willing to kill a man for a woman who got his hormones rolling. In The Apartment, MacMurray is the central villain, keeping C.C. separated from his dreams by fulfilling his goals. Worse, he casually lies to his mistress, just keeping her hooked. MacMurray is a wonderful cad. It’s hard to imagine that the following year he would become TV’s über-Dad in My Three Sons.

Lemmon and MacLaine went on to greater things. Until the end of his life, Lemmon was always trying to find roles that would surprise people. As the alcoholic in Days of Wine and Roses, the careworn ragman in Save the Tiger, or the scheming salesman in Glengarry Glen Ross, Lemmon never tired of trying new things. His peers loved him, giving him eight Oscar nominations and two trophies. MacLaine did less actorly stretching, but her résumé includes some great films, such as The Turning Point and Terms of Endearment.

Wilder picked up three Oscars for The Apartment, for Best Director, Best Writing, and Best Picture. By the end of his career, he had garnered 21 Oscar nominations and six statues. But after The Apartment, his films devolved into bitter diatribes. If you want to see the work of a truly acrimonious sensibility, try trudging through Wilder’s Kiss Me, Stupid, a look at someone willing to put his wife in bed with another man to make a little money. If that sounds like pimping and whoring, it is. By this time, Wilder was losing interest in the film business, feeling it had lost its direction. The critics said Wilder had lost it. He told an interviewer in 1976, "They say Wilder is out of touch with his times. Frankly I regard it as a compliment. Who the hell wants to be in touch with these times?" He retired and tended his (some say) $100 million collection of modern art.

Between Wilder’s retirement in 1981 and his death a year ago this month at 95, he wanted to direct only one other film. He even helped polish the screenplay, but ultimately, the producer decided to direct the film himself. The producer was Steven Spielberg; the film was Schindler’s List. Film writer David Thompson’s view of Wilder’s satire is that of essentially a voyeur, not a participant (my words, his concept). This explains how Wilder could be so sardonic and bitter about life while never revealing the traits he so despised in his fellow man (avarice, stupidity, lack of sophistication, status seeking) as true evils. I think he might have unleashed his anger on Schindler’s List and made it more powerful than it actually turned out. I’ve always been suspicious of Spielberg’s motives for making the film. It had obvious Oscar potential, something Spielberg was on record as wanting badly. Wilder wouldn’t have cared. He’d have gone for the throat, but intelligently, instead of in Spielberg’s overwrought style.

MGM’s DVD reveals the beautiful camera work of Joseph LaShelle. Much of the film is shot in low light, and the DVD does a fine job of revealing the textures and shadows. Wilder’s decision to shoot the film in widescreen black and white was brilliant. It makes the offices look drab and uninviting, and C.C.’s apartment lifeless. Shirley MacLaine never looked lovelier than in this muted light. The sound is in clear mono and there is only one extra -- the trailer. The price is right. I bought mine at Best Buy for $10.99.

The Apartment received 10 Academy Award nominations and won five, including Best Picture. When the British Film industry’s highly respected journal, Sight and Sound, polled some of the world’s greatest directors in 2002, The Apartment ranked 14th on the list of all films ever made. That same poll put Billy Wilder at No. 7 on the list of all-time-best directors. Wilder also went on to receive the ultimate awards for his profession, the Academy’s Irving Thalberg Memorial and the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

The Apartment is not a comfortable film to watch, though the director’s astringent view of life is somewhat smoothed by the sweetness of the comedy. It is also the clearest glimpse you’ll ever get into Billy Wilder’s complicated soul.

...Wes Marshall
wesm@hometheatersound.com

• Go Back