10 / 10
Official trailer
The Apartment is Billy Wilder’s 1960 American comedy-drama about an ambitious insurance company clerk who lends his Manhattan apartment to senior executives for their extramarital affairs in exchange for career advancement, until he discovers the boss’s mistress is the elevator operator he’s been secretly in love with for months. Jack Lemmon plays C.C. Baxter. Shirley MacLaine plays Fran Kubelik. Fred MacMurray plays Jeff D. Sheldrake. Ray Walston plays Mr. Dobisch. David Lewis plays Mr. Kirkeby. Jack Kruschen plays Dr. Dreyfuss.
Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond wrote the screenplay. The Mirisch Company and United Artists produced and released the film in June 1960. The Apartment won five Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay.
Wilder’s film is as close to perfect as an American comedy gets, and it’s also the saddest comedy I know. It makes me laugh at Baxter in one scene and want to protect him in the next, and it never goes soft on the men who use him. I don’t have a single complaint I’d bother to make.
The film is set against the Christmas-New Year holiday window because Wilder needed the season to do work the screenplay otherwise couldn’t do. Office Christmas parties give Baxter and Fran their key drunken-honest exchange. The Christmas-Eve realization in his apartment sets up the New Year’s-Eve resolution. The cumulative effect frames the film as a Christmas story without ever being marketed as one.
The Christmas elements are integrated so deeply into the screenplay’s mechanism that they’re inseparable from it, and consequently the film belongs in any serious Christmas-cinema canon despite its primary identity as a corporate-corruption character study.
Jack Lemmon’s Baxter
Lemmon’s performance is as fine as anything in American film, and it’s the main reason I rate this movie so highly. Baxter is required to be sympathetic while doing contemptible things: enabling other men’s adultery in exchange for promotions, lying to colleagues about why his apartment is unavailable, pretending illness to cover for executives. Lemmon plays the moral compromise as something Baxter himself can no longer fully see, the only choice that lets the audience stay with him through the screenplay’s harder material.
The transformation from corporate striver to morally awake character is shaped through small gestures instead of declarations. The way Baxter holds his tennis racket while making martinis. The way he plays solitaire alone on Christmas Eve before Fran’s overdose. The way he says ‘shut up and deal’ in the closing scene. Lemmon’s career had several great roles. Baxter is the deepest of them.
For Writers
Characters who do wrong things can hold sympathetic narrative position when the actor plays the moral compromise as habit instead of choice. Lemmon never lets Baxter feel his own complicity until the film forces him to.
Shirley MacLaine as Fran
MacLaine was twenty-six during production and her Fran is the film’s wounded heart. The character has to be both vulnerable and intelligent, both attractive enough to plausibly be Sheldrake’s mistress and self-aware enough to recognize what the affair is doing to her. MacLaine plays both registers without ever choosing one over the other.
The overdose sequence and its aftermath are the film’s longest and most demanding passage for MacLaine. She plays the recovery scenes with Lemmon at low key, her exhaustion and shame held under the dialogue instead of performed through it. The gin rummy sequences in Baxter’s apartment have a tenderness the film hasn’t earned through plot and earns moment by moment through the two performances.
Those card games are my favorite scenes in the film. Almost nothing happens in them, and I could watch another hour.
For Writers
Vulnerable characters in serious comedy require performances that resist the comic energy of the surrounding screenplay. MacLaine plays Fran straight even when Lemmon’s Baxter is being funny around her.
Fred MacMurray’s Sheldrake
MacMurray took the role over considerable reluctance about playing an adulterous corporate predator. His casting against the wholesome-father type he’d established in the 1950s gives Sheldrake real menace. The audience can’t read Sheldrake as the cad they’d expect from typecasting. That makes his actions colder.
Sheldrake’s Christmas-Eve treatment of Fran, where he gives her a hundred-dollar bill as a Christmas present after she demands more from the relationship, is the film’s worst single act, and it reads worse because MacMurray plays it with mild irritation instead of cruelty. The character doesn’t think he’s doing anything wrong. That bill is the ugliest moment in the film for me, and MacMurray’s little shrug makes it uglier than any open villainy could.
For Writers
Casting against type strengthens villainous performances when the audience is forced to adjust expectations. MacMurray’s wholesome history makes Sheldrake’s corruption hit harder than a typecast actor’s would.
Craft Note
Wilder and Diamond wrote the screenplay with Lemmon in mind after their successful collaboration on Some Like It Hot the previous year. The film was Wilder’s first since Sunset Boulevard to fully integrate his darker thematic instincts with his commercial comedy capabilities. Joseph LaShelle’s black-and-white cinematography captures the office tower’s gridlike conformity and the apartment’s loneliness with equal precision. Adolph Deutsch composed the score, with the famous theme later released as a Ferrante and Teicher hit single.
Does The Apartment still hold up?
It’s a 10, and I’d put The Apartment at the top of American films from the 1960s. It’s also a Christmas film with more bite than almost any other. The five Academy Awards including Best Picture were entirely warranted. If you care about American cinema, about romantic comedy as a serious form, or about a holiday movie brave enough to face loneliness, start here.
