The Apartment (1960, Dir. Billy Wilder)
Synopsis:
Lowly accounting clerk, C.C. Baxter, known to all as “Bud” (Jack Lemmon) lets several of his bosses at his firm use his Apartment to bring their mistresses and one night stands. He is shyly infatuated with one of the elevator girls at work, Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine). When his boss, Mr Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray) finds out about Baxter’s apartment, he pressures Baxter into letting him use it as well, in return for a promotion. The rise through the company comes at a hidden cost however, when Baxter learns that Sheldrake’s mistress is none other than Fran. When she attempts to kill herself at the apartment on Christmas Eve, after Sheldrake refuses to leave his wife, Baxter looks after her. The two grow close and Baxter must choose between his job and the woman he loves.
The lovely folks at Last Exit To Nowhere T-shirts recently did a Twitter poll asking people for their favorite Xmas movies and I’m ashamed to say that I totally forgot about this film, which is set at Xmas and is one of my favorite movies of all time.
Some of you might be wondering how it could be truly classed as “underrated”, it’s regarded as one of Wilder’s and Lemmon’s best movies, it won 5 oscars (including best picture) and yet I’m often surprised by the fact that people aren’t as aware of it as they are of some of Wilder’s other work. I even once had a good friend of mine, whose opinions on film I normally respected, dismiss it as “sub Neil Simon-like melodrama”…so for those of you who have not yet discovered it or perhaps like me, needed to be reminded of it’s brilliance, here you go…
I first discovered it as a teenager when, after having seen Some Like It Hot, I immediately decided Jack Lemmon was my new acting hero. My mother recorded this film when it appeared on tv a few months later for me to watch and I did, ultimately loving it even more than Some Like It Hot.
Only now, looking back, do I realize that seeing Shirley MacLaine in this film might well be the reason why, even to this day, I find girls with short dark hair incredibly sexy. Certainly it provided a mental image of 50s New York that has stayed in my mind ever since. It has so many great moments but particularly the wonderful plot device of the cracked pocket mirror as the way Baxter discovers that Fran, the girl he secretly loves, is Sheldrake’s mistress or the way that both Baxter and later Fran slowly incorporate the faux-statistical slang of the lecherous Mr Kirkeby into their own speech, with Fran in particular using it one of the film’s final scenes as a sort of private code to tell the audience how she really feels about Baxter.
For me its brilliance lies in how it can effortlessly “shift gear” from snappy, light comedy to something much darker, more in tune with a Douglas Sirk movie or Alexander Mackendrick’s jet black The Sweet Smell Of Success. Name me another romantic comedy has such a hardcore post suicide attempt scene in the middle. Name another piece prior to Mad Men that attempts to show the cracks behind the glamorous facade of the 50s, when American business and culture was booming. This film highlights the misogyny and sexism of that era, from a contemporary perspective.
This is an important point, as although the film was released in 1960, it is a 50s movie for all intents and purposes. The look of the insurance company offices, the Chinese restaurant are now the stuff of retrospective rediscovery thanks to the aforementioned Mad Men, and yet this, the majority of which was clearly shot on the back lot (I don’t know how many other films have used the front steps to Lemmon’s apartment in the years since but it certainly looks familiar… then again, it’s meant to — the New York presented her is a nondescript one, the perfect compliment to Lemmon’s Everyman: C.C. Baxter) seems to have a level of authenticity that no modern period recreation, no matter how detailed, can really manage.
If the gorgeous black and white photography by Joseph LaShelle (just look at the shot of Lemmon sitting on the park bench at night, it could be straight out of a Cartier-Bresson picture — incidentally this was the last black and white film to win “Best Picture” until Schindler’s List and The Artist) wasn’t enough to immediately clue you into the film’s time and place; the score by Adolph Deutsch certainly will.
The main theme which plays over a shot of the exterior of the apartment, seems at first to be a hideously over-the-top piece of Hollywood Golden era musical melodrama, but as with the rest of the film, appearances are deceptive: Deutsch continually reuses this theme in very interesting and often diagetic (as opposed to non-diagetic, which is what most film music is) ways. It is the theme that the pianist in the Chinese restaurant plays whenever Fran arrives for her trysts with Mr Sheldrake. Later a record of it that Fran buys Sheldrake for Xmas is what plays when she attempts to kill herself. I particularly really like the slow, sober version of the theme that first plays when Sheldrake tells Fran that he can’t leave his wife and then later after her suicide attempt when Baxter is looking after her — It’s gone a faint echo on it to make it seem even more like a ghostly reminder of a love story gone wrong.
This is an incredibly meta-fictive idea of scoring, that is light years ahead of what most scores did in the 50s and 60s and it would be the end of the 60s before other scores such as Midnight Cowboy and Altman’s The Long Goodbye would attempt something similar. The way the score mimics the insurance company’s printing machines in the opening scene with Baxter at work is brilliant too.
The true power of this film lies in Lemmon’s performance however. Just watch his wonderful and varied expressions during the short scene where he sits down in front of the tv with his dinner. It’s so perfect and so subtle and really should be required viewing for anybody who wants to act in film.
The brilliance of his performance in the scene where Sheldrake interviews him and says he knows about how the others have been using Baxter’s apartment is breathtaking: Look at the layers present in the performance here: He goes from excited, to nervous, to scared that he’ll lose his job, all played on top of the additional layer of having a heavy cold and then to “top it off” with the great slapstick gag of having him accidentally spray his nose spray over the room. Finally his wonderful series of expressions when he realizes what Sheldrake wants of him.
Like much of the film, this scene is played almost entirely in one master shot. This was one of Wilder’s greatest directorial achievements, not only in this film but in many of his other movies as well. He was a master at staging action so that you barely notice that they’re aren’t many cuts — the camera is exactly where it needs to be in order to capture the action.
Yet, Lemmon’s performance isn’t the only great one on display here. If you are only familiar with Shirley MacLaine as an older actress, prepare to be blown away by her amazingly sexy and assured performance here. Despite the way Fran is treated by the slimy Sheldrake, she is most definitely not a stereotypical “victim”. She wants to believe his promises, though it’s made very clear that she doesn’t really believe them. The wonderful monologue when she’s recovering at the apartment shows very little self pity and instead. a sad realization that, for one reason or another, she has always fallen for the wrong guy. Suicide attempts in films are often presented as either inevitable or as a positive means of escape for a tragic character. There is none of this here. There is no sign posting and it seems that even Fran herself has not considered it until the moment she does it. It feels, correctly, like a tragic decision by someone who believes that they truly have no options left.
I didn’t initially realize just how daring the casting of Fred MacMurray as the adulterous and two-faced boss, Sheldrake was. It was my step-father who mentioned it initially and it’s another great example of the film’s attempts to throw the audience a curveball. Normally cast as “a nice guy” (a tradition he would later continue in such Disney films as The Absentminded Professor) it was Wilder who would, more than once, cast him “against type”, first in Double Indemnity and then in this, 16 years later.
But it’s not just the 3 leads that are brilliant here, virtually every one of the supporting cast is equally superb, including Ray Walston and David Lewis as Dobitsch and Kirkeby, two of the adulterous bosses in his firm; Jack Kruschen as Baxter’s neighbor Dr Dreyfuss, Edie Adams as Sheldrake’s jealous secretary and former lover, Miss Olsen and another Wilder regular, Joan Shawlee (who played “Sweet Sue” in Some Like It Hot) as Kirkeby’s mistress, Syliva.
Only Naomi Stevens as Dr Dreyfuss’ wife, seems over-the-top, in her rather stereotypical role of a very Jewish wife, even down to giving Fran a bowl of chicken soup… fortunately she’s not in it for long, but, watching the film again for this post, I found her performance grating next to the superb and understated turns of the rest of the cast. Equally disturbing (for audiences today) is the scene where you see Sheldrake getting his shoes shined by a colored man, because it’s presented without comment or irony, as part of day-to-day life… which, of course, it would still have been in 1959.
However, these are minor blips in an otherwise brilliant film, where the brilliant dialogue and performances and the superb black and white cinematography serve up a bittersweet, funny and often dark, Christmas treat.
