The Apartment (1960)
For a long, long time The Apartment was my default answer to "What's your favorite movie?" It was more a way of coming up with an appropriate answer to that question than something I thought deeply about. I saw it when I was about 13 or 14 and I loved it so much - the romanticism and the humor - that I listed it as my favorite and stopped thinking about why.
Every time I see The Apartment, though, I think "maybe this is my favorite after all." The Apartment would never have happened if an earlier film, David Lean's Brief Encounter hadn't been made and hadn't been seen by Billy Wilder at the exact right time. In Brief Encounter two star-crossed lovers are lent an apartment by a friend for a short rendezvous. I don't think that you ever even see this friend on screen, but Billy Wilder came away from Brief Encounter wondering about that unseen person and what it would be like to come home to an empty apartment after the lovers have left and the bed is still warm. Wilder turned that idea into The Apartment.
Billy Wilder with bedsheets
Here's the plot: C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) is an office drone at Consolidated Life Insurance in Manhattan and lives on the upper West Side (back when ordinary people could afford to live on the Upper West Side). In order to climb the corporate ladder he lends his apartment out to four middle-aged, middle-management jerks who use the place to conduct their shallow affairs. Eventually this situation comes to the attention of Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), an upper-upper-management jerk who wants to use Baxter's apartment exclusively for his affair with Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), a lowly elevator operator at Consolidated Life. The only problem is that Baxter is in love with Miss Kubelik and when he finds out that she's the girl who's been in his apartment with a married man, things get sticky.
What makes The Apartment a masterpiece is its hidden scope. It's as much about corporate America and urban life in 1960 as it is about Mr. Baxter and Miss Kubelik. An early scene shows the original idea Billy Wilder had, as C.C. Baxter arrives home after the lovers have left (and the bed is still warm). He enters the apartment, opens the window to air it out, throws out all the empty liquor bottles, and makes himself a t.v. dinner. He then sits, eating in front of the t.v., flipping channels in the vain hope that something good will come on. Throughout the movie there is this constant sense of the mundaneness and loneliness of both private and working life in America. Everyone at Consolidated Life, except for Mr. Baxter and Miss Kubelik, is either offhandedly cruel or pathetically shallow (another exception to this might be Mr. Sheldrake's secretary, Miss Olson, who is also cruel, but only because she's been made this way by Sheldrake and the corporation). Things are so flattened in this world, that the small acts of consideration (Baxter taking off his hat in the elevator in deference to Miss Kubelik) and beauty (Miss Kubelik's carnation that she always wears pinned to her uniform) stand out amid the ever present conformity and dehumanization of Consolidated Life.
Baxter and a sea of florescent lights
A lot of people were talking about the portrait Mad Men created this year of sexual politics in the early 1960's, but for me, Mad Men is too overt and too pointedly unfair. It doesn't match the offhand nature of the acceptance of cruelty that exists in The Apartment. The things people know are not spoken of - they just are. Inner lives are not mentioned, even in the close proximity of eight hours a day. Fran Kubelik is sleeping with Mr. Sheldrake in Baxter's apartment several times a week, but he never suspects. And even when this is revealed to him, he doesn't know the real truth - that Miss Kubelik is not a woman with loose morals, she's just decided to trust the wrong guy.
The Apartment is an American Romance so it offers up redemption and hope and I have no problem with that. The hope comes because C.C. Baxter and Fran Kubelik choose to smarten up and leave the corporate world for what Baxter calls the wonderfulness of "dinner for two." It's a nice message, saying maybe if you're young enough and smart enough, you can forget the idiocy you're surrounded by and strike out on your own.
