The Apartment

The Apartment

There is a sad gap during the holidays between those who have somewhere to go, and those who don’t. That’s one reason “The Apartment” is so affecting: It takes place on the shortest days of the year, when dusk falls quickly and the streets are cold, when after the office party some people go home to their families and others go home to apartments where they haven’t even bothered to put up a tree. On Christmas Eve, more than any other night of the year, the lonely person feels deprived of something that was there in childhood and isn’t there now.

C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) is the definitive lonely guy in “The Apartment,” with an ironic twist: He isn’t even free to go home alone because his apartment is usually loaned out to one of the executives at his company. He has become their landlord for a series of affairs; they string him along with hints about raises and promotions. His neighbor Dr. Dreyfuss (Jack Kruschen) hears nightly sounds of passion through the wall and thinks Baxter is a tireless lover; actually Baxter paces the sidewalk in front, looking resentfully up at his own lighted window.

When Billy Wilder made “The Apartment” in 1960, “the organization man” was still current. One of the opening shots shows Baxter as one of a vast horde of wage slaves working in a room where desks line up in parallel rows almost to vanishing point. This shot is quoted from King Vidor’s silent film “The Crowd” (1928), which also was about a faceless employee in a heartless corporation. Cubicles would have been revolutionary progress in this world.

Baxter has no girlfriend and apparently no family. Patted on back and called “buddy boy” by executives who use him, he dreams romantic dreams about better job and having own office someday. One day he even gets up nerve to ask out one of the elevator girls, Miss Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), but she stands him up at last moment because crisis has developed in her relationship with big boss, Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray). She thought her affair with Sheldrake was over, but now apparently it’s on again; he keeps talking about divorcing his wife, but never does.

The Wilder/Diamond screenplay, poised precisely between farce and sadness, is constructed to demonstrate that while Baxter and Miss Kubelik may indeed like each other may feel genuine feelings of the sort that lead to true love they are both slaves to company’s value system. He wants to be assistant to the boss man; she wants to be wife of boss man, and both of them are so blinded by the concept “boss” that they can’t see Mr. Sheldrake for untrustworthy rat.

The film has been shot in black and white. The b&w dampens any cheer that might blow in with the tinsel at Christmas parties, bars and restaurants where the holiday season is in full swing. Also, it’s in wide-screen format which emphasizes space between people who are or have grown apart, or isolates them within emptiness.

Baxter’s apartment design throws a spotlight on the bedroom door at rear left of center beyond which sleep the secrets of his masters, the sources of his resentments, the site of his own lonely slumbers and ultimately the stage upon which Miss Kubelik will act out her pivotal life change.

Other shots track down Manhattan streets into club windows and isolate Miss Kubelik and the phony sincere Mr. Sheldrake in their booth at a Chinese restaurant where he makes earnest protestations of good intentions while nervously watching time pass by on his wrist.

By this time “The Apartment” was made, Wilder had become a master of a wised-up but sad satire. “Double Indemnity” (1944) starred MacMurray as a man who believed one simple crime would fix all his romantic and financial problems. “Sunset Boulevard” had William Holden as gigolo to grotesque aging movie queen Gloria Swanson, but there was pathos in her ex-husband Erich von Stroheim continuing to worship at her faded-greatness shrine.

Wilder came off his biggest hit “Some Like It Hot” (1959), first collaboration with Lemmon; Lemmon was on his way toward “The Days of Wine and Roses” (1962) both movies showed he could go from light comedian to tragic everyman. But this picture was also culmination for Wilder to date, key transition for Lemmon’s career.

It also registered as key work for Shirley MacLaine, who’d been around five years in light comedies and had strong scenes in “Some Came Running” (1958) but here emerged as a serious actress who would flower during the 1960s.

What’s particularly good about her Miss Kubelik is how MacLaine doesn’t play her for a sucker. She suggests instead a young woman who’s been lied to before, who has a good heart but limited patience, who’s willing to make the necessary compromises to become the next Mrs. Sheldrake. The underlying seriousness of MacLaine’s performance helps anchor the picture it raises the stakes, keeps it from turning into musical beds.

What’s specifically perceptive is how once she’s attempted suicide, instead of falling apart she pulls herself together and gives Sheldrake another chance. Like Baxter, the job has not been thrust upon her; she has chosen it. One way in which this is an adult picture rather than a sitcom is that it takes Baxter and Miss Kubelik so long to make the romantic leap they are not deluded fools but jaded realists who have given up on love and are more interested in paychecks. There is a wonderful, wicked delicacy to the way Wilder handles the final scene, and finds the right tender-tough note in the last lines of the screenplay (“Shut up and deal” would become nearly as famous as “nobody’s perfect,” the immortal closing lines of “Some Like it Hot”).

As luck had it, I saw “The Apartment” shortly after Jack Lemmon died, at about the same time Blake Edwards’ “The Days of Wine and Roses” (1962) and James Foley’s “Glengarry Glen Ross” (1992). Watching them one after another gave me an insight into Lemmon’s acting, and into styles that have come and gone. I think “The Days of Wine and Roses” has dated; that famous greenhouse scene looks like overacting more than alcoholism today.

Wilder made “The Lost Weekend” (1945) 17 years earlier but treats alcoholism more contemporarily. In fact, Lemmon may give his best performance in “Glengarry Glen Ross.” His aging desperate real estate salesman stands comparison with anyone’s Willy Loman from “Death of a Salesman,” and it’s interesting how Lemmon famously beginning with directors who asked him to dial down and give “a little less” was able to hit these precise tones for David Mamet dialogue that is realism cloaked in mannerism.

By saying that “The Lost Weekend” has not dated, I may be commenting on Wilder in general. Even a lightweight romantic comedy like “Sabrina” (1954) holds up better than its 1990s remake, and the great Wilder pictures do not play as period pieces but look us straight in the eye. “Some Like It Hot” is still funny, “Sunset Boulevard” is still a masterful gothic character comedy, and “The Apartment” is still tougher and more poignant than the material might have permitted.

What is valuable in Wilder is his adult sensibility; his characters cannot take flight with formula plots because they are burdened down by the trials and responsibilities of working for a living. In many movies, the characters hardly even seem to have jobs, but in “The Apartment,” they have to be reminded that they have anything else.

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