Film Review: The Apartment

That great cynic of cinema, Billy Wilder, softens up and gives us one of the great romantic movies set around Christmas with his definitive classic, The Apartment (1960).

A few years ago, I wrote about the melancholy of Christmas when writing about The Dead, a movie about a New Years party of people reflecting on the past. Billy Wilder’s classic, The Apartment has two lonely people with hopes and plans for the future, during that noisiest of holidays; Christmas. The film follows an insurance clerk, CC Baxter (Jack Lemmon) who, in the hope of climbing the corporate ladder, lets more senior coworkers use his Upper West Side apartment to conduct extramarital affairs. He is attracted to an elevator operator, Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine) in his office building, unaware that she is having an affair with his immediate boss Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray).

Jack Lemmon was one of the great actors of cinema, a man who played the every man so well. CC Baxter is quite pathetic at the start, cowardly bowing to his superiors by giving up his private space so they can get their extramarital kicks. The equally great Shirley MacClaine’s Fran is just as pathetic. Fran is a beautiful young

woman, hopelessly devoted to an older married man who won’t leave his wife. CC and Fran are certainly up there in the pantheon of flawed and troubled romantic couples. The Apartment is certainly a big difference from Wilder’s other great comedy just from a year before, Some Like It Hot. It’s more muted. It’s very adult and practical in its depiction of romance, letting it simmer gently rather than boil. Its black and white photography adds to our two characters loneliness, removing the garish colours of the season that pollute everywhere. Christmas can show someone that even in the biggest crowd with the most noise, one can feel the most loneliness. The movie certainly gets heavy, MacLaine’s character Fran, attempts to take her life. We see a doctor frantically trying to resuscitate her, slapping her out of unconsciousness, a Christmas tree, right beside them, adding a blackly comic juxtaposition to the whole thing.

In her essay, Why The Apartment is the greatest Christmas film of all time, Clarisse Loughrey points out: “... even in the bleakest of Christmases, there’s always hope. It thrives on it. And it’s precisely hope that

Billy Wilder’s beloved 1960 film offers the world… a film that deals with love. Real love. A kind quiet, pained, but with eyes fixed on the stars above.” That’s what I love about this movie, it comes off as a romantic movie for adults. There’s really no grand gestures, there’s just two flawed human beings who gradually make the right decisions to better their lives. Having made the movie sound bleak in parts, it’s anything but. Hope and love triumphs in the most deserving way for our two characters. Your heart will be tingling.

The movie’s final line “Shut up and deal’’ is in the pantheon of great movie line closers matching Wilder’s other great closer “Nobody’s perfect” from Some Like It Hot. If you haven’t already, shut up and experience The Apartment’s magic for yourself. Available on DVD, Blu Ray and to rent on Youtube