Directed by Billy Wilder
Written by I.A.L. Diamond and Billy Wilder
Starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray, Ray Walston
USA, 1960
Not Rated
R.I.P. JACK LEMMON
At the center of The Apartment are two warped versions of innocents: C.C. “Bud” Baxter (Jack Lemmon) and Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), subordinate employees in an insurance firm. We find Mr. Baxter at his desk, dutifully working away because he wants to get ahead in the world, lost in a sea of suits that pays homage to The Crowd. He is this film’s hero but he isn’t pure or blameless; he prostitutes himself to the Goliaths of the firm by turning his apartment into a hotel-of-sorts where his superiors can have sex with their mistresses, and he allows himself to be taken advantage of by senior executives so he can someday reach a respectable position in the company. He is often shut out of his own home while customers finish their business, and he suffers colds and sleepiness while on the job. Miss Kubelik is the elevator girl whom Baxter has a crush on but she, too, is no angel. She has foolishly fallen in love with Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), a married man who works at the firm. He eventually gets around to asking Baxter for the key to the apartment in exchange for a higher rank and salary, and Baxter consents. Miss Kubelik and Mr. Baxter are innocents because almost everyone else in this film is not; in a New York pungent with narcissism, they have absorbed some of that nastiness, but they are the only ones who don’t revel in it and they realize that it is the source of their own unhappiness.
When I first saw The Apartment, I was too young to understand Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond’s morosely humorous nuances or the lonely pursuits of the Lemmon and MacLaine characters. All I understood in the art of moviemaking was “plot,” and nothing but “plot.” I had no ear for the witty dialogue, and I had no eye for those smiles tainted with fatigue or Joseph LaShelle’s lyrical, uncluttered widescreen compositions. Wilder, who has no less than half a dozen masterpieces to his name (a number of which starred Jack Lemmon), was such an elegant, precise filmmaker, and yet there was always something lurking beneath the surface, something dark, complex, and unanswered. The Apartment, one of his most finely crafted dramedies, is no exception. The film’s journey to a rosier end is fraught with attempted suicide, remorseless adultery, corporate corruption, mixed-up morality, acerbic irony, and a long string of broken hearts. The hero and heroine are, in many ways, no better than the villains; it’s just that they’re redeemed by finding each other. Wilder’s gleeful cynicism is all too human, and The Apartment was a harbinger for what would come later in cinema of the 1960’s decade. By ‘67, we were making movies like Bonnie and Clyde, and in ‘69, Midnight Cowboy was released, boasting violent and sexual pyrotechnics.
We meet some pretty heartless people in this perfectly created cutthroat world, Fred MacMurray’s Sheldrake being the most overtly slimy of them all. This is a world not unlike the one I see on the surface of everyday high school life; Sheldrake’s callous language is one spoken by too many young men today. Mr. Baxter is mistaken for one of these monsters- the kind of men he panders to but is morally disgusted by- when he really has no one to keep him company at night, except Ed Sullivan at dinnertime. Already suspected by his neighbors of being promiscuous, Baxter is seen as a vicious heartbreaker when his love interest, Miss Kubelik, tries to kill herself after Sheldrake gives her a hundred dollar bill for Christmas, an impersonal gesture that makes her feel like a hooker. She, like the prostitute in Nights of Cabiria and MacLaine’s own role in the adaptation Sweet Charity, has had her heart broken again and again, and she knows that she shouldn’t have gotten involved with a married man in the first place.
Though they hook-up in the end, the sadness of the movie continues to hang around, like the curse of the romantically unlucky. After triumphantly dumping the loser Sheldrake, Miss Kubelik runs to Baxter’s apartment and refuses to get sentimental, intent on finishing a card game with him while he showers her with “I love you’s.” She ends the movie with the impeccably delivered “Shut up and deal.” The Apartment is reliant on these gloomy colors and life-affirming shades that pack an astonishing emotional punch. Wilder’s films noirs, Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard, were grand tragedies of the glamorous, and perhaps those are his greatest achievements; I know they are my personal favorites. Or maybe the out-and-out hilarity of Some Like It Hot is his opus. The Apartment, which is ranked beneath all of these in the pantheon of movie classics, is emotionally resonant in a way that none of these films are.
Jack Lemmon died on June 27, 2001, and I feel I’ve lost a person I’ve grown up with. I vividly remember my mom taking me to see Grumpy Old Men when I was six or seven years old. It was an odd choice of a movie to take a young boy to, and it’s not a great film, but Lemmon was not the wet blanket elderly people are often portrayed as; he had much of the same sprightliness that characterized his comedic work of earlier years. Even in his comedies, he was as unexaggerated a version of the Everyman as one could get in a comedy, and this makes his passing a strange loss. There was no special charisma there; just dignity and kindness, and this showed even in his darkest roles. In Days of Wine and Roses and his devastating, unforgettable performance in Glengarry Glen Ross, you could still sense that there was a goodness hidden behind all the tragic layers his characters had been buried under.
I love the way he works with the wonderful Shirley MacLaine in this movie. I enjoy his work with her as much as I do his collaborations with his best friend Walter Matthau. She was this mixture of the angelic and the streetwise and in The Apartment and Wilder’s Irma La Douce, Lemmon’s boyishly enamored with her, and the infatuation is charming, eerie, and familiar. In The Apartment, he lets MacLaine steal all his scenes (except for when he famously strains pasta with a tennis racket) just as he allows Matthau to stand in the spotlight in yet another Wilder classic, The Fortune Cookie. In Some Like It Hot, it’s Tony Curtis who ends up with Marilyn Monroe. Even in Glengarry Glen Ross, it’s Al Pacino who relishes being saucy. Lemmon was a great foil, a basis of virtue. He was an incredible actor but, because he had no need for bombast or histrionics, he didn’t draw attention to himself.
And still this is not enough to describe him. I think in this era of acting, there are fewer identifiable stars around and, in a way, that’s a shame. We’re trying to get rid of the idolatry, yet a part of us still silently yearns for the consistent personas of yesteryear. The day after he passed away from cancer, Larry King interviewed a few people who were close to Lemmon. Among them was Shirley MacLaine, who got to the very essence of what it means to be a star and why he was most definitely one of them. He could undoubtedly act, but when you went to see a Jack Lemmon movie, you knew you were going to see Jack Lemmon. It was going to be him doing some of that old shtick he could never escape from; it was like visiting an old friend. Of all the recent celebrity deaths of the past few months, his has spooked me the most. Rest in peace, Jack.
By Andrew Chan [JULY 3, 2001]