If greatness is defined cinematically as a picture whose characters we can feel for—even if we’ve never found ourselves in identical circumstances—and whose stories play out against a sharply defined rendering of their society with its peculiar characteristics as well as its universal norms, The Apartment (1960) ranks among the greatest films from Hollywood or anywhere. Although writer-director Billy Wilder went on to make nine additional films before his death in 2002, none came close.
The Apartment has been reissued in a limited edition by Arrow Academy, featuring a beautifully restored print on Blu-ray and a hardcover book complete with essays and stills. As film studies professor Neil Sinyard writes in his contribution to the book, “Sweet and Sour: The Greatness of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment”: “The elements are welded beautifully together through a subtle pattern of recurring visual and verbal motifs; and the control of tone and tempo is a thing of wonder.” Few contemporary filmmakers, with their lazy digital pacing and editing, are in the same universe.
Jack Lemmon plays the protagonist, C.C. Baxter, with a comic pathos that sometimes suggests Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp. He is the cog in a vast machine, punching numbers into a calculator on a desk surrounded by row after row of desks in an M.C. Escher picture of conformity unto infinity. Baxter’s hope of promotion in this high-rise hive of dull activity rests on the location of his Manhattan apartment. His address has become a convenient trysting spot for his bosses—a place for illicit sex and booze on the way home to their wives in the suburbs. He cleans up the messes they leave behind, but one mess proves too much to handle.
Baxter is in love with the elevator operator, Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLain) while she is in love with Baxter’ superior, J.D. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), whose affability conceals cruel disregard as he toys with her body and her emotions in Baxter’s flat.
The Apartment is, among other things, a devastating satire of the sort of workplace environment that has come under scrutiny in the last months with women at the mercy of male bosses whose sexual appetites aren’t sated behind the respectable facades of wives and family. The comedy darkens until laughter turns to tears. Baxter is the everyman who finds himself compromised by a corrupt society at odds with his fundamental sense of decency. The Apartment is a bittersweet masterpiece as relevant today as it was half a century ago.
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