Billy Wilder's 1960 "The Apartment"

Acting-wise, one of the most awe-inspiring moments of American cinema occurs in an elevator in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment. It’s Christmas. A raucous holiday party is being thrown at Consolidated Life in New York City, which (according to our voiceover narrator, a well-worn Billy Wilder technique) houses “31,259 employees, which is more than the entire population of, err, Natchez, Mississippi.” Drones during the day, they let loose at night. C.C. “Bud” Baxter, the nebbish accountant played with warm blubberiness by Jack Lemmon, is racing to the elevator where his crush Miss Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine) works. Baxter carries two cups of liquor — one for him, one for Miss Kubelik. He rarely drinks, but he does with Miss Kubelik.

The dialogue in a Wilder romance-comedy is unparalleled, and this tiny elevator exchange is no exception. She apologizes for the night before. Nice guy that he is, he shrugs it off. “You couldn’t help yourself.” She’s less adamant: “It’s unforgivable.” “I forgive you!” “Well, you shouldn’t.” Bashful Baxter, ever the unassertive and assuaging office-drone, is genuinely happy: “Ya did the only decent thing.” Miss Kubelik presses him a little bit, wants him to understand that, no, what she did last night isn’t “the only decent thing”, pitching some playful punning his way: “Well, I wouldn’t be too sure. Just ‘cause I wear this uniform doesn’t make me a Girl Scout.” Finally, he asserts himself, in the most crucial moment of his character in the first half of The Apartment: “Ms Kubelik, one doesn’t get to be a Second Administrative Assistant around here unless he’s a pretty good judge of character. And as far as I’m concerned, you’re tops. Decency-wise, or...otherwise-wise! (tiny guffaw) Cheers!”

Worlds turn around that guffaw. It truly, honestly gives me chills, inspires a tear in my eye. The depth of a movie character doesn’t rest solely on their big gestures or the clever lines they spew out. C.C. Baxter is not just a neb who lets people walk over him, who finds courage to stand up for himself when he falls in love with the elevator girl. He comes especially alive in the sharp, crisp nods while watching a ticker-tape read his life away. He lives in the nonsense Italian song he bellows, in mock-operatic booms, as he cooks up some spaghetti — finally, finally, with company. And he comes alive in that little guffaw. A guffaw which says, “I’ll aim to be happy at every instant, overjoyed despite the New York overcrowding at a holiday party where everyone’s having fun except me and my love.” A guffaw which indicates how closely and instinctively Jack Lemmon thinks through C.C. Baxter, one of the most ordinary and dullest characters on paper, brought alive with an actor so vivid and alive and brimming with ideas he executes all of them at the same time. (A side note, but we must one day map each and every Lemmon gesture in this film, and then present that as a lecture in a class on acting. This is truly one of the most elastic, fresh, and spirited performances to ever come out of Hollywood.)

But the guffaw is also brimming with naïveté and gullibility. Baxter is both irritatingly complacent and refreshingly decent — the only type of man like him in the office. He doesn’t lift skirts, but he doesn’t admonish his work-buddies who do. Basically prostituted out by his highers-up (they have the power to make or break him in the dog-eat-dog world of—Manhattan insurance?), Baxter lets people walk all over him. In the money-men’s mad dash to use the apartment for their sex-capades while the wife isn’t in the room, Baxter is necessarily left without much hope of New York’s decency, its irregular beauty. It takes Miss Kubelik to change his mind about that, and vice versa.

Thus, two complex and thinking humans in the city of New York are sculpted.

Star-wise, humor-wise and emotion-wise, there are few films that can match The Apartment. Everything about Billy Wilder’s 1960 romantic comedy — my favorite romcom — is so perfectly constructed: not a shot wasted, not a beat missed. Its tight-rope marriage of vulgar laughs and suicidal melancholia works better than it has any right to.

So what’s it about? We’ll let Wilder’s one-sentence summary speak for itself:

“This is about a young fellow [Jack Lemmon] who gets ahead in a big company by lending his apartment to executives for that grand old American folk ritual — the afternoon shack-up.”

Reportedly, those were the only words Shirley MacLaine needed to accept the part of Lemmon’s love interest. Wilder would also call it “a dirty fairy-tale about the price of success”: Lemmon has to do a lot of sucking-up to secure his high position at the firm. When his boss (Fred MacMurray) double-crosses him, will he still accept the American dream?

In a New York City as antiseptic as Wilder’s, Lemmon’s C.C. Baxter and MacLaine’s Fran Kubelik are breaths of fresh air. They lend NYC its human charm — something that it never lacks, of course, but which tends to be forgotten in its sardine-packed rush of people going from place to place, in the adulterous-lecherous-opportunist air of the capitalist office. The metropolis can be cripplingly lonely. But Baxter and Kubelik are determined to find a private human connection, to be the exception in a city where everyone is also trying to be the exception.

Billy Wilder always preferred the comfort of a studio set over the tricky finagling of an on-location shoot. Weirdly enough, he disliked his masterful 1972 film Avanti!, also starring Jack Lemmon, because it was shot on location: “It smelled like it was shot in Italy,” Billy said. (Indeed, it was — Jonathan Rosenbaum rightly notes that that’s one of Avanti!’s strengths, since the real-Italian locations adds to the romantic, authentic air of the picture.) Despite Wilder’s anti-location adversity, he was, like Vincente Minnelli, obsessed with getting every detail right inside. Baxter’s apartment is authentically lived-in: down to the match-skid-marks right above the oven, the pieces of chewing gum underneath the sofa, the cheap borderline-kitsch reproductions of famous paintings in the bedroom. (Baxter is a fan of Rousseau’s Sleeping Gypsy and Picasso's Three Musicians) The Oscar-winning set and interior designs (by production designer Alexandre Trauner, a frequent Wilder collaborator) conjures up the cloistering claustrophobia of a big city like NYC, especially when it boomed in the early 1960s.

Wilder renders Baxter’s living-space with palpable loneliness, thanks to his stretchy long shots. Wilder struggled a lot with his cinematographer Joe LaShelle, who only worked with TV directors, and who was used to framing everything in close-up. Wilder, by contrast, hates close-ups, preferring the camera hang back from a distance while observing his characters move about naturally in an undisturbed space. The CinemaScope wideness of Wilder’s shots only adds to the isolating feeling that Baxter’s apartment seems too big for him. At night, we can understand why he started lending it out to other guys; if he’s not going to have fun in it, maybe he should let others. A character mark of both tremendous generosity and naïveté; but then again, that’s the sweet and sour of Wilder’s characters, who he treats with alternate coldness and warmth, contempt and empathy, condescension and humbleness.

The Apartment is certainly one of the slyest indictments of Manhattan corporate culture that hit American screens. That it never loses its sense of comic sharpness or romantic allure is all the more impressive. For me, this still remains Billy Wilder's most effective work. It is the best of Wilder's Lubitsch tributes — since it doesn't wear its Lubitschian influence on its sleeve at all (unlike the too-slick Sabrina, 1954, or even in the successful Lubitschian grace of Love in the Afternoon, 1957, or Avanti!). The Apartment smoothly engages Lubitsch's treasured themes —namely, the switching of social roles and the deceit of appearances, fakery and illusion come to represent Reality more than reality. C.C. Baxter, pretty much the only moral and decent man in the film, is looked down by his neighbors as an inconsiderate player; and, even though he's seen as a successful playboy in public, he is at core a pathetic loser (a victim of Manhattan corporatism and yes-sir-ism). His boss Sheldrake, meanwhile, an exceedingly disgusting man who embodies everything that is wrong with corporate-office metropolitan white male sexist patriarchal culture (Wilder gives poor MacMurray his most morally wretched dialogue), has the wife, two white-collar sons, and respectability as a front to hide the wave of mistresses that give him inordinate privilege to continue his toxic behavior. It's clear Wilder believes, rather pessimistically and hopelessly, that this will be the way of the world for a foreseeable time. Even when his secretary (Edie Adams) pulls the plug on his affairs and his wife serves him up divorce papers, there is no indication that Sheldrake will be gravely disturbed like Miss Kubelik or C.C. Baxter; he rides high on his status, money, and position. People like that always win—always. Like Breakfast at Tiffany's depressing finale, the manic-depressiveness of the Hollywood ending (Kubelik is suicidal and kicked out of the only job that treated her halfway-decently, Baxter is forced, by his principles, to remove from a position he has crawled-through-sludge and humiliated himself to get) cannot escape us. His movie does not offer solutions; it only offers temporary salvation — the question is, is romance enough?

What may be Wilder's own invention, and not Lubitsch's, is the splitting of the protagonist into two roles: Baxter and Kubelik. Our protagonist, if conjoined, would be a sad, broken, pathetic one — pushed around and made lonely by the madcap city — but is the only person with enough decency and morals to survive. Our protagonist, then, is neither just Lemmon nor just MacLaine, but rather the two together. One is meant to identify with both Kubelik and Baxter, complicating the popular perception of a gender binary. Yet also, when they join, they don't form a synthetic whole; instead, their togetherness only serves to highlight their tragic and lonely exceptionality, the chemistry is in how they lack chemistry with the rest of the world. Usually, Hollywood leading-pairs are kooky opposites; what one lacks, the other supplies, vice versa; the goal is for them to join at the end of the picture to become perfectly one, so that they can successfully integrate back into society. Wilder's vision of a couple, by contrast, is only conciliatory in a technical way: for who we see in the end two mensches (human beings) who will be swallowed up by a cruel, uncaring world. Baxter plans to escape the city, and Kubelik will presumably join him; will they find their happiness in the new locale, though, or will the ill illusion of American dream-ism simply follow them wherever they go, comfortable capitalism dictating their every move, and make them compromise against their will and morals? "Shut up and deal" is the final line of the work. Be quiet, let's not think about the implications of you saying I love you, let's not think about our future now, let us just share in the moment of non-verbal beauty, for the future looks bleak, even if we face it together.

You may watch a Wilder film and come out of it feeling good, or just dandy, or even slightly cold. But I guarantee — you spend enough time with the Wilder, focused intensely on character gesture, delivery, pitch, movement, framing of camera around the actor — and you’ll come out of it with a whole new appreciation for every bitter person’s nuance. For this is a cinema that shuns elaborate camera movements — virtuoso in Welles, Ophuls, Preminger, etc., but far too distracting for a hard-boiled prose director like Wilder. His is a cinema that cares first and foremost about the actor — the star — the shiny soul in Baxter’s black-and-white blue eyes.

Jack Lemmon was the secret ingredient, the organic tenderness, that Wilder needed in his cinema. He first worked with Lemmon on 1959’s “Some Like it Hot.” Dissatisfied with the way he treated Jack’s character in that picture (stuck with the horny old man while Marilyn Monroe got Tony Curtis), Wilder made Lemmon the center of six of his subsequent films, including “The Fortune Cookie” (1966) and his late-period masterwork “Avanti!” (1972). In “The Apartment,” Lemmon was made the moral center of the Wilder universe. Lemmon was able to curb Wilder’s enthusiasm for the jaded, perverse and cynical. Lemmon was so effective as Wilder’s conscience that when he played a total bastard in “Avanti!,” the polar opposite of C.C. Baxter, it didn’t come off as a bad thing. Rather, somehow, the audience knew that this asshole’s cartoonish anger would soon melt into Lemmon-y Snickers. Yes — even Wendell Armbruster, Jr., (“Avanti!”‘s pathetic, angry bulldog of a lead man) inched his way to C.C. Baxter territory in a space of 144 minutes — thanks to the Italian location, slow pacing, sharp Wilder/I.A.L. Diamond script and a never-better Juliet Mills.

Wilder is more honest than most about the way of the world — willing to confront life and its myriad absurdities. His suicide-centered humor (they are NOT suicide jokes; this implies he is making fun of suicide; not so, he understands how deadly serious it is) is willing to recognize the tastlessness of lived existence, of how life has no moral code except the one imposed upon it by decent folk (who are probably immoral anyway), of the absurdity of having to be successful without ever really being ourselves. It is deeply moving to me, and comes from someone who truly understood the darkside of humanity — and the necessary grace that comes from (to crib from King) the non-sentimental-bosh kind of Love that KubelikBaxter embody.

The Apartment was nominated for ten Oscars in 1961 and won five, including Best Picture, Best Director for Billy Wilder, Best Original Screenplay (Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond), Best Film Editing and Best Art & Set Decoration for a Black-and-White Film.