For romantic comedies and Christmas movies alike, a little misery can go a long way. No one understood this balancing act more than Billy Wilder, whose films ran the gamut from bottomless cynicism (Ace in the Hole) to gender-bending farce (Some Like it Hot). His 1960 film The Apartment splits the difference.
Like another yuletide classic, Carol, the film finds inspiration in David Lean’s Brief Encounter, which depicts an extramarital affair briefly consummated in the bed of a friend’s apartment. In an old interview, Wilder says he was compelled by a character “who comes back home and climbs into the warm bed the lovers just left”, and so The Apartment’s hero, CC “Bud” Baxter, was born.
Baxter, played by Jack Lemmon (hired right off the back of Some Like it Hot), is an insurance worker who scales the corporate ladder by leasing his bedroom to a rotating cast of middle managers. The concept isn’t far removed from an Airbnb, though Baxter weathers the additional humiliations of accommodating his superiors’ sexual conquests outside work. On one sorry occasion, a late request sees him stranded in Central Park on a winter’s night.
Wilder didn’t necessarily conceive of the film as a comedy (at times, Joseph LaShelle’s shadowy cinematography more readily evokes noir), but in his own words: “When they laugh, I don’t argue.” Wilder and co-writer IAL Diamond’s playful plotting and staccato repartee keep the film from sinking into the gutter, and Lemmon remains endlessly likable while channelling Baxter’s nervous energy into a spectacle of physical gestures. Each dramatic reveal is offset by a similarly unforgettable joke, whether it’s Lemmon fussing over the placement of a bowler hat or straining spaghetti through a tennis racket.
When Baxter develops an innocent crush on Shirley MacLaine’s elevator operator, Fran Kubelik, he unknowingly finds himself in competition with Jeff Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), the company’s personnel director. Kubelik has sworn off Sheldrake after a summer fling (one of many that this family man has conducted within the office), but he lures her back into his arms when he dishonestly vows to leave his marriage for her. The same day, he offers Baxter a promotion in return for exclusive usage of his Upper West Side abode.
Sheldrake may be a philandering emotional terrorist – at the time, MacMurray had become a Disney icon, leaving some audiences scandalised – but Bud discovers the limits to his downtrodden “nice guy” exterior when he encounters a passed-out Kubelik in his apartment on Christmas Eve.
As Baxter and Kubelik finally get to know each other, Wilder works through the self-loathing at each character’s core. Kubelik struggles to believe she’s worthy of anything greater than a tryst with a man who leaves her a $100 note before returning to his wife and children for the holidays. Baxter lacks the courage to stand up for himself and risks numbing himself entirely to the spiritual corruption he’s become immersed in. To illustrate the point, Wilder frames his workplace as an unending procession of desks and bodies, with production designer Alexander Trauner making clever use of forced perspective tricks.
With the film being made in the twilight era of the Hays Code, MacLaine embodies a more candid, less inhibited form of female sexuality than had been typically portrayed on screen. It’s a sweet, unconventional performance that’s subsequently informed any number of manic pixie dream girls and alt-heroines; her ecstatic, New Year’s sprint through the streets of New York has become the template for the romcom’s climactic dash towards destiny.
In romance and business, ethics are always optional; as Kubelik muses, “some people take, some people get took.” Over six decades on, its depiction of atomisation and alienation has barely aged; ill-advised workplace affairs endure, forms of self-commodification have multiplied, and insurance companies remain deeply evil.
For anyone who finds themselves lonely on Christmas – or any other day of the year – there are few films more comforting than The Apartment.
The Apartment is streaming on MGM+ in Australia and the UK and Fubo in the US, as well as available to rent globally. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here
