The Apartment

The Apartment is a magnificent comedy with splendid acting turned out by the studios at the end of the Golden Age of film. It is one of only eight comedies to have ever won the Best Picture Oscar, it hangs with some heady company, but it certainly belongs there as one of the best comedies ever put to film. Not that comedies are lacking in merit, just that it is a rare comedy that is really witty and gives its characters something to do. Plus it is difficult given the Academy membership and voting system to take comedies as seriously as they deserve. Of course comedy is subjective; a film about adultery, suicide, and corporate blackmail might not be considered a comedy. This film is one of the collaborative gems of director Billy Wider and actor Jack Lemmon that showcases the considerable talents of both.

In The Apartment Lemmon plays CC Baxter a low level worker in an insurance agency who has aspirations of moving up the corporate ladder. Baxter faces a nasty dilemma; he is a nice guy who can’t say no to the scheming executives around him. These executives promise him career advancement in exchange for a key. The key in question is the key to Baxter’s apartment which the mid-level married executives have been using for illicit trysts with the secretaries, elevator operators, girls they pick up in bars, or any other woman foolish enough to fall across their paths. Baxter spends his time staying late at work or hanging out in doorways and on park benches waiting for the use of his own apartment. Herein lies the crux of his problem, Baxter is a good nice guy caught up in the gears of a corporate machine which asks him to do things that he must acquiesce to in order to reach his supposed goals.

At work the shy unassuming Baxter has a crush on Ms. Kubelik played by an adorable and versatile Shirley MacLaine. She is a woman unsure of herself who is looking for love in all of the wrong places. They carry on a daily banter on the elevator as he rides to work in a sweet and simple courtship. Baxter thinks her a sweet and lovely lady until the slimy, manipulative Mr. Sheldrake, played with aplomb by Fred MacMurray, enters the picture as the married lover of Ms. Kubelik and he begins using Baxter’s apartment for their meetings.

Fred MacMurray may best be remembered as the father from My Three Sons or as the affable Absent-Minded Professor, but it should not be forgotten that he also played a number of great slime balls as in this film and most memorably as the morally challenged life insurance salesman Walter Neff in Double Indemnity with Barbara Stanwyck. Here he is the quintessential user, a boss who manipulates and blackmails to get what he wants. Not only does he use a parade of young girls but he leverages his position as head of personnel to blackmail his coworkers. He is the happily married man who ‘works late’ while playing around with young women misleading them by promising a divorce from his wife and a list of dreams that he never intends to fill.

Ms. Kubelik becomes aware of this farce from Mr. Sheldrake’s bitter secretary and former lover. This leads to a botched suicide attempt on Christmas Eve in Mr. Baxter’s apartment. Mr. Sheldrake goes home to his wife leaving Mr. Baxter to cleanup his boss’ mess. The most excruciating moments of the picture are the doctor, MR Baxter’s neighbor played by Jack Kruschen, dealing with the overdosed patient. As he pours coffee into the limp body of MacLaine and slaps her repeatedly Lemmon clenches a coffee cup and turns away in horror. An honest and respectable reaction from a good man in a horrible situation if ever there was one. Of course this all leads to Ms. Kubelik spending the holidays in the apartment with Mr. Baxter, both of whom are glad to not be alone during a time devoted to families.

What makes the film so interesting and so heartfelt is that it is not much of a comedy. Almost all of the humor is provided by Lemmon and his everyman persona seeking to accept the decadence and corruption of the corporate machine and how it uses and discards people both men and women. The premise of the film and its themes are far from funny. It is the characters and the actors who inhabit them that lend the film warmth and humor in the face of cold calculation. Only Billy Wilder and Jack Lemmon could find the balance between humor and pathos in a story of adultery, suicide, and corporate avarice.