The Apartment ***** (1960, Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray) – Classic Movie Review 1241

‘That’s the way it crumbles… cookie-wise.’ – C.C. Baxter.

Co-writer/producer/director Billy Wilder’s delightful bitter-sweet comedy 1960 classic stars Jack Lemmon as Calvin Clifford (C C) ‘Buddy Boy’ Baxter. It is Wilder’s triumphant follow-up to Some Like It Hot (1959), and it scored another big commercial and critical success, grossing $25million at the box office on a $3million budget.

Lemmon ‘s character is a sad, lonely little office-worker at a national insurance corporation in a high-rise building in New York City who is forced by his boss, his company’s head of personnel Jeff Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), to allow him to use his Upper West Side apartment for entertaining his mistresses.

Eventually, Lemmon finds himself lending the apartment out to various others of his randy bosses for  their various extramarital love-making. The four managers (Ray Walston, David Lewis, Willard Waterman and David White) write glowing reports about Baxter, who hopes for a promotion from the personnel director.

The sole light in the darkness for Lemmon is the cute, gamine, sympathetic young woman who conducts the elevator, Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine). Though she’s the head of personnel’s lover, he falls in love with her himself. Sheldrake has convinced Fran that he is about to divorce his wife for her.

Wilder and I A L Diamond’s screenplay is by turns funny and touching, with beautifully observed characters and cleverly written scenes and acidly witty lines. The performances are exquisitely well judged. Following his drag role work as Daphne in Some Like It Hot (1959), Lemmon’s acting is another tour de force, one of the highspots of his brilliant career.

The adorable young MacLaine is affectingly sweet and appealingly vulnerable and MacMurray is as sharp as a razor, cast against type as a cad and a bounder, a real despicable, unfeeling tough nut (Wilder had already cast him as a bad guy in Double Indemnity [1944]).

The film received 10 Academy Award nominations and won five. Wilder personally triumphed at the Academy Awards by winning Oscars for Best Picture, Best Writing Original Screenplay (with I A L Diamond) and Direction. Daniel Mandell won for Best Film Editing and Alexander Trauner and Edward G. Boyle for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White. As of 2014, only two black-and-white movies have won the Academy Award for Best Picture since The Apartment: Schindler’s List (1993) and The Artist (2011).

Because of its themes of infidelity and adultery, the film was controversial for its time. MacMurray said he was accosted by a strange woman in the street who berated him for making a ‘dirty filthy movie’ and hit him with her purse.

Lemmon improvised two scenes: in one he squirted a bottle of nose drops across the room and in another he sang while making a meal of spaghetti, which he strains through the grid of a tennis racket. The nasal spray he uses was milk because real nasal spray would not have shown up on camera.

Lemmon and MacLaine reconvened with Wilder for Irma La Douce (1963).

Kevin Spacey dedicated his Oscar for American Beauty (1999) to Lemmon’s performance.

The film was the basis of the 1968 Broadway musical Promises, Promises, with book by Neil Simon, music by Burt Bacharach and lyrics by Hal David.

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© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1177

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Calvin Clifford (C C) ‘Buddy Boy’ Baxter (Jack Lemmon) and Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine) in the film’s final scene: ‘Shut up and deal.’