C.C. Baxter is a junior clerk with a giant New York insurance corporation who has found an unusual way to get on. He is the tenant of a small apartment which he allows senior executives of the firm to use for sexual assignments with their mistresses. He does this not in exchange for money but on the understanding that the managers involved will use their influence to advance his career. As a result Baxter quickly finds himself promoted from his lowly position to that of a junior executive with his own office and a key to the executive washroom. Complications arise, however, when Baxter falls in love with Fran Kubelik, the elevator girl who just happens to be the mistress of Jeff Sheldrake, the head of the company's personnel department, who has often taken Fran and his other mistresses back to Baxter's apartment.
This film is in the tradition of the "sophisticated" comedies centred upon adultery and divorce which were considered very daring and risqué in the forties and fifties. Director Billy Wilder had made another film of this type, "The Seven Year Itch", several years earlier. The difference between that film and "The Apartment" perhaps reflects the growth in permissiveness which took place between the mid-fifties and the early sixties, "The Apartment" being considerably bolder in its treatment of sexual themes. In "The Seven Year Itch", Marilyn Monroe's character is the object of the fantasies of the married man who lives below her, but nothing ever takes place between them. In "The Apartment", however, although there are no bedroom scenes, we are given to understand that adulterous sex takes place in Baxter's apartment on a regular basis (to the horror of his neighbour, a Jewish doctor, who mistakenly believes that Baxter himself is the lover of all these different women). Moreover, the film is a romantic comedy which has as its heroine a woman who is conducting an affair with a married man, something that would have been unthinkable a few years previously.
In this respect "The Apartment" can be seen as looking forward to the fully-fledged sex comedies of the late sixties and seventies and to modern rom-coms in which it is no longer necessary that the characters be chaste and virginal. It was also one of the first films to deal with sexual harassment in the workplace, something that has become a staple theme of modern office-based films.
In other respects, however, it is rather old-fashioned. In a seventies sex comedy Baxter would probably have been presented as an attractive jack-the-lad whose pursuit of self-interest is wholly admirable, Fran as a go-getter happy to sleep with her boss all the time she thinks she is in with a chance of becoming the second Mrs Sheldrake but equally happy to throw him over when she realises he is not serious about her, and Sheldrake himself as a groovy swinger. "The Apartment" takes a more moralistic line. Baxter may not be the drunken womaniser that Dr Dreyfuss imagines him to be, but the film condemns his conniving at the sexual immorality of others for the sake of his own self-advancement. Fran is hopelessly in love with Sheldrake, even after she discovers how insincere and selfish he is. At times the comedy becomes much blacker than the average romantic comedy; Fran's suicide attempt shows how dangerous and destructive the casual philandering of a man like Sheldrake can be.
Another difference between this film and the more traditional romantic comedy is that the humour is often very satirical in nature. Most of the satire is at the expense of American big business- the impersonality of big corporations (Baxter proudly announces that his firm employs more people than the total population of Natchez, Mississippi), the culture of corporate philandering, the bullying of junior staff by senior management, the snobbery of the top brass. Combined with the satire is a more serious study in character development, of how Fran overcomes her hopeless infatuation with Sheldrake and how Baxter becomes (in Dreyfuss's words) a "Mensch" by learning that his love for Fran is of more import than his selfish pursuit of success by dubious means and that there are more important things in life than who gets the key to the executive washroom. (The word "Mensch" is German for "human being"; its use in this film, and the character of Dreyfuss himself, possibly reflect Billy Wilder's own German-Jewish roots).
The script is often witty and Jack Lemmon as Baxter shows just why he was regarded as being among the best comedy actors of the period. (At times, as in "Days of Wine and Roses", he got the chance to show that he could be a very good actor in serious dramas as well). Nevertheless, I am surprised that the film won the "best picture" Oscar ahead of not only "Elmer Gantry" but also "Spartacus" and "Psycho", neither of which were even nominated. It is overlong, and the character of Fran seems problematic for a modern audience. Shirley MacLaine does her best to portray her as a feisty, independent woman, but this portrayal sometimes seems at odds with the way the character is written. The fact that she remains hopelessly devoted to Sheldrake even after it becomes clear to her what a scoundrel he is can make her seem weak and passive. Perhaps the audiences of the early sixties would only accept as a romantic heroine a woman involved in an adulterous affair if it was made clear that she was truly in love with him. This is an entertaining film, which has dated better than "The Seven Year Itch", but I would not rate it as highly as Wilder's other great comedy from this period, "Some Like It Hot". 7/10
This film is in the tradition of the "sophisticated" comedies centred upon adultery and divorce which were considered very daring and risqué in the forties and fifties. Director Billy Wilder had made another film of this type, "The Seven Year Itch", several years earlier. The difference between that film and "The Apartment" perhaps reflects the growth in permissiveness which took place between the mid-fifties and the early sixties, "The Apartment" being considerably bolder in its treatment of sexual themes. In "The Seven Year Itch", Marilyn Monroe's character is the object of the fantasies of the married man who lives below her, but nothing ever takes place between them. In "The Apartment", however, although there are no bedroom scenes, we are given to understand that adulterous sex takes place in Baxter's apartment on a regular basis (to the horror of his neighbour, a Jewish doctor, who mistakenly believes that Baxter himself is the lover of all these different women). Moreover, the film is a romantic comedy which has as its heroine a woman who is conducting an affair with a married man, something that would have been unthinkable a few years previously.
In this respect "The Apartment" can be seen as looking forward to the fully-fledged sex comedies of the late sixties and seventies and to modern rom-coms in which it is no longer necessary that the characters be chaste and virginal. It was also one of the first films to deal with sexual harassment in the workplace, something that has become a staple theme of modern office-based films.
In other respects, however, it is rather old-fashioned. In a seventies sex comedy Baxter would probably have been presented as an attractive jack-the-lad whose pursuit of self-interest is wholly admirable, Fran as a go-getter happy to sleep with her boss all the time she thinks she is in with a chance of becoming the second Mrs Sheldrake but equally happy to throw him over when she realises he is not serious about her, and Sheldrake himself as a groovy swinger. "The Apartment" takes a more moralistic line. Baxter may not be the drunken womaniser that Dr Dreyfuss imagines him to be, but the film condemns his conniving at the sexual immorality of others for the sake of his own self-advancement. Fran is hopelessly in love with Sheldrake, even after she discovers how insincere and selfish he is. At times the comedy becomes much blacker than the average romantic comedy; Fran's suicide attempt shows how dangerous and destructive the casual philandering of a man like Sheldrake can be.
Another difference between this film and the more traditional romantic comedy is that the humour is often very satirical in nature. Most of the satire is at the expense of American big business- the impersonality of big corporations (Baxter proudly announces that his firm employs more people than the total population of Natchez, Mississippi), the culture of corporate philandering, the bullying of junior staff by senior management, the snobbery of the top brass. Combined with the satire is a more serious study in character development, of how Fran overcomes her hopeless infatuation with Sheldrake and how Baxter becomes (in Dreyfuss's words) a "Mensch" by learning that his love for Fran is of more import than his selfish pursuit of success by dubious means and that there are more important things in life than who gets the key to the executive washroom. (The word "Mensch" is German for "human being"; its use in this film, and the character of Dreyfuss himself, possibly reflect Billy Wilder's own German-Jewish roots).
The script is often witty and Jack Lemmon as Baxter shows just why he was regarded as being among the best comedy actors of the period. (At times, as in "Days of Wine and Roses", he got the chance to show that he could be a very good actor in serious dramas as well). Nevertheless, I am surprised that the film won the "best picture" Oscar ahead of not only "Elmer Gantry" but also "Spartacus" and "Psycho", neither of which were even nominated. It is overlong, and the character of Fran seems problematic for a modern audience. Shirley MacLaine does her best to portray her as a feisty, independent woman, but this portrayal sometimes seems at odds with the way the character is written. The fact that she remains hopelessly devoted to Sheldrake even after it becomes clear to her what a scoundrel he is can make her seem weak and passive. Perhaps the audiences of the early sixties would only accept as a romantic heroine a woman involved in an adulterous affair if it was made clear that she was truly in love with him. This is an entertaining film, which has dated better than "The Seven Year Itch", but I would not rate it as highly as Wilder's other great comedy from this period, "Some Like It Hot". 7/10