DISQUS

noelbotevera · 1 year ago

Just get that man in the White House. Then work out the details.

I'm not a big fan of The Apartment. It's not the cynicism that strikes me bad, it's the sentimentality at the back of the cynicism, something that I see in a lot of Wilder, even his best (I'd say my favorite is Sunset Boulevard, where the conviction has, well, the most conviction, and the gothic tone fits the occasion and his visual style perfectly). Wilder here cribs from--yeah, Vidor's The Crowd comes to mind--and depends on Jack Lemmon to pull it off.

I don' t feel Lemmon; think he tries too hard, and I can sense the muscles at the back of that very tense neck straining to pop the head out, like a party favor. Much of this may be because he strikes me the wrong way, I suppose. Much prefer say William Holden, and the light way he holds Joe Gillis in his hands (Gloria Swanson has the Lemmon role--but then she's a silent film actress, and it fits, it's loudly off key for the fifties, which is perfect, and tragic).

McMurray I love; I think he oozes slime even if he just sat there, drinking Mai Tais.

The ending (spoilers) I submit encapsulates everything I dislike about it--MacClaine going up the stairs, the shot heard, her banging on the door with both fists, Lemmon sticking his head out and--tilted just so that we can see it, fizzing and dripping on the floor, the champagne bottle, explaining that pop away neatly and perfectly. Dark ending squared away by happy misunderstanding. Have your cake and eat it. Much prefer Ms. Desmond fading away into glitter and madness.

Campaspe · 1 year ago

John McElwee at Greenbriar Picture Shows had a good post on Sunset Boulevard a while ago, arguing that Wilder's treatment of the silents lacks the feeling it should have from him as a filmmaker. They're cartoons, antique grotesques, but in fact they were real artists and Wilder doesn't really give that them dignity.

I think that's the first time I have seen Wilder decried as too sentimental! Certainly Ace in the Hole is darker than either SB or The Apt. I do think The Apartment is a love story, underneath it all, and Wilder couldn't leave his characters with nothing at the end. I wouldn't call it sentiment, I would call it compassion. He doesn't have the same fight-for-the-underdog feeling you get from Wellman or Capra but he knows what it's like to be luckless and his movies reflect that.

tomwatson · 1 year ago

Yeah, The Apartment is a movie about kindness.

LanceManion · 1 year ago

Let's start with one of these: Jack Lemmon's best role? Billy Wilder's best movie?

tomwatson · 1 year ago

Yes, and I'm a big Lemmon fan - I love his range, the drama and the farces. All of it except the very late, post-facelift stuff.

And yes on Wilder, though again - what range! He did it all....

LanceManion · 1 year ago

I think we should leave Lemmon's later unfortunate eyebrow disaster out of it.

tomwatson · 1 year ago

A sad end to one of the most expressive faces in the history of American cinema.

LanceManion · 1 year ago

I should have timed it, how much of the first half hour of the movie is taken up with Wilder just holding the camera on Lemmon and letting him do nothing.

LanceManion · 1 year ago

I love the bit when he's watching TV and listening to the names of the stars of Grand Hotel being announced. Greta Garbo. John Barrymore. Ethel Barrymore...he reacts to each name like a poke in the nose.

tomwatson · 1 year ago

The kindness of Lemmon's character is the center of the film - Wilder was making a movie about kindness.

LanceManion · 1 year ago

Then there's the scene the next day at his office when he's taking his temperature.

tomwatson · 1 year ago

Brilliant - hey where's the Sireen?

LanceManion · 1 year ago

She's coming. She said she'll be a bit late though. I left the key out under the mat for her.

Campaspe · 1 year ago

Maybe not his best, but in several ways Wilder's most lovable movie. And it's funny that many critics were repelled by it when it first came out, even though it won the Oscar of course. I don't find it cynical or misanthropic at all, quite the opposite. But then and now, Americans don't necessarily want to be told about the many moral compromises necessary in their daily office lives.

LanceManion · 1 year ago

We're back to Sweet Smell of Success. No, we like to be told how goodness and decency and honesty and fairplay are intrinsic to our national character and how they always carry the day. We seem to especially enjoy hearing this from cheats and frauds.

Campaspe · 1 year ago

*grim chuckle* Well, for a while anyway ...

gerardjones · 1 year ago

Critical opinions of Wilder in the '60s are interesting because of the way he was criticized both by the "wholesome" mainstream for his cynicism and by the edgy art-house types for his vulgarity and sentimentalism. Both the Catholic League of Decency and Pauline Kael went to town on "Kiss Me Stupid." Looking back, both sides seem wrong to me, and yet both sides make sense, because he was unique in the way he stayed within what was entertaining and reassuring to most American moviegoers while at the same time exposing our hypocrisies and compromises.In the end, "The Apartment" resonates far more with me as a portrait of real people trying to make sense of a morally upside-down world than something Kael would have praised at the time, say "La Dolce Vita." (Don't get me wrong, I like L.D.V.--just comparing it to The Apt as a "relatable" portrait of almost-real people.)

Jason_Chervokas · 1 year ago

oops, clique

tomwatson · 1 year ago

Some video clips for everyone's viewing pleasure"

The trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRta_ko0XGU

Lemmon makes spaghetti
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSi4zbBMrSM

The ending - shut up and deal
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfDwuv2_9dQ&feat...

LanceManion · 1 year ago

Thanks for these, Tom.

LanceManion · 1 year ago

You know who Lemmon reminded me a lot of in this movie?

tomwatson · 1 year ago

I'll bite - who?

LanceManion · 1 year ago

Dick Van Dyke.

tomwatson · 1 year ago

Yeah, though there's a touch of My Favorite Martian in there too!

LanceManion · 1 year ago

You didn't mix Lemmon up with Ray Walston, did you?

gerardjones · 1 year ago

Van Dyke had a Lemmony style he arrived at on his own--I think the times nurtured such--but I'm sure he and Carl Reiner were also conscious of building Rob Petrie, their own sensitive, hapless, loveable, modern New York husband/lover on The Apartment. Biggest comedy of 1960, big rage at the Oscars in early '61, DVD Show hits the air in Sept. '61...

LanceManion · 1 year ago

Buster Keaton and Chaplin a bit too, but Van Dyke a lot. I mean in the scenes when he's not talking.

tomwatson · 1 year ago

When he dons the bowler hat...

LanceManion · 1 year ago

The movie came out a year before the Dick Van Dyke Show went on the air. I wonder if Van Dyke took notes.

LanceManion · 1 year ago

I swear there's an episode of Dick Van Dyke in which Rob has a cold and he cribs straight from Lemmon, including treating the thermometer in the same way.

LanceManion · 1 year ago

Of course it could be the case that both were influenced by the same silent movie comics and they were both cribbing from Keaton or Chaplin or Stan Laurel.

gerardjones · 1 year ago

I kinda stuck my comment on this in the wrong place, up above....

MaPeel · 1 year ago

Hi guys. I haven't seen The Apartment in many years. When I saw it as a kid, it was the first vehicle I had seen "Larry Tate"--who I think is David White--outside of Bewitched. I was shocked.

LanceManion · 1 year ago

Hey MA, good to see you! This thread is turning out to be something of a David White film festival. He was in Sweet Smell of Success too.

tomwatson · 1 year ago

Lotsa TV types - the drunk Santa in the bar is Otis from the Andy Griffith Show. And of course, Ray Walston.
And Fred MacMurray - ole Steve Douglas himself!

LanceManion · 1 year ago

MacMurray is creepier to me for his having been Steve Douglas in my imagination for so long before I ever saw this movie.

tomwatson · 1 year ago

Yeah no kidding - where are chip and ernie and uncle charley?

LanceManion · 1 year ago

I like the scene at his house Christmas morning where his one son is shown to be smarter and more together than he is and he's got no clue how to respond to him. Big difference there between Sheldrake and Steve Douglas. Douglas never minded being flummoxed by his boys.

gerardjones · 1 year ago

I think MacMurray showed a lot cojones by taking on this role while he was shifting his career into Disney comedies and M3S. Especially at a time when the "wholesome image" was so important, especially on TV. Easy to imagine either Uncle Walt or his TV sponsors (General Motors, I think), flipping out over Sheldrake. Don't know what fed into his decision--not caring, loving Wilder, wanting to prove he wasn't a sap?--but it was a great one.

MaPeel · 1 year ago

As for dear Shirley, I saw Sweet Charity as a kid before The Apartment, and i was so worried that she was going to be left and sad at the end Apartment. For me, it was really suspenseful, moreso even than Rear Window, how this was going to end. I totally did not expect a happy ending.

LanceManion · 1 year ago

The happy ending is happier for its not being something the movie takes for granted. People like CC Baxter and Fran Kubelik often don't ever find each other.

LanceManion · 1 year ago

Tom, what you said earlier about Wilder making a movie about kindness. I agree. You want to elaborate?

tomwatson · 1 year ago

Yeah, I think he consciously set out to make a film that portrayed human kindness in the big city - and it's not easy to do. You can describe good acts, but without being maudlin, it's pretty tough to portray kindness, especially in a humorous way. And Lemmon had to be a sap, a simpleton, a dupe. Like Dostoevsky's Idiot. He has to be deceived and use - and still, despite it all - do the right thing; indeed, more than the right thing - to make a choice even while feeling jealousy and betrayal. It's a beautiful thing.

LanceManion · 1 year ago

Dr and Mrs Dreyfuss have to carry a little too much of that theme by themselves, but again I think you're right. Baxter's whole predicament started because he did a small favor for a friend. The movie never repudiates that initial act of good fellowship.

LanceManion · 1 year ago

Curiously, it also never explores Baxter's opportunism, either to criticize it or to condemn it.

tomwatson · 1 year ago

No - and obviously he's in love - but he still, even when spurned for his heinous boss, treats his intended with kindness - even when all hope is lost.

LanceManion · 1 year ago

He does it consciously too. We get to see him decide to be the mensch Dreyfuss told him he needs to be.

tomwatson · 1 year ago

Yeah exactly - he goes from nebbish to noble nebbish

Campaspe · 1 year ago

One biographer, Ed Sikov, really hated the doctor character and particularly the doctor's wife. Too shticky, as when Mrs. Dreyfus calls him "Casanova" or the like. I thought her lines worked fine. It's heightened New York Yiddishry, taken up a level.

One of the things I love about Wilder is his incredible use of American slang. It's like Nabokov, he hears rhythms and poetry in it that a native speaker is deaf to.

tomwatson · 1 year ago

Sounded right to this NYer's ear - slightly dated but they're older - I think it captures the difference and serves that purpose of showing seniority over Lemmon's character.

LanceManion · 1 year ago

What's so hard? Dr Dreyfuss is the son of immigrants, Mrs Dreyfuss is an immigrant herself, maybe even fresh off the boat when the good doctor he sees her working somewhere in the neighborhood of the hospital where he's interning? A bagel he buys from her one morning...

Campaspe · 1 year ago

I agree. Sikov is good on the biographical research but I don't find him especially insightful on the movies themselves (this was also true of his Bette Davis bio).

Jason_Chervokas · 1 year ago

Just a quick comment. I'm not a fanatic of this movie. Only seen it ones in its entirety....but I DO think Billy Wilder is the most underrated director of all time...among the youngest of that click of great early directors who came to Hollywood from Germany (tho' I think he was Austrian). Never an autuer, instead of following a personal director's vision or world view he made great movies in every kind of style or genre: The Lost Weekend, Some Like It Hot, Sunset Boulevard (his best picture, btw), Double Indemnity, Sabrina, Stalag 17....amazing.

LanceManion · 1 year ago

Whoops, I forgot all about Double Indemnity. Sunset Boulevard I expected someone to bring up. But Double Indemnity is way up there too.

LanceManion · 1 year ago

Secretly, though, I was hoping the Siren would make the case for Ace in the Hole.

Campaspe · 1 year ago

Is someone dissing Ace in the Hole?

I am very late, I am sorry! I was at a screening that ran late. How are things going, Kubelik-wise?

MaPeel · 1 year ago

Not too much kindness in either of these.

LanceManion · 1 year ago

Kindness wasn't one of Wilder's regular specialties. Joe E. Brown in Some Like It Hot is incredibly kind. But so are all the girls in the band.

tomwatson · 1 year ago

The Fortune Cookie - first Lemmon-Mathau - and Witness for the Prosecution, a fine court-room drama.

LanceManion · 1 year ago

I'm a big fan of One...Two...Three. James Cagney bringing down communism with Coca Cola. Or was it Pepsi?

Campaspe · 1 year ago

nooo, Coca-Cola!

LanceManion · 1 year ago

So it's a Pepsi Cagney gets stuck holding at the end? I couldn't remember.

Campaspe · 1 year ago

yep, it's a Pepsi. His expression is hilarious.

Campaspe · 1 year ago

I actually think Wilder has a lot of themes and concerns that carry from one movie to another, despite the different genres. So he fits that sense of an auteur quite well.

LanceManion · 1 year ago

Ok, that puts the ball in your court, C. Do tell.

tomwatson · 1 year ago

Yeah C, any thoughts on the "kindness" discussion?

Campaspe · 1 year ago

World-wise viewpoint (which some would call cynicism), anti-hero who must make a lot of often shabby compromises (said to go to back to Wilder's stint in Vienna as a glorified gigolo), sex as currency (ditto), flexible, shall we say, attitude toward moral certitudes like patriotism and fidelity ...

LanceManion · 1 year ago

Honesty often a result of out-hustling the dishonest?

Campaspe · 1 year ago

Honesty coming from a clear-eyed view of what you're doing. Holden's character in Stalag 17 is a prick by any meaningful definition but he's the one guy who's cynical enough to spot the real informer in the one who everyone else sees as noble.

LanceManion · 1 year ago

I need to watch Stalag 17 again, just to remind myself it's not Hogan's Heroes or King Rat. Also for the fun of seeing Holden act. What an edge he had to his voice.

jmhm · 1 year ago

It's also kind of fun watching the secretary disavow any knowledge of Peter Graves' actions with extreme prejudice at the end.

filmdr · 1 year ago

Wasn't The Apartment made at about the same period as Mad Men depicts (the early 60s), and in more or less the same location? The office parties look much the same.

I agree that Wilder is chronically underrated, and I would have a hard time choosing between Some Like It Hot, Sunset Boulevard, The Apartment, and Ace in the Hole as his best film.

LanceManion · 1 year ago

filmdr, I'm glad you brought up Mad Men. I wish I had the DVDs of Mad Men to pop in, but I swear the offices of Sterling Cooper and the offices of Consolidated Insurance were designed by the same architect.

tomwatson · 1 year ago

Except there's a ridiculous number of desks in alignment in Consolidated Insurance - like scores of them - obviously a commentary, and pretty funny at that.

Campaspe · 1 year ago

The shot is cribbed almost directly from the King Vidor silent "The Crowd."

tomwatson · 1 year ago

And the basis for Dilbert...

LanceManion · 1 year ago

On the 19th floor, yes. I meant on the 27th where Sheldrake has his office. But I love the way Baxter's lost in the crowd in those shots on the 19th floor.

LanceManion · 1 year ago

Obviously the designers of Mad Men watched The Apartment. Sylvia the telephone operator the first boss brings to the apartment wears a dress to the Christmas party that I think Joan has worn the knock off of several times.

MaPeel · 1 year ago

Hate to bring in reality, but did you see Bush speak at 9:00? I need to go see what everyone's saying about it.

tomwatson · 1 year ago

Yeah, the Democrats caved.

LanceManion · 1 year ago

Shit! No!

Campaspe · 1 year ago

oh dear. caved how? His approval is at 19%, if they can't stand up to THAT screw 'em.

tomwatson · 1 year ago

Seems like they've agreed to what i think is a pretty bad deal - sure they got some executive pay caps, but doesn't seem like equity for the taxpayers is in the cards - it's lipstuck on a bailout pig.

LanceManion · 1 year ago

Speaking of Mad Men, I think it would be interesting to do a compare and contrast between The Apartment's contemporary criticism of office sexual politics and Mad Men's revisionist take on it looking back 40 years. Personally, I think Wilder does a better job because he understands and forgives the human nature side of it and because he gets the economic exploitation involved. Mad Men is just a tad too resolutely Oh those bad bad men and those poor poor unenlightened women for me. Though that seems to be changing with the addition of Jane into the mix.

tomwatson · 1 year ago

Yeah - and Peggy is so clearly a hat tip to MacLaine's character, and she's moving beyond a woman's job - I couldn't see that happening at Consolidated Insurance.

LanceManion · 1 year ago

Although on the 19th floor there doesn't seem to be a division between men's jobs and women's jobs. Everybody at the other 840 desks is a human computer.

tomwatson · 1 year ago

Except when they cut loose at the Christmas party - then those equal women become strippers.

LanceManion · 1 year ago

That's Sylvia from the switchboard, who is a good time girl, and her existence at the office is another difference.

LanceManion · 1 year ago

You know what I noticed Consolidated has on its payroll that Cooper Sterling doesn't?

LanceManion · 1 year ago

Tell us, Lance.

tomwatson · 1 year ago

Yes do...

LanceManion · 1 year ago

Glad to oblige, Lance. Women over 40!

Campaspe · 1 year ago

Yes indeed. You are right.

LanceManion · 1 year ago

I'm not sure exactly what that means, except that it suggests that in 1960 things were more complicated and more interesting than Mad Men often makes them out to have been.

kspendill · 1 year ago

The Apartment is wondrous--but Wilder's best (IMHO) is 1, 2, 3. Cagney never had it so good--and the varied actors Wilder remembered and saved after the war . . . the views of pre-wall Berlin. . . and the controlled Viennese hilarity of taking the piss out of East and West . . . a fine fine film.

LanceManion · 1 year ago

One of my favorites too, ks.

Vanwall · 1 year ago

I'm going with The Apartment as my favorite Wilder comedy, I can relate to it better than most of the others - it's a lot drier in the wit dept, and Fran Kubelik is actually one of his more sympathetic roles for women. As for the buddy-boy office wolves, I've known too many like that, always looking for some "strange". Jack Lemmon was never closer to the ground than here either - he had a lot of sadly similar experiences to some of mine, tho I didn't end up with a Kubelik.

LanceManion · 1 year ago

Noel, I see everything you're pointing out and can nod my head in agreement. But I just don't care by that point in the movie. It's what happens once she gets in the door.

The cork popping is pushing things. But I think it's important that we see Miss Kubelik switch from running to the apartment in order to be loved and wanting in to the apartment in order to take care of him.

James S. · 1 year ago

I am sorry to admit that I was going to take down the "Mad Men" production designer
by pointing out that they got the fluorescent ceiling light fixtures wrong.

I stopped short after I found a photo from "The Apartment".

http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/apt4.jpg

I read somewhere that John Huston bumped up the production design budget
when he pioneered the habit of shooting ceilings in "The Maltese Falcon".

LanceManion · 1 year ago

James, that's funny! I never thought about it. Ceilings are tricky things though and they would cause a lot of expensive problems, I suppose.

James S. · 1 year ago

I thought the ceilings should look the same as I remembered them in the 4th grade. But I wasn't writing copy for DDB in a Madison Avenue office building, I was chucking my way through "Wide Horizons" at Valley View school.

http://www.juliascollectibles.com/hj125.jpg

Vanwall · 1 year ago

Films or TV shows set in the past always have so much hindsight - i like 'em produced during their era of enactment more most of the time, as they keep the sensibilities from those times in the details, plus they're not all-knowing about themselves. Too much knowing can be too smart-assed.

LanceManion · 1 year ago

Good point.

noelbotevera · 1 year ago

But the music at that ending. And Baxter should be daid--

I do think he was too sentimental in The Apartment. Mannion has a point--good post on domesticity, but couldn't she get in that apartment without the so called gunshot? Meet again at some elevator? MacClaine's is such a tragic character--you're asked to only feel for her and Baxter, wheras for someone like Gilles and Desmond, it's equal measures repulsion and pity and awe.

Sure the silent film stars are grotesques and cartoons, but they're cartoons with scale. They loom over the picture, give it a gravitas I find in few films.

I'd make a case for Wilder's later films too. Have a fondness for The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, which is a smooth entertainment and a love story of sorts, more delicately presented. And I remember liking Fedora--haven't seen it in years.

LanceManion · 1 year ago

Noel, there might have been a better way, but I don't think Wilder meant *us* to be fooled by the champagne cork. That bottle arrives a long at the apartment a long time before the last scene and it keeps being brought out only to go un-popped, the last time in the scene just before Fran runs out on Sheldrake---Baxter offers it to Dr Dreyfuss for his party and the doctor turns it down, "Booze we don't need." It's the Chekhov's gun of champagne bottles.

LanceManion · 1 year ago

At any rate, C.C.'s suicide is all in her head. If it was in ours, or really was meant to be, then I'd definitely agree with the charge of sentimentality.

noelbotevera · 1 year ago

Two things:

Case in point of a transplanted German with less sentiment: Fritz Lang (okay, Austrian) in, oh, Fury, and Clash By Night, and While the City Sleeps, and even Rancho Notorious. That bit of music while Miss Kubelik runs up the stairs to the presumed dead hero is a dead giveaway--

And Huston may have pioneered ceilings in Maltese, but so did Welles in Kane, same year...

noelbotevera · 1 year ago

The bottle was a running gag whose time has come, sure. But we're not meant to think he didn't off himself? That only Miss Kubelik was fooled? Seems cruel, but that I like better. Don't buy it, though--seems like one of those Hong Kong movies, where they have the tragic endign, then--hey, presto! He turns out to be alive after all.

I do love Hong Kong films, don't get me wrong. But that kind of ending--which doesn't always happen in Hong Kong, thank goodness--keeps me from taking some of their melodrama too seriously.

LanceManion · 1 year ago

Although, Noel, I am with you on the music there at the end.

Campaspe · 1 year ago

But I think the end is perfectly in keeping with what's gone before -- a series of disasters, barely averted by the main character's essential decency. It would wreck the tone if Baxter died, where would that come from? The movie's subversive aspect is that you are being asked to sympathize with two people who are behaving quite badly, one having an affair with a married man (with kids yet) and another who's let his apartment become a cathouse. You're fighting against the repulsion you might feel otherwise, whereas with SB it's a pure poison dart leveled at Hollywood.

tomwatson · 1 year ago

Ah that's well-said - you've put your finger on it. They are behaving badly according to the usual public mores (certainly of 1960) yet they're semi-forced into those actions by those with more power in big business. Essential decency - I buy that. (Also, I don't consider sentiment to be an epithet against film quality - but that's just me).

Vanwall · 1 year ago

This one is a sugar-coated poison-frog dart - it's indictment is more of the audience than it is of H'wood - there but for the grace of God go I, or the grace of forgiving friends, or wives or lovers - its message is implicit: You are them.

noelbotevera · 1 year ago

You're right, Baxter should't of died, or the movie should have had a darker tone. I don't think we needed that fake gunshot tho--or the voilins as Kubelik runs up the steps.

LanceManion · 1 year ago

Like I said, I agree about the music. Plus, isn't that Fran and *Sheldrake's* song?

Vanwall · 1 year ago

Didn't those violins play for your girl when she ran after you? I swear.... But the gunshot was needed for the release of tension - so he could sap you when you stuck your head in the door, and all those little stars make ya goofy.

LanceManion · 1 year ago

Vanwall, it was all piano music for us. I've known some people for whom it was kazzoos.

noelbotevera · 1 year ago

I think but I'm not sure it's Kubelik's suicide theme.

That latest 'disaster' isn't averted by Baxter; just happens in Kubelik's head. But I do think we're supposed to be zinged by it, at least while she does the Stairmaster bit--it's when we see the foaming bottle that we're supposed to connect it with the film's last running gag.

Difficult posting here. Heavy traffic? And I wish I could edit my spelling...

noelbotevera · 1 year ago

For the record my girl and I's theme song is Weird Al's "I Get the Feeling You Don't Love Me Anymore." Sophomoric, but there it is.

James S. · 1 year ago

We shouldn't forget that Dr. and Mrs. Dreyfuss wound up snoozing through the whole ordeal.

LanceManion · 1 year ago

Last thought from me because I need to take my five aspirin and climb into bed. But on the subject of Wilder's range as a director: The Spirit of St Louis??????? Who thought to put him on that one?

James S. · 1 year ago

I'm guessing he needed a payday to pop for a KOKOSCHKA.

http://arte.observatorio.info/wp-content/upload...

Vanwall · 1 year ago

He was a go-to guy.

James S. · 1 year ago

....

noelbotevera · 1 year ago

I don't think he did science fiction, or horror. But what he did was cherce.

clairehelene7 · 1 year ago

I'm sorry I missed this discussion, as I love this movie. Sounds like you all had fun here. (Lance, your opening post was great!)

David Ehrenstein · 1 year ago

Sorry I wasn't in here last night. This is one of my favorite Wilders. The Big Moment is right in the middle when Lemmon's C.C. Baxter gets his bowler hat and ask's MacLaine's Miss Kubelik if she has a mirror, and when she hand him the cracked mirror of her compact he learns EVERYTHING. It's a perfect visual and dramtic idea. In ertain ways this is Wilder's most German film. The view of office politics and Big City Living is very Weimar. I could easily see Fassbinder making a variation on this had he emigrated. Yes this is "Mad Men" territory but "The Apartment" was a contemporary film and "Mad Men" is a period piece. All the difference in the world. The climax of the film is MacLaine ditching McMurray in the Chines restaurant and running down the street with a big smile on her face as the music rises. I never fail to burst inot tears every time I see this. Happy endings get to me that way. And Woody Allen TOTALLY rips it off in "Manhattan." But that film doesn't so much as raise a sniffle.

Dan Leo · 1 year ago

Y'know, I love Wilder, but for perhaps completely subjective reasons this is one of my least favorite films of his. I've just never been able to get over what I can only call "the skeeve factor". I agree with Dave Ehrenstein that this may be Wilder's most European film, and somehow I think I would find it easier to take if it were a German or French movie from the late 30s, and not a German/French movie queasily transplanted to 1960s Manhattan. And I love Jack Lemmon but he's just way too "busy" for me in this. My favorite part of the movie oddly enough is Fred MacMurray, who I think plays the part coldly and brilliantly, so refreshing opposite the near-terminal cutesiness of Lemmon and MacLaine. Watching the movie again the other night I was reminded of an interview in a film rag (the lamented "Take One") I read back around 1972 or so with the great Jean-Pierre Melville. The interviewer asked him who his favorite actor was and he said: "Fred MacMurray."

David Ehrenstein · 1 year ago

Melville said MacMurray "invented underplaying." You can se that quite clearyl here as he's a complete monster, but if we're cued to that fact right away the film falls apart. he hides his rattiness perfectly. I don't agree about "the skeeve factor." Lemmon's Baxter is for the most part a sad and lathetically lonely man. I ove the way he hanngs all over Hope Holliday in the bar is sensational. And there's nothing "cute" about MacLaine's suicide attempt.

In many ways "The Apartment" conveys the true spririt of Christmans just as "Christmas Holiday" does. It's suicidal depression to the Max!

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