| The Apartment | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Theatrical release poster | |
| Directed by | Billy Wilder |
| Written by |
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| Produced by | Billy Wilder |
| Starring | |
| Cinematography | Joseph LaShelle |
| Edited by | Daniel Mandell |
| Music by | Adolph Deutsch |
Production company | |
| Distributed by | United Artists |
Release date |
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Running time | 125 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $3 million |
| Box office | $24.6 million[2] |
The Apartment is a 1960 Americanromantic comedy film directed and produced byBilly Wilder from a screenplay he co-wrote withI. A. L. Diamond.Jack Lemmon stars as an insurance clerk who, in hopes of climbing thecorporate ladder, allows his superiors to use hisUpper West Side apartment to conduct their extramarital affairs. He becomes attracted to anelevator operator (Shirley MacLaine) in his office building, unaware that she is having an affair with the head of personnel (Fred MacMurray).Ray Walston andEdie Adams feature in supporting roles.
The Apartment was distributed byUnited Artists to widespread critical acclaim and was a commercial success, despite controversy owing to its subject matter. It became the8th highest-grossing film of 1960. At the33rd Academy Awards, the film was nominated for ten awards and won five, includingBest Picture,Best Director, andBest Screenplay. Lemmon, MacLaine, andJack Kruschen were nominated forBest Actor,Best Actress, andBest Supporting Actor respectively, and Lemmon and MacLaine wonGolden Globe Awards for their performances.Promises, Promises, a 1968Broadway musical byBurt Bacharach,Hal David, andNeil Simon, was based on the film.
The Apartment has come to be regarded asone of the greatest films ever made, appearing in lists by theAmerican Film Institute andSight and Sound magazine. In 1994, it was one of 25 films selected for inclusion to theLibrary of CongressNational Film Registry.[3][4]
C.C. "Bud" Baxter is a lonely office worker at an insurance company in New York City. To climb the corporate ladder, he allows four company managers to take turns borrowing hisUpper West Side apartment for their extramarital affairs. Baxter meticulously juggles the "booking" schedule, but the steady stream of women convinces his neighbors that he is a playboy.
Baxter solicits glowing performance reviews from the four managers and submits them to personnel director Jeff Sheldrake, who then promises to promote him provided that Sheldrake also earns use of the apartment for his own affairs starting that night. As compensation for this short notice, he gives Baxter two tickets to seeThe Music Man. Bud asks Fran Kubelik, anelevator operator in the office building to whom he is attracted, to join him. She agrees, but first has dinner with a "former fling", who turns out to be Sheldrake. When Sheldrake tells her that he plans to divorce his wife to be with her, they head to Baxter's apartment, while Baxter waits outside the theater.
During the company's raucous Christmas Eve party, Sheldrake's secretary, Miss Olsen, tells Fran that her boss has had numerous affairs with other female employees, including herself. Fran confronts Sheldrake at Baxter's apartment; he claims he loves her, but heads back to his family inWhite Plains.
Realizing that Fran is the woman Sheldrake has been taking to his apartment, Baxter lets himself be picked up by a married woman at a local bar. When they arrive at his apartment, he discovers Fran passed out on his bed from an overdose of sleeping pills. He ditches the woman from the bar and enlists his neighbor Dr. Dreyfuss to revive Fran. Baxter implies that he was responsible for the incident; Dreyfuss scolds him for philandering and advises him to "be amensch."
Fran spends two days recuperating in Baxter's apartment, during which a bond develops between them, especially after he confesses to an earlier suicide attempt over unrequited love. Fran says that she has always suffered bad luck in her love life.
As Baxter prepares a romantic dinner, one of the managers arrives for a tryst. Baxter persuades him and his companion to leave, but the manager recognizes Fran and later informs his colleagues. They are annoyed that they have not had the same ready access to the apartment since Baxter's promotion. When Fran's brother-in-law Karl shows up at the office building looking for her, the managers send him to the apartment. Baxter deflects Karl's anger over Fran's wayward behavior by once again assuming all responsibility. Karl punches him, and as she leaves, Fran kisses Baxter for protecting her.
When Sheldrake learns that Miss Olsen told Fran about his affairs, he fires her; she retaliates by spilling all to Sheldrake's wife, who promptly throws him out. Sheldrake welcomes this as an excuse to pursue Fran, although she hints that she is losing interest. Having promoted Baxter to an even higher position, Sheldrake expects Baxter to lend him the key to his apartment yet again so that he can take Fran there. Instead, Baxter gives him back the key to the building's "executive washroom", proclaiming that he has decided to become amensch, and quits the firm. He decides to move out of the apartment and begins to pack his belongings.
That night at a New Year's Eve party, Sheldrake indignantly tells Fran about Baxter quitting, disclosing that Baxter refused to let him use his apartment, particularly with Fran. She abandons Sheldrake and runs to the apartment. At the door, Fran hears an apparent gunshot, but Baxter opens the door holding a bottle of just-opened champagne. Baxter declares his love for Fran. She smiles and says: “Shut up and deal”. The two resume a game ofgin rummy that they had left unfinished earlier.
Immediately following the success of 1959'sSome Like It Hot, Wilder and Diamond wished to make another film with Jack Lemmon. Wilder had originally planned to castPaul Douglas as Sheldrake; however, after he died unexpectedly, Fred MacMurray took his place.
The initial concept was inspired byBrief Encounter byNoël Coward, in which Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) meets Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) for a tryst in his friend's apartment, which ends up thwarted. However, Wilder was unable to make the comedy about adultery he envisioned in the 1940s due toHays Code restrictions. Wilder and Diamond also based the film partially on a Hollywood scandal in which agentJennings Lang was shot by producerWalter Wanger for having an affair with Wanger's wife, actressJoan Bennett; during the affair, Lang had used a low-level employee's apartment for trysts.[5] Another element of the plot was based on the experience of one of Diamond's friends, who returned home after breaking up with his girlfriend to find that she had committed suicide in his bed.[citation needed]
Although Wilder generally required his actors to adhere exactly to the script, he allowed Lemmon to improvise in two scenes. In one, he squirts a bottle of nasal spray across the room, and in the other he sings while cooking spaghetti (which he strains through the strings of a tennis racket). In another scene, where Lemmon was supposed to mime being punched, he failed to move correctly and was accidentally knocked down. Wilder chose to use the shot in the film. Lemmon also caught a cold (he was supposed to come down with in the script) when one scene on a park bench was filmed on a bitter autumn night.[citation needed]
Art directorAlexandre Trauner usedforced perspective to create the set of a large insurance company office. The set appeared to be a very long room full of desks and workers; however, successively smaller people and desks were used, ending up with children. He designed the set of Baxter's apartment to appear smaller and shabbier than the spacious apartments that usually appeared in films of the day. He used items from thrift stores and even some of Wilder's own furniture for the set.[7]
The film's title theme, written byCharles Williams and originally titled "Jealous Lover", was first heard in the 1949 filmThe Romantic Age.[8][9][10] A recording byFerrante & Teicher, released as "Theme fromThe Apartment", reached #10 on theBillboard Hot 100 chart later in 1960.
The film made double its $3 million budget at the US and Canadian box office in 1960.[11][12][13] Critics were split onThe Apartment.[11][14]Time andNewsweek praised it,[12] as didThe New York Times film criticBosley Crowther, who called the film "gleeful, tender, and even sentimental" and Wilder's direction "ingenious".[15]Esquire criticDwight Macdonald gave the film a poor review,[14] calling it "a paradigm of corny avantgardism".[16] Others took issue with the film's controversial depictions of infidelity and adultery,[14] with criticHollis Alpert of theSaturday Review dismissing it as "a dirty fairy tale".[11]
MacMurray, having generally played guileless characters, related that after the film's release he was accosted by women in the street who berated him for making a "dirty filthy movie", and one of them hit him with her purse.[7]
In 2001,Chicago Sun-Times film criticRoger Ebert gave the film four stars out of four, and added it to hisGreat Movies list.[17] The film critic Clarisse Loughrey has identified it as one of her two favorite movies, along with the 2010 filmBoy.[18] The film holds a 93% rating onRotten Tomatoes, based on 103 reviews with an average rating of 8.8/10; the site's consensus states that "Director Billy Wilder's customary cynicism is leavened here by tender humor, romance, and genuine pathos".[19] OnMetacritic, the film has a score of 94 out of 100 based on 21 reviews, and was awarded the "Must-See" badge.[20]
Although Lemmon did not win the Oscar,Kevin Spacey dedicated his Oscar forAmerican Beauty (1999) to Lemmon's performance. According to the behind-the-scenes feature on theAmerican Beauty DVD, the film's director,Sam Mendes, had watchedThe Apartment (among other classic American films) as inspiration in preparation for shooting his film.
Within a few years afterThe Apartment's release, the routine use ofblack-and-white film in Hollywood ended. SinceThe Apartment only two black-and-white movies have won the Academy Award for Best Picture:Schindler's List (1993) andThe Artist (2011) (Oppenheimer was in partial black and white).
In 1994,The Apartment was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United StatesLibrary of Congress and selected for preservation in theNational Film Registry. In 2002, a poll of film directors conducted bySight and Sound magazine listed the film as the 14th greatest film of all time (tied withLa Dolce Vita).[23] In the2012 poll by the same magazine directors voted the film 44th greatest of all time.[24] The film was included in "The New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made" in 2002.[25] In 2006,Premiere voted this film as one of "The 50 Greatest Comedies Of All Time". TheWriters Guild of America ranked the film's screenplay (written by Billy Wilder & I.A.L. Diamond.) the 15th greatest ever.[26] In 2015,The Apartment ranked 24th onBBC's "100 Greatest American Films" list, voted on by film critics from around the world.[27] The film was selected as the 27th best comedy of all time in a poll of 253 film critics from 52 countries conducted by theBBC in 2017.[28]
American Film Institute lists:
In 1968,Burt Bacharach,Hal David andNeil Simon created amusical adaptation titledPromises, Promises which opened on Broadway at theShubert Theatre inNew York City. StarringJerry Orbach,Jill O'Hara andEdward Winter in the roles of Chuck, Fran and Sheldrake, the production closed in 1972. An all-starrevival began in 2010 withSean Hayes,Kristin Chenoweth andTony Goldwyn as the three leads; this version added the Bacharach-David compositions "I Say a Little Prayer" and "A House Is Not a Home" to the roster.
in his 1960 film The Apartment, the Austrian filmmaker Billy Wilder cribbed the sequence to introduce Jack Lemon at his desk.
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