“And the girl…?”
The romantic comedy changed with those three little words in “The Apartment.” Shirley MacLaine played “the other woman,” the scandalous character who always broke up the true love. But here, she was the lonely girl forgotten by the love of her life, cast out, neglected and contemplating suicide. How did we miss her?
Billy Wilder’s “The Apartment” is one of the groundbreaking comedies of all Old Hollywood. It gave the screwball comedy severity. Its characters were lonely, depressed and scummy, and it found a funny color amidst all the blue, proving to be heartwarming and filled with emotional pathos.
Jack Lemmon plays C.C. Baxter, an office drone in a movie that would inspire the image of the working man for decades to come. The desks stretching to infinity was inspired by King Vidor’s silent film “The Crowd,” but Wilder’s numerical facts of a singular employee in a massive insurance company seem to paint a broader picture of his workforce servitude.
To move up in the world, Baxter has agreed to a deal with the executives. They can use his apartment as a haven to take their mistresses. The company’s head-honcho, Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), promotes Baxter for the same reason, but his mistress is the lovely Fran Kubelik (MacLaine), the spritely elevator girl with the short haircut Baxter has a crush on.
The interesting thing about Baxter is that he’s living a lie that he’s not actually living. His neighbors and his landlady both think he’s a rambunctious party animal bedding a new girl each night and polishing off several bottles of liquor as well. He does need to wake up and smell the coffee, but for different reasons than his neighbors believe. We see him living completely mundanely, changing the channels on TV in the hopes of watching “Grand Hotel” only to be teased with more commercials. And in the short time he earns these new promotions, he earns none of the extra money, still straining pasta with a tennis racket and washing martini glasses by hand. When he takes another lonely woman home from a bar on Christmas Eve, he’s doing so out of complete depression. He’s like the guy not invited to the party but forced to clean up afterwards. Continue reading “The Apartment (1960)”