Best Picture Review: The Apartment (1960)

The Apartment (1960) Director: Billy Wilder

“Where will we go, my place or yours?”
“Might as well go to mine. Everybody else does.”

★★★★★

With the benefit of a supremely well-constructed script, Billy Wilder’s The Apartment is a film that has continued to stick with me long after seeing it for the first time. I have been ruminating on it quite a bit lately, especially Billy Wilder’s injunction to “show, don’t tell” and to allow the audience to participate in the film by piecing together the plot. Unspoken subtext is key here. This effect is only bolstered by the extraordinary cinematography of Joseph LaShelle, whose use of wide-angled anamorphic lens shots and all manner of claustrophobic camera tricks creates a rich, layered depth in both the fore and backgrounds of each scene –taking us along on a journey to see a vast and geometrically proportioned lines of cubicles at the Consolidated Life Insurance office, and then into an intimately confined and cluttered upper westside brownstone apartment half a block away from Central Park (West 67th Street). Winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1960, The Apartment was directed by Hollywood legend Billy Wilder, whose incredible repertoire includes Double Indemnity (1944), Sunset Boulevard (1950), Some Like It Hot (1959), and many others. The Apartment was unique in that it won Billy Wilder the first ever string of Oscars for Best Director, Producer, Screenwriter, and Picture –quite a feat!

The Apartment is about a slightly neurotic mid-level insurance clerk named C.C. “Bud” Baxter (played by Jack Lemmon) who begins offering his Manhattan apartment to senior leaders at his company in exchange for preferential treatment and advancement opportunities at work. The executives use Baxter’s apartment for romantic liaisons –so much so, in fact, that Baxter’s neighbors begin to suspect Baxter of being an insatiable playboy, especially the Jewish doctor next door, Dr. David Dreyfuss (Jack Kruschen) and his wife Mildred (Naomi Stevens). Baxter wonderfully narrates the opening monologue of the film which succinctly describes his life in his usual string of obsessions with numbers and facts:

“On November 1, 1959, the population of New York City was 8,042,783. If you laid all these people end to end, figuring an average height of five feet six and a half inches, they would reach from Times Square to the outskirts of Karachi, Pakistan. I know facts like this because I work for an insurance company, Consolidated Life of New York, We’re one of the top five companies in the country. Our home office has 31,259 employees, which is more than the entire population of Natchez, Mississippi. I work on the nineteenth floor, ordinary Policy Department, Premium Accounting Division, Section W, Desk number 861. My name is C.C. Baxter, ‘C’ for Calvin, ‘C’ for Clifford, however most people call me Bud. I’ve been with Consolidated for three years and ten months, and my take home pay is $94.70 a week. The hours in our department are 8:50 to 5:20, they’re staggered by floors so that sixteen elevators can handle 31,259 employees without a serious traffic jam. As for myself, I very often stay on at the office and work for an extra hour or two, especially when the weather is bad. It’s not that I’m overly ambitious, it’s just a way of killing time until it’s alright for me to go home. You see, I have this little problem with my apartment. I live in the West sixties just half a block from Central Park. My rent is $85 a month, it used to be $80 until last July when Mr. Lieberman, the landlady, put in a secondhand air conditioning unit. It’s a real nice apartment, nothing fancy, but kind of cozy –just right for a bachelor. The only problem is that I can’t always get in when I want to.”

There is one particularly funny scene early in the film in which Baxter is finally granted access back into his apartment after a shyster executive has kept him waiting out in the cold. As Baxter finally regains entry and turns on his television, he is noticeably excited at the opportunity to watch the classic film Grand Hotel (1932), also a Best Picture winner. However, we learn that Baxter despises commercials so he quickly clicks away as the advertisements start to appear. As he changes channels, we see clips from Stagecoach (1939), Angel and the Badman (1947), and Fort Apache (1948) –all of which are John Wayne films, two of which were directed by the great John Ford. But Baxter doesn’t like violence so he keeps clicking away from these films. Instead of watching advertisements and violence, Baxter simply turns off the television. Perhaps we might interpret this unique little sequence as Wilder examining the changing nature of cinema. For example, in 1960 the ubiquity of the Western was starting to decline along with the huge lavish MGM productions of yesteryear, which were giving way to a new breed of more intimate, intensely character-driven pictures, films like The Apartment. And C.C. Baxter serves as a unique new kind of protagonist; he couldn’t be more distinct from the archetypal John Wayne. Perhaps the ‘John Waynes’ in The Apartment are back at the Consolidated Life corporate office, while the more gentle and upstanding character of Baxter is openly exploited by his superiors.

The Apartment uniquely explores the world of white collar corporate work, a profession which requires a certain degree of groupthink and turning a blind eye to unseemly things ( the scenes of vast rows of employees at desks is a nod to King Vidor’s silent masterpiece The Crowd from 1928). At work, Baxter is infatuated with a pixie-cut elevator girl named Fran Kubelik (wonderfully played by Shirley Maclaine). Each day, Baxter is one of the few men who seems to treat her with respect, always removing his hat like a gentleman in the elevator. But unbeknownst to anyone, Fran has been having a secret affair with one of the older married corporate executives, a sleazy man named Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray). We are slowly introduced to this romantic dalliance through a series of subtle cues that brilliantly unfold like a puzzle. And eventually Baxter realizes he has been allowing Mr. Sheldrake to take Fran up to Baxter’s own apartment! Thanks to Mr. Sheldrake’s nosy secretary, Miss Olsen (played by Edie Adams), Fran comes to realize Mr. Sheldrake has just been using her, he has promised the same things to her as he has to a dozen other girls. On Christmas Eve, when Mr. Sheldrake neglects to give Fran a nice gift (simply handing her a $100 bill), and after Miss Olsen drunkenly spilled the tea to her about Mr. Sheldrake at the office Christmas party, Fran overdoses on sleeping pills in a deliberate suicide attempt. Baxter is shocked that night to find her lying unconscious in his bed. He quickly rouses his neighbor Dr. Dreyfuss (and who has grown increasingly suspicious of Baxter), and together they spend all night reviving Fran. In this way, Dr. Dreyfuss plays a surprisingly pivotal role in the film as he provides Baxter with a sense of old world, Jewish values –he is a source of moral stability, a healer, ameliorating all the modern ills plaguing poor, silly Baxter.

Baxter nurses Fran back to health, together they play a game of Gin Rummy. Baxter, a lonely bachelor, grows to love having Fran around. As she struggles to overcome her love for Mr. Sheldrake, Baxter tells her about a similar situation he once faced, attempting to shoot himself over his best friend’s wife, only to fail and strike himself in the knee. Eventually, Baxter rough-and-tumble brother-in-law comes to collect her from the apartment (he punches Baxter in the face, knocking him down and leaving a shiner). Needless to say, Baxter takes considerable heat to cover-up this incident for Mr. Sheldrake, but it earns him his much-desired promotion at work. There is a dark social commentary here about the morally compromising situations employees must put themselves in to get ahead in corporate America. Baxter is reminded of the guidance his neighbor Dr. Dreyfuss: to be a “mensch,” or a human being. It forces us to consider what it takes to hold onto your humanity while climbing the corporate ladder, serving as a reminder to still be a “mensch” as you chase that executive washroom. The group of vulture junior executives who all collectively call Baxter “Buddy Boy” are hardly his friends.

Baxter finally realizes this in the end. He no longer wants to pimp out his apartment to Consolidated Life’s executives. He triumphantly quits, tossing his executive washroom key onto Mr. Sheldrake’s desk. And Fran finally runs away from Mr. Sheldrake (after his secretary Miss Olsen reveals his affairs to his Mrs. Sheldrake). On New Year’s Eve, she rushes back to Baxter’s apartment just as he’s finishing packing up all his things. She hears a loud “pop” and worries that Baxter has shot himself, but as she rushes to his door, it turns out it was just a bottle of champagne. Fran and Baxter smile at each other as they start playing Gin Rummy. We are led to believe that Baxter and Fran have hope in the end. At least, Baxter musters the courage to confess his love for Fran, and in return she coyly says the film’s famous closing line: “Shut up and deal.” Thus, The Apartment confidently avoids being a sentimental picture as Wilder successfully falling into the trap of cliche trap. However, The Apartment is still an adultery comedy film about two people who are emancipated from their respective entrapments –Baxter from his soulless job and Fran from her loveless affair. Will they wind up together? We may only speculate. But at least they both have broken free of their prisons.

“Shut up and deal.”

In some respects, The Apartment is a traditional Christmas story –Bud Baxter is essentially an innocent, humble, and noble hero who strives to “become a mensch,” but only after he tries to achieve his career goals by compromising his values and allowing his shady corporate executives to use his personal apartment like a brothel. Baxter’s chief flaw is that he is too tender; he lacks courage and his priorities are misplaced. Though it’s hardly his own fault, he’s just following the dictates of society around him. However, after being strung along on this emotional roller coaster, which eventually grants him his desired promotion at work, Baxter suddenly realizes the folly of the corporate world and he decides to walk away. Only then does he get the girl (or at least in theory). Despite this replication of the hero’s journey, The Apartment is still a social satire and a cynical comedy. Getting ahead in the workplace is still only accomplished by appeasing a cabal of a-moral superiors –that fact doesn’t change. None of the executives ever see the light in the film. When Baxter is trapped in their cold and immoral world, he learns that doing what is right is near impossible, and so values clash. Even in the end, we question the extent to which Fran truly intends to pursue an honest romance with Baxter –does she actually return his love? Or does she merely pity him? I wonder if she will still prefer a cynical, conniving womanizer like Mr. Sheldrake? The world seems to offer little recourse for a kind and gentle person like Baxter. Despite being a good person, he still must choose between conflicting ideas of what is right: either in pursuit of his career, or perhaps chasing after something else and seeing if it will crumble, cookie-wise.

---

Credits:

• Director: Billy Wilder
• Written by: Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond
  • The script for The Apartment went through some seventeen drafts, with Wilder and Diamond developing complicated profiles of each character.
• Produced by: Billy Wilder
• Cinematography by: Joseph LaShelle
• Edited by: Daniel Mandell
• Music by: Adolph Deutsch
• Production Company: The Mirisch Company
• Distributed by: United Artists
• Release date: June 15, 1960
• Starring:
  • Jack Lemmon…..Calvin Clifford (CC) “Buddy Boy” Baxter, an office worker
    • Billy Wilder had the cast and crew working at a break-neck pace to complete this film, with Jack Lemmon sometimes working nineteen hour days. He eventually collapsed on-set after a twenty-three hour marathon of the dinner scene wherein Baxter strains pasta through a tennis racket. Lemmon was hospitalized due to exhaustion and dehydration. Doctors asked him to rest for a week, but Wilder gave him a weekend. He then scheduled the most emotionally vulnerable scenes to be shot immediately after Lemmon returned, believing his frailty would show through in the film. Lemmon later said he lost sixteen pounds during filming and he was barely conscious between takes. Lemmon also suffered a cornea injury when he popped open a real champagne bottle on-set. He was forced to wear a special contact lens to continue shootng and cinematographer Joseph LaShelle created special lighting to hide the injury.
  • Shirley MacLaine…..Fran Kubelik, an elevator operator
    • It was later revealed that Shirley MacLaine was actually experiencing her own heartbreak over a romantic relationship she was having with a married corporate executive during the filming of The Apartment. When Billy Wilder found out, he deliberately scheduled the suicide attempt scene to be filmed the day after she was stood up by her lover. The infamous mirror scene was the result. This psychological and emotional roller-coaster has led to some ethical criticisms for Wilder’s approach, even if it yielded a legendary onscreen performance. When studio executives found out, they panicked and hired a publicist to prevent any leaks to the press about MacLaine’s affair. MacLaine later admitted she had never forgiven Billy Wilder for this.
  • Fred MacMurray…..Jeff D. Sheldrake, personnel manager, Baxter’s boss and apartment user
    • Fearing career suicide over the unlikable adulterous role of Sheldrake, many actors apparently turned down the role, among them included Gregory Peck, Jimmy Stewart, and William Holden. Paul Douglas was initially cast as Sheldrake but he died of a heart attack before filming began. After the release of The Apartment, Fred MacMurray’s mostly squeaky clean image was transformed, though to be fair he had already appeared in several other darker roles before The Apartment (such as in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity) but he was largely seen in the public consciousness as a moral father figure of sorts, in shows like My Three Sons and various Disney productions). But his performance in The Apartment garnered him a tremendous amount of hate mail and he was apparently nearly dropped by Disney.
  • Ray Walston…..Joe Dobisch, public relations manager and Baxter’s apartment user
    • Joe Dobisch is one of the four junior executives at Consolidated Life who exploits Baxter for his apartment.
  • Jack Kruschen…..Dr. David Dreyfuss, Baxter’s neighbor
  • Frances Weintraub Lax…..landlady Mrs. Lieberman
  • David Lewis…..Al Kirkeby, claims department manager and Baxter’s apartment user
    • Al Kirkeby is one of the four junior executives at Consolidated Life who exploits Baxter for his apartment. Kirkeby is the one who speaks in uniquely structured sentences like: “Premium-wise and billing-wise, we are eighteen percent ahead of last year, October-wise” and “Well, I don’t blame ya. So you hit the jackpot, eh kid? I mean Kubelik-wise.” Both Baxter and then Fran also adopt this way of speaking: “That’s the way it crumbles… cookie-wise.”
  • Edie Adams…..Miss Olsen, Sheldrake’s secretary
  • Hope Holiday…..Mrs. Margie MacDougall, a woman whom Baxter meets at the bar
  • Joan Shawlee…..Sylvia, Al’s partner
  • Naomi Stevens…..Mrs. Mildred Dreyfuss, David’s wife
  • Johnny Seven…..Karl Matuschka, Fran’s cab driving brother-in-law
  • Joyce Jameson…..the blonde in the bar
  • Hal Smith…..Santa Claus in the bar
  • Willard Waterman…..Mr. Vanderhoff, manager and Baxter’s apartment user
  • David White…..Mr. Eichelberger, manager and Baxter’s apartment user

---

Other Notes:

• Upon initial release, some critics lambasted The Apartment for being “dirty,” “immoral,” and “disgusting.” Billy Wilder faced considerable pushback from United Artists when he proposed the film, and executives worried the film would ruin Jack Lemmon’s career, but after refusing to back down, the film was greenlit, albeit with a reduced budget.
• Hungarian Production Designer Alexandre Trauner constructed the large, ornate, yet cramped apartment sets in this film with collapsable walls. He conducted considerable research on New York men and their living habits. Another amazing feat was the fully controllable elevator in the office building run on hydraulics complete with hidden cameras. It was designed by three different engineering firms. The famous office room set featured 137 working desks arranged in mathematically proportionate rows with a trick of the camera (“force perspective”) making the set appear larger than it actually was (but in fact the desks were fitted to be smaller and smaller the further back you walked, with perhaps short people or even children playing the characters furthest away from the camera). Crewmen who visited the set described it as inducing a kind of ‘existential vertigo.’ All the sets were designed to create the feeling of anxiety and unsettling intimacy. Alexandre Trauner won a well-deserved Academy Award for his work on The Apartment.
• The Apartment played a major role in ending the old Hollywood censorship code and replacing it with the familiar rating system we know today.
• “The Invisible Camera” technique was developed specifically for this film, using unique lighting and cinematography which allowed for more intimate performances.
• The original release of The Apartment featured a brutal suicide sequence as per Wilder’s original vision. However, after initial screenings led to dozens of audience-goers walking out of theaters, and even reports of a woman fainting, the studio demanded cuts. Wilder called the revised film “The Apartment with its teeth shaved down.” As far as I’m aware, United Artists has preserved these original scenes in its vaults but they have never been officially released.
• The Gin Rummy card-playing scene has become notorious as it was very likely the longest continuing shoot in Hollywood history up until that point, covering some forty-three hours. Wilder refused to call cut, insisting they play hand after hand, forcing the actors to drink alcohol for hours, making them appear exhausted and disheveled, while the studio dispatched increasingly senior executives to put a stop to the film.
• Each character wears specifically selected colors in this film as they enter onto a ‘color journey’ throughout the story (the costume department had elaborate charts since scenes were shot out of order).
• The score for The Apartment is filled with all manner of hidden Hollywood insider commentaries with composer Adolph Deutsch and director Billy Wilder connecting musical phrases and minor-key-oriented inverted notes from Marilyn Monroe films, giving Wilder the chance to issue musical commentary on the treatment of Monroe in Hollywood.
• The Apartment created the innovative “triangular dialogue” technique wherein characters don’t exactly address exactly what they are thinking, instead speaking across he central topic while exposing through subtext their own anxieties.
• Just days before the film was released, Billy Wilder launched a chaotic reshoot for the film’s conclusion, now a famous scene in the history of cinema.
• Apparently there are several different stories about the origination of the plot for The Apartment, but the most plausible seems to be that Billy Wilder was inspired after seeing David Lean’s Brief Encounter, which was based on the play “Still Life” by Noël Coward. It was a film about two married people having an affair, and Wilder wondered about the story from the perspective of the apartment owner who permits their tryst. There is also a story that Billy Wilder based The Apartment on his own experience in Hollywood in the 1930s and he loaned out his apartment to studio executives who used it for sexual affairs with starlets.
• Jack Lemmon improvised the nasal spray squirting scene in this film (he had the props department fill the bottle with milk). He also apparently improvised his Italian singing while tossing the spaghetti on his tennis racket. These were the only two scenes Billy Wilder allowed him to improvise.
• In the scene where Baxter is punched in the face by Fran’s brother-in-law, Jack Lemmon was supposed to mime being punched, but he failed to move correctly and was accidentally knocked down. This was the take that was used in the final cut of the film.
• The idea for including the card game of Gin Rummy was apparently a result of Shirley MacLaine learning the game from her friends in the Rat Pack and Billy Wilder immediately wrote it into the ever-evolving script.
• At one point, Baxter and Fran are said to be having “a lost weekend” together, a funny nod to Billy Wilder’s earlier classic film The Lost Weekend (1945).
• There are a variety of minor in-jokes and allusions in this film –for example, when Mrs. Dreyfuss thinks Baxter is living a playboy lifestyle, she refers to him as “a regular King Farouk,” a reference to the Egyptian King Farouk (1920-1965) one of the last kings of Egypt who was overthrown and exiled to Europe where he became renowned for his many marriages and mistresses. Another instance is when one of the junior executives, Al Kirkeby, calls Baxter “Little Lord Fauntleroy” for suggesting Fran might be a nice respectable girl. Little Lord Fauntleroy is a late 19th century children’s novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett about a poor boy in New York City who suddenly inherits an Earl’s vast English country estate, and he spends the book teaching the Earl about practicing compassion.
• The name on the office door next to Baxter’s is “T.W. Plews.” Tom Plews was the prop master.
• According to rumor, while filming the scene where Baxter sleeps on a bench in Central Park in the rain, Billy Wilder had to spray Jack Lemmon with anti-freeze to keep him from freezing. While filming, Jack Lemmon apparently caught a cold.
• The musical Baxter tries to take Fran to is “The Music Man” at The Majestic.
• When Fran attempts to make a call to her sister from Baxter’s apartment, the one visible album cover is “The First Lady Of Song” by Ella Fitzgerald.
• There is an amusing running gag wherein characters hold up four fingers while saying “three.” For example, Baxter says he’s only had 3 drinks at the Christmas party while holding up 4 fingers, and later Fran says she’s only had 3 boyfriends but holds up 4 fingers.
• Today, the exterior of Baxter’s apartment sits at 51 W 69th Street. The exterior of Baxter’s office building is located at 2 Broadway. While a few of the exteriors were shot on the actual New York street, most of the film was shot on a Hollywood soundstage.

---

The 33rd Academy Awards (1960)

The 33rd Academy Awards were held on April 17, 1961, hosted by Bob Hope at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in Santa Monica, California. It was the night of The Apartment (1960) as the film was nominated for ten Academy Awards, ultimately winning five. Neither Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus nor Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho were even nominated for Best Picture (though thanks to John Wayne’s extensive lobbying campaign, his directorial debut The Alamo was nominated); Jack Lemmon lost Best Actor to Burt Lancaster for his performance in Elmer Gantry; and Elizabeth Taylor notoriously won Best Actress for her performance in BUtterfield 8, a prize which many regard as being a pity prize for her then-recent life-threatening throat surgery in 1961 and subsequent bout of pneumonia.

Gary Cooper was awarded an Honorary Award “for his many memorable screen performances and the international recognition he, as an individual, has gained for the motion picture industry.” However, Gary Cooper was too ill to attend the ceremony and his friend Jimmy Stewart accepted the award on his behalf. While Cooper’s condition was publicly disclosed, Stewart’s emotional speech hinted at something being seriously wrong. The following day newspapers ran the headline: “Gary Cooper has cancer.” He died less than four weeks later.

• Best Picture: The Apartment (Billy Wilder’s The Apartment was the last black-and-white film to win Best Picture until Schindler’s List and then The Artist). When Wilder accepted the award from presenter Audrey Hepburn, he later said it felt like an acknowledgement from Hollywood that audiences were finally ready for more real and adult-themed films. In his brief acceptance speech, Wilder acknowledged all the people who came together to make the film a success, but he joked that the award should be split in half and shared between Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine.
  • The Alamo
    • Note: John Wayne’s aggressive lobbying campaign for his directorial debut The Alamo is believed to have bumped Psycho from the Best Picture nominees entirely.
  • Elmer Gantry
  • Sons and Lovers
  • The Sundowners

• Best Director: Billy Wilder – The Apartment
  • Jules Dassin – Never on Sunday
  • Alfred Hitchcock – Psycho
  • Jack Cardiff – Sons and Lovers
  • Fred Zinnemann – The Sundowners

• Best Actor: Burt Lancaster – Elmer Gantry as Elmer Gantry
  • Trevor Howard – Sons and Lovers as Walter Morel
  • Jack Lemmon – The Apartment as Calvin Clifford “Bud” Baxter
  • Laurence Olivier – The Entertainer as Archie Rice
  • Spencer Tracy – Inherit the Wind as Henry Drummond

• Best Actress: Elizabeth Taylor – BUtterfield 8 as Gloria Wandrous (Elizabeth Taylor, who had a near-fatal bout with pneumonia a short time before the ceremony, was viewed as having received her Oscar out of sympathy rather than for her performance in Butterfield 8).
  • Greer Garson – Sunrise at Campobello as Eleanor Roosevelt
  • Deborah Kerr – The Sundowners as Ida Carmody
  • Shirley MacLaine – The Apartment as Fran Kubelik
  • Melina Mercouri – Never on Sunday as Ilya

• Best Writing (Story and Screenplay – Written Directly for the Screen): The Apartment – Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond
  • The Angry Silence – Richard Gregson, Michael Craig and Bryan Forbes
  • The Facts of Life – Melvin Frank and Norman Panama
  • Hiroshima, My Love – Marguerite Duras
  • Never on Sunday – Jules Dassin

---

Did the right film win Best Picture?

In my view, The Apartment is a true classic and a cinematic delight; I could watch this film again and again. I often return to it, particularly around Christmastime, just to marvel at its masterfully organized plot. Every minute detail plays an important part in this film, nothing is left to chance. Recently, I saw The Apartment again on the big screen at my local independent theater with my Dad. If you ever get the chance, I highly recommend seeing it this way.

---

Click here to return to my film reviews.

Click here to return to my survey of the Best Picture Winners.