Romance at its most anti-romantic--that is the Billy Wilder stamp of genius, and this Best Picture Academy Award winner from 1960 is no exception. Set in a decidedly unsavoury world of corporate climbing and philandering, the great filmmaker's trenchant, witty satire-melodrama takes the office politics of a corporation and plays them out in the apartment of lonely clerk CC Baxter (Jack Lemmon). By lending out his digs to the higher-ups for nightly extramarital flings with their secretaries, Baxter has managed to ascend the business ladder faster than even he imagined.... The story turns even uglier, though, when Baxter's crush on the building's melancholy elevator operator (Shirley MacLaine) runs up against her long-standing affair with the big boss (a superbly smarmy Fred MacMurray). The situation comes to a head when she tries to commit suicide in Baxter's apartment. Not the happiest or cleanest of scenarios, and one that earned the famously caustic and cynically humoured Wilder his share of outraged responses, but looking at it now, it is a funny, startlingly clear-eyed vision of urban emptiness and is unfailingly understanding of the crazy decisions our hearts sometimes make. Lemmon and MacLaine are ideally matched and while everyone cites Wilder's Some Like It Hot closing line "Nobody's perfect" as his best, MacLaine's no-nonsense final words--"Shut up and deal"--are every bit as memorable. Wilder won three Oscars for The Apartment, for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay (cowritten with long-time collaborator I A L Diamond). --Robert Abele [show more]
"The Apartment" is one of the best examples of director Billy Wilder's genius for crafting hilarious comedies with a darkly acidic core. In this case, the acid is directed at corporate culture and the draining effects of enforced conformity on the corporate employee. Jack Lemmon is both hysterically funny and poignant as a poor worker drone at a big company, who hits on the idea of getting ahead by lending out his apartment for the company bigwigs to use for romantic trysts. This turns out to be a great idea for his career, but it wreaks havoc on his life, which becomes and endless routine of waiting, walking the city streets, and meeting the demands of others while his own life is increasingly empty and meaningless. Even his attempts to woo the office elevator girl, Shirley MacLaine, are disrupted by his nearly non-existent private life -- as well as by the fact that she's already spoken for by Lemmon's womanizing boss, Fred MacMurray. Wilder's satirical eye savages the corporate environment that replaces love with ambition, and the film is both a riotous comedy and a surprisngly moving ode to the victory of individual emotion over corporatized emptiness.
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Billy Wilder embraces both sentiment and cynicism in this superb comedy-drama, set in New York City, that chronicles the trials of a young ambitious insurance clerk, C.C. "Bud" Baxter (Jack Lemmon). Baxter tries to get ahead by lending his apartment key to several of the company's philandering executives. But when he falls in love with the building's elevator operator, he soon realizes that she's the woman his married boss has been taking to the apartment for romantic trysts... Winner of 5 Oscars including Best Picture.
Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine star in this acclaimed satire from writer-director Billy Wilder. Insurance clerk C.C. Baxter (Lemmon) lets his superiors use his apartment as a secret love nest and as a result begins to make his way up in the company. Things go awry when director Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray) wants to use the apartment for a rendevouz with Fran Kubelik (MacLaine), an elevator operator whom the young clerk already holds a candle for. The film won five Oscars including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay.
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