The Apartment. (15.)
Directed by Billy Wilder. 1960.
Starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred McMurray, Ray Walston. Black and white. 130 mins.
If you’ve never seen The Apartment, well why would you ever want to? It may have been the Best Film Oscar winner of 1960 but what’s the appeal now? An aging black and white black comedy of New York office politics and selling yourself to get ahead in business with a cast you’ve probably seen enough of to last a lifetime. After spending 13 weeks of your life waiting for something (please, anything at all) to happen in Mad Men why put yourself through that again?
A black comedy with Jack Lemmon would seem to be almost an affront to natural order. Seeing The Apartment was always one of those tasks that I’d meant to do but never got round to. Just couldn’t see how this premise of a lowly office worker who gets ahead by allowing bosses to use his place for entertaining ladies who are not their wives could be this movie that everybody loved.
I know now. Nearly six decades on Wilder and IAL Diamond’s script is as dark and unforgiving vision of corporate life as Heartbeat Detector. A lot of viewers have blanched at the French film’s notion that, Spoiler, the way that multinational act is basically a sublimation of the Holocaust, yet here is a vision of a man who has been utterly demeaned by just obeying orders.
Lemmon’s achievement in playing CC Baxter is to create a character that audiences stick with even when he’s being despicable. The scene where he’s not just meekly obedient but parroting the persona of his bosses is incredibly creepy. He’s such a fiddly little performer which often irritates but here it captures a person who seems to be trying to distract himself from his own situation.
Opposite him, Fred MacMurray is the personification of matey corporate malevolence. MacMurray is the embodiment of Honey I’m Home to a warm round of applause from the studio audience and he does it well
The film is sparring with the laughs. The door policy is tough, and no gags are let in unless they absolutely improve the film. The second half of the film is extraordinarily dark. The scene where doctor Dreyfuss slaps Shirley Maclaine after her sleeping pill mishap are a jolt. Today you might have seem the whole stomach pumping process in gruesome detail but I don’t think it would make you sit up like those repeated slaps do.
Directed by Billy Wilder. 1960.
Starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred McMurray, Ray Walston. Black and white. 130 mins.
If you’ve never seen The Apartment, well why would you ever want to? It may have been the Best Film Oscar winner of 1960 but what’s the appeal now? An aging black and white black comedy of New York office politics and selling yourself to get ahead in business with a cast you’ve probably seen enough of to last a lifetime. After spending 13 weeks of your life waiting for something (please, anything at all) to happen in Mad Men why put yourself through that again?
A black comedy with Jack Lemmon would seem to be almost an affront to natural order. Seeing The Apartment was always one of those tasks that I’d meant to do but never got round to. Just couldn’t see how this premise of a lowly office worker who gets ahead by allowing bosses to use his place for entertaining ladies who are not their wives could be this movie that everybody loved.
I know now. Nearly six decades on Wilder and IAL Diamond’s script is as dark and unforgiving vision of corporate life as Heartbeat Detector. A lot of viewers have blanched at the French film’s notion that, Spoiler, the way that multinational act is basically a sublimation of the Holocaust, yet here is a vision of a man who has been utterly demeaned by just obeying orders.
Lemmon’s achievement in playing CC Baxter is to create a character that audiences stick with even when he’s being despicable. The scene where he’s not just meekly obedient but parroting the persona of his bosses is incredibly creepy. He’s such a fiddly little performer which often irritates but here it captures a person who seems to be trying to distract himself from his own situation.
Opposite him, Fred MacMurray is the personification of matey corporate malevolence. MacMurray is the embodiment of Honey I’m Home to a warm round of applause from the studio audience and he does it well
The film is sparring with the laughs. The door policy is tough, and no gags are let in unless they absolutely improve the film. The second half of the film is extraordinarily dark. The scene where doctor Dreyfuss slaps Shirley Maclaine after her sleeping pill mishap are a jolt. Today you might have seem the whole stomach pumping process in gruesome detail but I don’t think it would make you sit up like those repeated slaps do.
