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"The Apartment" and peering under the rock
By Rich Kennedy | "The Apartment" is a magical film for me in the sense that, for the first time, I was exposed to a film that was more than the stereotype of pietists: either a frivolous frolic or an ode to the glories of sin. More than not being either of the above, it humorously skewered human folly while taking delight in detailing it and making it fun. Even more, there was the lone heroism of owning up to your mistakes and paying for them and those of others. The magic of the movies was now open to one for whom such stuff had been evil and out of bounds. Parents, beware of how you communicate right, wrong, and justifications for set boundaries. Ill-defended principles and ultimately weak principles are so easily breeched by the relentless curiosity of the young.
That's nice, but it won't cut it for me anymore in my late 40s. I carried a torch for Billy Wilder (writer/director) when the most authoritative summary of his career was "less than meets the eye". The Encyclopedia of Film still considers Wilder rather weak. Now that he is gliding through his 90s, Mr. Wilder is held in higher esteem. The question is, does this 1960 "classic" still entertain and communicate today?
Oh yes, it does. The more one knows about life in the U.S. in the late '50s, the more one will have in reserve to appreciate its nuances. The general situation in which the characters find themselves is universal for contemporary times. Men and women must be more careful of the little things and general impressions today, but the big things concerning the battle of the sexes and human relations still fall through the cracks with no notice until the cracks become holes. Just like old times.
Our hero is introduced as voiceover, citing statistics. This is fitting, for C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) collects statistics as an accountant for The Consolidated Life of New York. He is "a shnook" to the hipsters at Con Life who fell into loaning out his apartment near Central Park for liaisons between his superiors and eager specimens of the vast female population of the company. He is now trapped in the scheme for fear of his job. Coming at him from the other side are neighbors in his building who think he parties every night, sometimes twice a night.
Baxter is a decent guy who keeps up a courteous flirtation with Con Life's great unobtainable prize, one Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine). It is ironic that Baxter is unaware of all the effort expended on her as well as much of the underground activity directed at others, considering his role in making it possible. Con Life is a veritable target range for the midlevel executives.
The apartment itself is a modest, neat bachelor pad with fine art prints on the wall. (Chagal, Mondrian, Picasso are the most obvious. All alive at the time.) The story is set in late 1959, so of couse, the appliances are mostly relics of the Hoover administration. Wilder takes advantage of this at key points to augment the action. Typical stuff that falls out of pockets when prone on the couch is also used at plot points. I want to give nothing away if one has never seen the film.
It can be easy to justify "The Apartment" as an entertainment with a more or less just ending and enjoy it as such. On the other hand, the gleeful hypocrisy of the characters and unexpected turns on the hypocrisy is ripe for points to be made, moral and otherwise. This is great Wilder territory. All his best films trade on it. Prison camp loyalties taxed by the unreliability of appearances, successful career-masking deep alchohol dependency, the great Sherlock Holmes undone by betrayed love and the affairs of Queen and country, or lust getting in the way of the very trust a professional is lisensed to trade on. Wilder loves to turn over the rock and watch the bugs scurry out of the light, then attaching exalted roles to the various bugs. The Wilder world is a world in which everyone is at least quite competant in one's job and is bored with it. The mind has long since wandered when the viewer arrives on the scene so that there is always much to hide. It doesn't stay hidden.
Finally there are the little things that make a Wilder film fun to watch. The arrangement of martini garnishes on the bar counter on Christmas Eve that tell the elapsed time while evoking a famous modern art clock design. The taught and witty dialogue on the part of even minor characters -- Bartender: "come on, you know what time it is, what day it is?" Santa Claus: "yeah, yeah, hey I work for the outfit!" There is the way honest straights get hip slang wrong without being condescended to by the script, and the way the straights will come to the rescue when the time comes (would that it were true always in real life) leaving the "I told you so"s for when the crisis is past. Watch and enjoy. Avalable at most video rental chains and on TCM 3.22 @ 8:00 p.m.
Other recognizable players of note : J.J. Honsecker, Fred MacMurray; Dobish, Ray Walston.
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