Film: “The Apartment” (1960) with Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine
CC Baxter (Jack Lemmon), the protagonist of Billy Wilder’s “The Apartment” (1960), is in a bind. A low-level employee of a New York insurance company, he’s desperate to climb the corporate ladder. But it seems the only way he can do that is to lend out his apartment to his bosses for their extramarital quickies.
Baxter spends much of his day scheduling flings for these muckety-mucks, which are often requested last minute and which sometimes force him to leave his one-bedroom walkup in the middle of the night. A steady stream of women and liquor bottles (Baxter also supplies his superiors with free booze) convinces his suspicious neighbors that he is a playboy.
When the big boss Mr. Sheldrake (Fred Macmirray) finds out, he calls Baxter into his office. The latter, fearing the worst, swears it’ll never happen again. “On the contrary,” Sheldrake replies, “I need the apartment tonight. Can I borrow the key?”
As played by Jack Lemmon, Baxter is the quintessential soft-hearted Lonely Guy. He doesn’t have a girlfriend, spends his evenings watching old movies on TV, and occasionally cooks spaghetti for dinner, which he strains through the strings of a tennis racket.
Baxter does dream of having a girlfriend like Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), the cheery young woman who operates the elevator at work. Unfortunately she’s the one everyone else wants too, most annoyingly Sheldrake, with whom she has been having a long-running affair and who falsely promises to divorce his wife and marry her.
Maclaine is just as adorbs as Fran who rues her inability to meet the right guy. Finally realizing Sheldrake has been playing her, she winds up in Baxter’s apartment on New Year’s Eve, and passes out on his bed from an overdose of sleeping pills.
Directed by Billy Wilder and co-written by Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond, this classic dramedy sweetens its bargain-with-the-devil concept with snappy, caustic dialogue, often peppered with Yiddishisms. The wonderful cast (including Ray Walston and Edie Adams) features the kinds of eccentric characters who seem to exist exclusively on the Isle of Manhattan.
At the 1961 Academy Awards, “The Apartment” won 5 Oscars (including best picture) and was nominated for 10, including Best Sound: the latter due in no small part to the haunting theme song composed by Adolph Deutsch and Charles Williams.
Note: as the movie ends, Baxter and Fran wind up in his apartment playing gin rummy. He looks at her with big puppy dog eyes, hopeful for romance. Fran notices, looks at him cynically, and utters the last and perhaps one of the best lines of the movie: “Shut up and deal.”
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