The Apartment

THE APARTMENT              A                    

USA  (125 mi)  1960  ‘Scope  d:  Billy Wilder

Shut up and deal.   —Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine)

Following on the footsteps of his most notable career achievement, SOME LIKE IT HOT (1959), Wilder along with his collaborator I.A. L. Diamond wrote what is arguably his greatest film, a strange mix of a satire on the American corporate success story of the 1950’s and a modern day romance at its most wonderful best, moving effortlessly between comedy and drama to romance.  As usual, no one really knows how love strikes, but when it hits, there’s nothing else like it.  Wilder won the best screenplay, best director, and best picture award in 1960, a trifecta of the first order, yet this film doesn’t knock you off your feet with dazzling camera work, but with wit, humor, and some amazing performances by the always nervous Jack Lemmon who is striving for a key to the executive suite and the lovable, yet klutzy elevator operator Shirley MacLaine.  Fred McMurray plays the shrewd boss who wants to have everything, and for the most part does, but ends up instead with only everything money can buy, which isn’t the same thing.  This is an interesting take on marriage, though surprising the unhappy marriage feels like a weight on one’s back, especially when one is wedded to their job.  A far cry from the American Dream, here the job is just another faceless number in the ranks of thousands, in this case an insurance company that actually employs over 30,000 workers where it’s nearly impossible to distinguish yourself, as every desk and every worker looks exactly the same.  While the worker bees flail away on the ground floor with figures and phone calls, tabulating graphs, statistics and flow charts, squeezing every last minute into their working day, the executives on the top floors seem to have plenty of idle time on their hands, sitting alone in spacious offices planning their social lives away from work, inventing excuses like evening board meetings to cover for their extra-marital activities.  At the bottom are the worker drones while at the top are a special breed of male species that can never have enough, an indulgent group that greedily takes what it wants.

A scathing critique of American capitalism, Wilder examines the life of a middle man, a drone like all the rest, but he’s got something else, lending out the keys to his bachelor apartment to various executives for illicit sexual affairs, men who remember these special favors and recommend a fast track to the top for their facilitator, C.C. Baxter, Jack Lemmon in another Everyman role.  While he’s obviously being duped out of his own life, spending his time after work dawdling at his desk or standing around outside his apartment waiting for his “special guests” to leave, Lemmon is a good-natured guy, a bit over anxious but eager to please, especially those in positions of authority, so he grovels and prostrates himself before them while pretending it doesn’t matter, that eventually they’ll send in a good word.  Using a voiceover narration by Lemmon, he recites figures and statistics about the position he’s in, becoming a meaningless number that may as well be corporate property, one in a long line of endless desks that stretch as far as the eye can see, exactly as Welles later conceived the life of K, the nameless bureaucrat in Kafka's THE TRIAL (1962).  Baxter does have something going for him that no one else has, the use of his apartment, even if it is for immoral and salacious purposes.  Wilder pokes fun at this through the use of his neighbors, who think his life is one continual party with one girl after another, with rumba music, bottles of liquor, and festive noise coming through the walls, where he’s bound to eventually drop dead on the spot from exhaustion.  Baxter has so little self esteem of his own that he’s even willing to accept this fake persona as a ladykiller as some kind of personal compliment, an attribute of his real character, borrowing it from time to time as he has no real life of his own.  

Like withholding the entrance of Monroe in SOME LIKE IT HOT (1959), Wilder teases the audience with the late introduction of Shirley MacLaine as Fran Kubelik, the company elevator operator who performs her service with a smile.  Baxter is especially pleasant with her, but so are all the other male figures, many overly exuberant to the point of being distasteful and obnoxious.  The way the male executives derisively talk about women behind their backs reveals the barren emptiness of their own lives, treating each like a commodity they can impress one another with, like a prize winning trophy.  But all they get out of it is a quick fix, something to indulge their quixotic needs that are simply unquenchable, as the narcissistic greed these men are used to has no limits, as they represent the successful business model that feels like the creation of a new phenomenon of being, the titular head that underlings cannot refuse, taking whatever they desire with their rapacious appetites.  The more the underlings try to please them, the more pleased with themselves these business executives become.  In this manner, Baxter eventually draws the attention of the chief executive of the company, Fred MacMurray as Mr. Sheldrake, who vainly wants the use of the apartment all to himself, offering Baxter an executive position if he plays along.  Of course, who is the object of his cheap affections, none other than Ms. Kubelik, the one woman who treats Baxter like a decent human being.  A real conflict ensues, as both Baxter and Kubelik are separately dragged through the mud by the same lecherous man, who is inseparable from the company. 

Wilder quickly turns this satiric comedy on end, where the lives of the characters begin to matter, where the dubious manner in which they continue to be treated becomes an offense, quickly turning to a horrible personal tragedy.  This tumble and fall comes out of nowhere, but has a remarkable effect, as the audience suddenly becomes outraged and sympathizes with the lovable Ms. MacLaine like in no other movie, where she’s smart enough to know what’s happening, but is mostly miserable at herself, never blaming the man or the company behind the abuse.  This is what separates this movie from others, as this is a blisteringly accurate critique of the business world, as the executives are perceived as untouchable, obscenely rich with lavish expense accounts and plenty of high priced lawyers to protect what supposedly belongs to them.  Edie Adams as the executive secretary plays a prominent role as an outspoken whistleblower, surfacing during one of the most outlandish office parties on record, one that rivals the Romans in the picture of decadence, creating a feverish, poisonous effect.  Wilder quickly changes directions on a dime, where the portrait of corporate excess comes to a screeching halt and the impact of human tragedy prevails, focusing instead on an intimate glimpse into the small details of the living, where just getting through each day can sometimes feel like a miracle.  SOME LIKE IT HOT is funnier and more outrageous, but Wilder never wrote anything with greater depth or profound insight, feeling perhaps like this may be his most personal film, the one he’s most proud to have been associated with.  This is the American Dream gone wrong, where the myth becomes a distorted reality, and where a jolt of honesty, a splash of water in the face may finally open the eyes of workers who continue to get exploited in droves.  Despite the passage of half a century, this obscene, lopsided corporate model is the consummate picture of capitalism running amok today.          

Some Like It Hot

SOME LIKE IT HOT        A

USA  (120 mi)  1959  d:  Billy Wilder

After co-writing and directing what is arguably the seminal example of Film Noir with Double Indemnity (1944), Wilder returns more than a decade later with perhaps the best example of comic farce in American cinema, though Kubrick’s DR. STRANGELOVE OR:  HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964) also comes to mind, listed as the funniest American movie ever made by the American Film Institute in 2000 AFI's 100 YEARS...100 LAUGHS, sitting alongside CASABLANCA (1942) as among the most quotable movies ever made.  Overlooked at the time by the sweeping popular success of William Wyler’s BEN HUR (1959), at the time the most lavishly expensive film ever made, a spectacle six years in the making, eventually winning 12 Academy Awards, while this film won a sole Oscar for costume design, notably those shimmering, form-fitting gowns worn by Marilyn Monroe who gives the most sexually appealing performance of her career, always the center of attention, even though she doesn’t show up for the first half hour of the film.  This was perhaps Monroe’s best chance at winning an Academy Award, as she carries the film, but she wasn’t nominated.  The eventual winner for Best Actress was Simone Signoret for ROOM AT THE TOP (1959).  What’s also unique here is that it doesn’t start out as a comedy, but is more of a realistic buddy picture between two jazz musician friends, Joe (Tony Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon), somehow caught in a gangster picture, whose rapid fire, back and forth banter suggests an overfamiliarity, perhaps a model for Neil Simon’s THE ODD COUPLE (1968), two guys used to being in one another’s company, which can get annoying after awhile as they continually complain about whatever’s bothering them.   Little do they know what lies ahead. 

In a wintry opening setup during Prohibition in 1929 where gangsters are delivering bootleg liquor to a speakeasy disguised as a funeral home, the two are playing raucous dance music in a jazz band for a Rockettes-style chorus line of dancers, where they escape arrest when the place is raided by the cops, beating a hasty retreat through the snowy windswept sidewalks of Chicago.  Hoping to land a job out of town, they wander into a garage where they witness the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, escaping once again to gunfire, as gangsters make it their business not to leave witnesses behind.  Frantic to the point where they’d do anything, they don disguises dressed as women and hop on a train to Miami with an all-girl band.  Both feel absolutely ridiculous at the idea and are having second thoughts until Monroe sashays by with her curves and her ukulele and boards the train, described by Lemmon as “like Jell-o on springs,” making them instant believers. 

Spending the rest of the movie on the run, it’s only when the two guys, dressed as girls, start to make fun of each other that the tone of the film changes, continually bordering on hilarious, adding the alluring sexual element of perhaps *the* leading sex symbol in Hollywood movie history, Marilyn Monroe as Sugar Kane Kowalczyk, the singer of the band, and there’s instant chemistry, along with plenty of conflict, as these guys are continually posing as something other than who they are, not to mention the unfinished business with the Chicago mob.  Jack Lemmon as Daphne takes to the role like it’s second nature, laughing giddily and making jokes with the girls, eliminating that invisible wall between the sexes.  Tony Curtis as Josephine, on the other hand, is used to being that good looking matinee idol, as he’s incredibly handsome as a man, but awkward, uptight, and utterly helpless as a girl.  

The two are inseparable, never leaving one another’s side, but Daphne freely ad libs about their absent history, suggesting they’ve been studying at a music conservatory, giving them a cultivated and highbrow side to their personalities that none of the other girls have, as they’re much more liberated and open minded.  When Josephine gets a load of Sugar sipping bourbon in the rest room, confessing how she’s always been a sucker for a saxophone player, running away from yet another one, his instinctual saxophone playing male mentality takes over but he’s stuck in a female body, where all he/she can offer is support and friendship.  Band practice is a frenzied riot, containing the first of three Monroe musical numbers, Marilyn Monroe - Running Wild on YouTube (3:36).  The closeness and intimacy of the music only serves to bring the girls closer together, which turns into a Marx Brothers vaudeville routine of pandemonium when word gets out that Daphne’s cubicle is serving liquor. 

Once they’re in Miami, all bets are off, as they’re free to go their separate ways, but Josephine as Joe has become hooked on Sugar’s sad dream to meet a millionaire on a yacht, inspired to fill those shoes through divine inspiration, if necessary, which requires devising a mad plan of action.  Since Daphne has been the object of an old geezer’s affection, none other than Joe E. Brown (a guy who grew up in vaudeville) as Osgood Fielding III playing a self-confessed millionaire who happens to own his own yacht, Josephine plots to inhabit his alias as well in an attempt to attract Sugar’s attention, sending Daphne and Osgood to a night on the town dancing the night away while he charmingly lures Sugar to his yacht.  Using a sophisticated Cary Grant accent and the pretense of owning millions, Curtis and Monroe engage in a spectacle of love at first sight, where romance is always the object of their affection.  The scene on the yacht is utterly spectacular, but it’s set up perfectly by another Monroe number, Marilyn Monroe - I Wanna Be Loved By You [HD] (2:53). 

Monroe’s dress couldn’t be more glamorous and seductive, backless and barely there covering her voluptuous curves, it literally cries out for sex.  Curtis, on the other hand, plays it coy, repressed and hurt by love, supposedly deeply damaged and pretending to be in a state of emotional freeze, just awaiting the spring thaw where the floodgates will be released.  The two couldn’t be more alluringly attractive, while at the same time, Osgood and Daphne spend the entire night in ultra dramatic fashion, dancing the tango to pulsating Latin rhythms, shaking maracas and carrying roses in their teeth.  By the time the night is over, Daphne’s about given up on being a man, thrilled by the unexpected rush of excitement, while Curtis is ready to throw his wig away for good, but instead they’re met by a mob convention in the hotel, causing them to bolt once again.  In despair, seemingly dumped once again, Monroe sings her final lament, I'm Through With Love/Marilyn Monroe (3:12), which finally touches the heart and soul of the man who has to eventually come clean in a rollicking conclusion that is so memorable that the final line is written on Wilder’s gravestone.