Evan D. As a project this year we are taking a trip through time to revisit all of the Best Picture winners in history, Wings to Anora. The Apartment is the thirty-third film in that series, to see all the other Best Picture reviews, click here. When we meet C.C. Baxter (a delightfully earnest Jack Lemmon) he just one of the 31,529 employees of Consolidate Life in New York City. He’s a good insurance man, although not an excellent one. Mildly ambitious, moderately genial, Baxter would be indistinguishable from any of his colleagues if not for one thing: his apartment. The close proximity of his one bedroom bachelor pad to the office would seem to be a delightful convenience. Unfortunately for Baxter, executives at the company have begun pestering him to use the place for their extramarital affairs.
Baxter goes along with this at mild personal cost but tremendous professional benefit. His rise through the ranks gets the attention of Jeff Sheldrake, (Fred MacMurray) the Director of Personnel, who takes Baxter under his wing in exchange for a spare key to the apartment. Unbeknownst to Baxter, Sheldrake’s mistress Fran (Shirley MacLaine) is the very same elevator operator he has taken a liking to himself. A couple of things strike very early on in The Apartment. It is strikingly spikier than just about any previous best picture winner. Much of the plot revolves around infidelity. At one point a character makes an an attempt on their own life. Not only are these heavy plot points for a comedy — and the film is very much a comedy — they were almost unheard up to that point in the history of the Oscars. You’d have to go all the way back to 1945 for a similar exploration of vice winning the big prize and again that was Billy Wilder with The Lost Weekend. The other piece that shines through is the depth of the screenplay and performances. Everyone in Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond’s script feels like a genuine person, warts and all. Lemmon plays Baxter as perhaps cinema’s greatest worm, spineless and servile. He pimps out his apartment, not even out of a sense of opportunism but rather out of some inability to stand up to anyone. Even as Fran is cast aside like an old shoe by Sheldrake, the gutless Baxter defends his boss. Speaking of Fran, MacLaine is the clear standout of the film, imbuing her elevator girl with a charming and confident exterior that is crumbling entirely below the surface. The Apartment has endured through the decades because of this combination between stellar writing and embrace of a harder edge. There is plenty that feels dated — even our protagonist is pretty dismissive and disrespectful towards the women of the story — but from a filmmaking perspective it feels rather modern. The dialogue cracks and iterates in a way thats especially entertaining. A sort of joyous alchemy that takes a questionable premise and turns it into one of the great comedies of cinema. 9/10
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