25 Days of Christmas | The Apartment, 1960

The Apartment | 1960

Nice poster... It's a little odd that Fred MacMurray
is in the cover, and the main titles, but the
nomination of best supporting actor went to
the actor that played the doctor instead

"On November first, 1959, the population of New York City was 8,042,783. if you laid all these people end to end, figuring an average height of five feet six and a half inches, they would reach from Times Square to the outskirts of Karachi, Pakistan. I know facts like this because I work for an insurance company,Consolidated Life of New York."

Bud lives in the West Sixties, just a block away from Central Park. It’s a real nice apartment – nothing fancy – but kind of cozy, just right for a bachelor. The trouble is Baxter can’t always have his apartment for himself.

His name is C.C. Baxter. C is for Calvin, C is for Clfford, but most people call him ‘Bud’. Especially the company managers that use his apartment for their extramarital rendezvous, which are so noisy that his neighbours assume that he is a playboy bringing home a different woman every night. The four managers (Ray Walston, David Lewis, Willard Waterman, and David White) take turns ‘booking’ his apartment every evening, which means he usually stays at work after hours to kill time, especially when the whether is bad…

Eventually the four managers write Baxter the glowing reviews they’d been promising him, and he’s called to the office of the personnel director, Jeff D. Shelldrake (Fred MacMurray). Mr. Shelldrake wants to tell Baxter about the promotion but that’s not all. He wants in in the apartment-booking thing, and what’s more, he wants a second key made especially for him. As a matter of fact he insists on using the apartment that same night (a night Baxter had tried so hard to clear up) and in return for the priviledge he offers Bud two company sponsored tickets for a Broadway musical, ‘The Music Man’.

In order to create the illusion that this was a much larger room, the art director used increasingly smaller tables, and increasingly smaller people, to a point that the last rows were desks occupied by children

Bud is incredibly happy. Not only he’s just climbed another step in the corporate ladder, but the tickets are the perfect excuse for him to ask Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine) out, the beautiful elevator operator he’s had his eye on for a while. Little does he know, Fran won’t be able to attend because she already has a date. A date with mr. Shelldrake in Bud’s apartment.

Fran with both men. Bud on the left and to the rigth the boss, Mr. Sheldrake, played by Fred MacMurray

Bud is heartbroken when he find that out, by accident, on Christmas Eve. And it doesn’t help that that same nigh, Shelldrake has his apartment booked for the evening. Unable to stay at the Office’s Christmas party (which, much like in Desk Set is a white-colar wild party that foreshaddows the liberality of the sixties), Bud doesn’t have a choice other than killing time alone at a bar before making his way home, in an evening meant to be spent with loved ones and family.

The apartment is not, perhaps a traditional Christmas movie, but there’s been few instances in cinema in which the Christmas setting was used so masterfully to highlight the loneliness and isolation of a character. From the start C.C.Baxter is a spineless corporate drudge, and the very first scene, when he waits outside his apartment building, trembling in the cold because one of his managers failed to vacate his apartment at the appropriate time. The managers walk all over him, ascertaining their superiority over him by calling him ‘Buddy Boy’ every single time, expecting him to provide not only the apartment for their womanizing enterprises but the alcohol and snacks. His apartment is much shabbier than the apartments we usually see in Hollywood films of that time (in fact, the art director designed it to be that way, and even used some itens from thrift stores and Wilder’s own furniture to decorate it). But Baxter’s loneliness is never more evident than when he is walking out of the Office Christmas Party, unable to utter a word.

Bud alone at the bar, and to the right him on his desk working. One of the nice things about this movie is that there are a lot of 'gadgets' which I am certain were rather common back in the sixties, like this little 'card wheel' in which he check telephone numbers, or the weird remote control he uses on his TV

It doesn’t help that when he finally gets home, Bud finds Fran still there, unconscious in his bed, next to a bottle of sleeping pills that she took in an attempted suicide. And not surprisingly, Shelldrake doesn’t want to have anything to do with it. A lot of what happens next in the movie happens in Baxter’s apartment, by his Christmas tree, including a wonderful (improvised) scene in which he makes spaghetti with a tennis racket, and ends up knocking down his own Christmas tree (though I won’t say how).

The ideas for his film had been with Wilder for a long time, but the Hays Production code barred a film about adultery in the 1940s. Even at the time it came out, the film was criticized for its portrayal of adultery as a commonplace matter in corporate America. But the movie was extremely popular nonetheless, and it went on to establish Jack Lemmon as a leading man, and to win a best picture Academy Award, the last film Black and White film to do so from the time when that was actually the norm.

The Christmas setting is what adds the fairy-tale element to the story really. It’s hard to empathize with Fran’s character seeing as she seems to have brought her troubles upon herself by falling for Shelldrake’s shallow lies. But then again, Baxter himself is selling out to climb the corporate ladder so perhaps they are not so different. And the script offers a great oportunity to make things right at New Year’s when both characters take charge of their own lives. What happens in the end of the movie happens for their choices not because of random ‘magic’ coincidences and that adds a lot more meaning to the story.

The hardest thing about watching to this film was seeing Fred MacMurray cast as the bad guy. Mr. Sheldrake is ville, such a stereotypical corporate womanizer with a long list of affairs and a disrespectful, vile attitude. The thing is, I had just seen “Remember the Night, a couple of days ago, and I liked Fred MacMurray in that film, he was such a perfect good guy. It was painful seeing him as this jerk. That’s one of the things I like about Cary Grant… It’s mentioned in the documentary ‘Cary Grant’ the leading man that Cary never took parts of murderers or other such foul characters because he wanted to remain true to his persona on screen. I really respect that, and it means the world that I’ll never see him playing someone like mr. Sheldrake in a movie. Wish Fred had the same philosophy.

The Apartment is another of those films that doesn’t seem to fit into a single genre. It’s described as a romantic comedy, but it’s a lot more than that. It definitely has its dark twists. And if Christmas is not just a season but a state of spirit, The Apartment happens to capture that spirit perfectly.

The Apartment | Directed by Billy Wilder | Written by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond | Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray, Jack Kruschen | 1960