Well, not all the posters can be winners
C.C. Baxter: The mirror… it’s broken.
Fran Kubelik: Yes, I know. I like it that way. Makes me look the way I feel.
– Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLain, The Apartment
After five years of big-budget historical epics, the Oscars refocused on a smaller more personal story at the 1960 awards show. While it’s hard to imagine today exactly what sort of moral unease The Apartment may have stirred up upon its initial release, it’s sweet, sad tale of infidelity and the internal conflict one man suffers in trying to get ahead in business by sacrificing his own happiness stands in stark contrast to the morally upright, power-of-the-family messages of the past two winners, Ben-Hur and Gigi. It’s also a very good, touching movie with knockout performances by Jack Lemmon as a likable schmo and Shirley MacLain as a depressed elevator operator who has stolen Lemmon’s heart.
Lemmon is C.C. Baxter, a low-level employee at an insurance company. To get in his boss’s good graces Baxter has begun lending them his apartment, conveniently located near the office, to carry out their extramarital affairs, even if it means he spends his nights sleeping on a park bench. Lemmon is in love with Fran Kubelik (MacLain), an elevator operator in his building, unaware that she is the mistress of Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMuray), one of the bosses Baxter has been lending the apartment to. Fran wants Sheldrake to leave his wife, but realizes
Shirley MacLain and Jack Lemmon
that he never will and attempts to kill herself in Baxter’s apartment (unaware that it belongs to Baxter). Baxter saves her life and nurses her back to health, but loses her back to Sheldrake (whose wife has finally tossed him out) before he can tell her that he loves her. Tired of the moral price lending out his apartment has cost him, Baxter quits his job and gives up the apartment. Kubelik learns what Baxter has done and on New Year’s Eve rushes off to be with him.
As the 60s are known as the decade of rebellion, it seems only fitting that the first Best Picture of the decade is about a man who realizes his boss is a louse and the American Dream comes at a deep personal price. A lot of the themes of The Apartment seem unusual for the timeframe. Business and work are not seen as rewarding but soul-killing. Even when Baxter isn’t violating his integrity by loaning out the apartment, he is a tiny cog in a big machine, literally shown when he is an anonymous drone in endless rows of workers. The moral ambiguity of the film is also startling for its time. Its hero turns a blind eye to cheating and even helps to facilitate it. The leading lady is a mistress. The business world is filled with drunkards and philanderers (the setting and actions clearly inspired Mad Men). The pinnacle of the American dream is dangerous to its inhabitants. These are the kind of themes that hadn’t been explored by the Best Pictures in a long time, since at least On the Waterfront in 1954, and that movie dealt with blue collar workers, not their white collar counterparts.
Baxter’s Office. The Apartment was the first Best Picture to present white collar work as anonymous and empty.
I really loved the performances from Lemmon and MacLain in this movie. Lemmon comes across as a gentle, friendly guy who you want to succeed but has turned a blind eye to what his ambition is doing to him. The scene where Baxter tries to ask Fran out, only to realize through a makeup mirror she had left at his apartment that she is dating his boss is devastating. His moment of defeat rips the viewer’s heart out.
The devastating moment where Lemmon realizes MacLain is one of the users of his apartment.
Even though MacLain is a mistress to a married man, she is presented in a sympathetic light. She’s no dummy, but is still challenged by the choices she’s made for love. We root for these two lonely souls to finally find each other. Billy Wilder provides even the supporting characters, from Baxter’s well-meaning doctor neighbor to some of the other men who use Baxter’s apartment, with snappy dialogue and witty rejoinders.
The actual plot device of Baxter’s apartment is heavily criticized as unrealistic. While true that these men could obviously afford hotels to carry out their affairs, I don’t think it’s so unrealistic that they’d use Baxter’s apartment, given that he gives it to them for free, eliminating costs and paper trails.
Billy Wilder won a triple threat Oscar for writing, producing and directing The Apartment. He’s actually better remembered for Double Indemnity and Some Like It Hot, two movies that didn’t win the Best Picture, but I think The Apartment is an outstanding movie about romance and a battle of the conscious that re-grounded the Oscars after a half-decade of awarding larger than life movies.
Trivia: The Apartment was the last black and white movie to win Best Picture until Schindler’s List in 1993 (or The Artist in 2011, if you consider Schindler’s List has moments of color).
Other Awards: Best Director, Billy Wilder; Best Writing, Original, Billy Wilder; Best Art Decoration-Set Decoration – Black and White; Best Film Editing;
Box Office: $6.7 million (6th for the year)
Other Notable Movies of 1960: Spartacus$, The Alamo*, Psycho, Swiss Family Robinson, Butterfield8, Ocean’s 11, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, Elmer Gantry*, Sons and Lovers*, The Sundowners*, Exodus, Inherit the Wind, The Magnificent Seven,
*Best Picture Nominee
$Top Box Office Grosser: $14 million
Operation: Oscar 