The Apartment (1960) – DVD

**/**** Image B Sound B
starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray, Ray Walston
screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond
directed by Billy Wilder

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I’ve never been able to fully accept the idea of Billy Wilder as a great director. While I have to admit that many of his films are solid entertainment–Some Like It Hot and Sunset Boulevard especially–they’re crippled by a tired, laboured sensibility that keeps them from rising to greatness. They have structure, all right, and snappy, cutting dialogue, but the rigidity of their conception stops us from reading between the lines: Wilder and his writing partners tend to tell us exactly what to think and expect us to accept their words as the word of God Himself. And because ultimately nobody can be this sure of themselves–even in a Hollywood noted for sweeping moral certainties–it becomes obvious that even Wilder isn’t falling for the phoney cynicism he passes off as wisdom. I can appreciate his craft, but his joyless inflexibility makes it hard for me to accept him as a great artist with a vision.

A case in point is his wildly popular, wildly overrated The Apartment, which manages to be acceptable light entertainment while showing up all of his weaknesses. Part of the problem lies in the rules of the game: even in a relatively racy 1960, the front office couldn’t possibly have accepted the sordid implications of its central premise. Yet as the film staggers to its conclusion, it’s interesting to see how little Wilder accepts or even notices those same implications. He seems in The Apartment to be a sort of rebel conformist, feebly attacking a vaguely defined success ethic while soft-pedalling the pain that it wreaks on its characters, resulting in insincerity that borders on contempt.

The film deals with the trials of C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon), a mid-level office worker with a great plan for getting promoted: he lends out his modest but comfortable apartment to trysting executives. Never mind that he has to wait in the cold and wet to regain access to his home, or that the neighbours think he’s the worst sort of philandering cad; he wants a ticket to the big time and believes that he’s found the box office. But his brilliant scheme boomerangs on him when he takes a liking to Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), an elevator operator in the building where he works. Despite his respectful interest, Fran is otherwise entangled with Jeff Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), the Chairman of the Board, and while his ambivalence over leaving his wife is tearing her apart, she sees no alternative to the relationship. As Sheldrake is a regular at Baxter’s apartment, it becomes obvious that the latter’s thirst for success is keeping him from the woman he loves, and so the question looms: will Baxter wise up to the lie he’s been leading?

Now, I’m not terribly worried about the obviousness of the answer to that question. Films like this are designed to make people feel better about not being rich–money doesn’t buy happiness, success is a burden, love conquers all, etc. I suppose that there’s nothing wrong with that, if you have the wit and effervescence to either make the lesson stick or make the bitter pill go down easy. And to be fair, The Apartment largely succeeds on both counts, linking its sustained anti-corporate stance with some good patter. There’s also a lovely, hysterical performance by Jack Lemmon, whose completely hamstrung character gives him maximum opportunities to flip out in inimitable Jack Lemmon style. So can I really complain?

Well, yes. The film stops just short of satire, because Wilder fails to find much of a dark side in the office sharks he ought to be lampooning. Casting the poker-faced Fred MacMurray as the film’s chief villain is one misstep. Despite his slimy turn in Wilder’s previous Double Indemnity, he’s too dignified and fatherly here to elicit much disgust. One gets the feeling that the director himself is ambivalent about Sheldrake and his divided loyalties; while in another context it might have made him interesting and complex, it simply doesn’t jibe with the Baxter-vs.-Them thrust of the narrative. Furthermore, the philandering executives who steal so much of his time aren’t much more threatening. They’re mainly around to call Baxter “buddy-boy” and offer some nudge-wink lines that make them seem more like teenage boys than corrupt capitalists. So these “attacks” on the so-called villains seem so feeble that they trivialize the alleged theme of the film.

This failure of nerve is as much emotional as it is thematic. While The Apartment takes great pains to establish Baxter’s loneliness and isolation, it’s not interior enough to make us feel his pain. One looks at the staid visuals and big writerly set-pieces and realizes that they tell us instead of showing us the depths of the hero’s plight. Although one sequence has him flipping frantically between advertisements on television, telegraphing what a subsequent era would call “alienation,” it never asks questions about how he got that way; the matter is never explored beyond making him lovably pathetic. Things improve with the far more troubled character Fran Kubelik, who delivers a sustained monologue about the emptiness of her life, but even here the words ring hollow–her speech is another block of text dropped into a character largely a prize to be squabbled over by the male leads. Like the rest of the snap-tongued cast, these characters have traits because they have them, minimizing both the strength of their pain and their relation to the rest of the world.

I am sure to be reprimanded for my demands on a film from a more innocent and less sophisticated time. But in the decade preceding The Apartment, its central concerns were dealt with by other directors with more devastating results. For a better glance at the money-doesn’t-buy-happiness schtick, one need only look at the films of Douglas Sirk, whose super-rich protagonists were torn apart by the commodity fetish that stands in for an absence of love. For a look at loneliness and alienation far beyond the aw-shucks of Wilder’s hero, there is Nicholas Ray, who in Rebel Without a Cause and In a Lonely Place evoked inarticulate rage with greater accuracy. And for a satire of big business with greater style and bigger laughs, there is Frank Tashlin’s Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, which not only outdoes The Apartment as risqué entertainment, but also delivers the coup-de-grace to the whole hypocritical subgenre to which both films belong. So, however brazen Wilder may have looked at the time, there was a seedier, more direct, and less pretentious cinema that overtook the middlebrow hand-wringing of Billy Wilder.

Andrew Sarris once remarked that Wilder was “too cynical to believe his own cynicism”, and while that seems a little glib, it’s not far from the mark. It’s impossible to tell where the limitations of the system end and the limitations of the director begin; somehow, he must have known that his holier-than-thou attitude was a partial pose, and it makes many of his films seem like he was simply going through the motions. So The Apartment emerges as a series of compromises not just with the Production Code but himself as well, making it a well-crafted irrelevance that deliberately blocks anything it’s unable to deal with.

THE DVD
by Bill Chambers First things first, I liked the movie better than Travis did, but since The Apartment has so few detractors, mine would’ve been a redundant review at best. Though MGM’s DVD has a paucity of extras, the included trailer for The Apartment is valuable just as proof to modern moviegoers that spoiling the feature ahead of time is no new advertising trend: after some establishing title cards, this vintage 1960 preview begins with the last shot of the film, its closing lines intact. (Update – 07/16/03: The Apartment was reissued yesterday with artwork that drops the “Vintage Classics” banner in conjunction with MGM’s “The Billy Wilder DVD Collection”. Previous image/sound assessments remain applicable and there are no additional supplements.) The 2.35:1 anamorphic transfer of The Apartment itself was taken from a black-and-white print that’s not in the best shape, and one wonders how this Oscar-winning, AFI-listing, finger-lickin’ good motion picture escaped a digital clean-up. Artifacts of the moiré variety also abound, but contrast is excellent and detail-enhancing, and consider the horrible alternative: a pan-and-scan VHS version, which I’ve seen and can confirm destroys the credibility of cinematographer Joseph LaShelle’s precisely composed widescreen images. Sound is unremarkable 2.0 mono. Note: the studio continues its practice of replacing the classic United Artists logo with the flashier one developed circa the mid-Nineties. Adding insult to injury, it’s in colour.

125 minutes; NR; 2.35:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 2.0 (Mono), French DD 2.0 (Mono), Spanish DD 2.0 (Mono); CC; French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; MGM