The Apartment

Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960) is the bittersweet tale of a New York office schnook who is snookered by company betters into lending his Central Park West apartment to them for extra-marital dalliances. Jack Lemmon plays the lonely, luckless C. C. Baxter, an efficient insurance clerk who wants to climb the corporate ladder and feels he needs an executive boost. All is well until Head of Personnel Jeff Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray) discovers Baxter's adulterous operation and wants in so that he can reignite an affair with a smart-cookie elevator operator named Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine). The thing is Baxter is smitten with the vivacious Miss Kubelik himself; he just knows more about amortization than he does about amore and so is left in the cold.

Wilder's insightful and touching film does so much more than skewer infidelity. It digs deep into how we define ourselves at work and at play and reveals, in funny and painful scenes, how much we rely on others to tell us who we are. Baxter, who is called "Buddy Boy" by the men who are extorting him, is a stifled and stunted man, and an easy mark because he lacks definition. He's a cog in a huge machine but wants desperately not to be. The quintet of randy philanderers know that and exploit it. The biggest individual statement Baxter makes is his purchase of a junior executive bowler hat, but he's not even sure about that. He seeks affirmation from Miss Kubelik but she's as much of an emotional cipher as he is.

She's being tossed about by Sheldrake's deceit but is unwilling to cut him loose. She's clearly a wounded bird seeking shelter, any shelter. And he's ready to offer some respite but no security. One desperate act brings Baxter and Kubelik together in Baxter's apartment, and he tries to win her through gin rummy but lacks the courage to fight for her outright. He does eventually come into his own, shuts down the cheaters club, while she, finally done with being optional, joins him for a hand of gin as the credit roll. She may not have found true love, but what Baxter is offering beats what Sheldrake was dealing.

Both Lemmon and MacLaine are terrific in two deceptively challenging roles. And MacMurray matches them as a cad who is the object of both their admiration and disdain.