‘The Apartment‘ was made in 1960, a year after director Billy Wilder and his Romania-born co-writer I.A.L. Diamond had made ‘Some Like It Hot’. The success was expected and the film did even better than its predecessor, winning 5 Oscars compared to only one (and that for costumes) won by the previous film, which I personally consider Wilder‘s masterpiece. ‘The Apartment‘ was the last black-and-white film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture until Spielberg’s ‘Schindler’s List’ in 1993. And yet I can’t help but ask a few questions. 1960 was the year when the French Nouvelle Vague exploded on the screens and Michelangelo Antonioni directed ‘L’Avventura’. Compared to these, ‘The Apartment‘ seems like a daddy’s romcom (to paraphrase the way the Nouvelle Vague filmmakers used to express themselves about the films they disliked). And yet watching or rewatching it 66 years after its production can be a pleasant surprise. The film has an annoyingly conventional plot, but also many cinematic qualities that make it an enjoyable viewing even today. In addition, paradoxically, the critics – as many as there were – at the time criticized … its boldness in approaching the theme of adultery.
The film’s story takes place between the days preceding Christmas and the New Year, which makes ‘The Apartment‘ an often included item in television holiday programs. C.C. Baxter, the film’s hero, works on the 17th floor of a Manhattan building for a large insurance company, in an open space shared with hundreds of other clerks, which seems like a bureaucratic version of the assembly line in Chaplin’s ‘Modern Times’. To supplement his income, but especially to ingratiate himself with his bosses and be recommended for promotion, he lends them the key to his rented apartment, conveniently located near Central Park, for their amorous escapades. The strategy seems to work despite the minor inconveniences of scheduling difficulties or the hours spent on the street waiting for his own living space to become available. Just when he is announced that he has received the promotion of his dreams and his office climbs up the the 29th floor (the top managers’ floor), he falls in love with a young and attractive elevator operator. Unfortunately, the girl is not exactly free, and his private life will enter a whirlwind of events in which the appointments for the apartment that has become a nest of love affairs play an essential role.
If a remake were made today, the film would probably include a consistent dose of sex and nudity. ‘The Apartment‘ is – visually – an extremely chaste film, respecting the requirements of the Hays Code to the letter. Paradoxically, although the lovers practically do not touch each other until the end and address each other as ‘Mr. Baxter’ and ‘Miss Kubelik’, we are dealing with an extraordinarily sexy film and this is mainly due to the acting and the mutual chemistry between Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine. Lemmon in particular impressed me. He was 35 when he made this film and what he does here is terribly similar to Tom Hanks’ acting style at the beginning of his career. I also found the sets in this film remarkable – both the small surface space of the Manhattan apartment, crowded and yet allowing the characters to evolve naturally in it, and the corporate headquarters where the characters work – with a huge open space in which hundreds of worker bees are crammed and with the directors’ offices with large windows and visibility towards other Manhattan skyscrapers. The matching of the story with the set, as well as the sharp social satire are two of the elements that make of this film a cinema work contemporary to what was happening at the time in other parts of the world and that foresee the revolution that made the American film industry look completely different at the end of the ’60s than at the beginning of that decade. As for the romantic and comedic parts, these always stay actual.