This week, I'll be monologuing on The Apartment (Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray, dir. Billy Wilder, 1960).
Plot: Lemmon works at a large NY office building - his bosses (including and most importantly MacMurray, in a rare but tremendous departure from his usual nice guy persona) use his apartment as a kind of lovers' get away, generally with members from the secretary pool. Lemmon has to sit outside his house in whatever the weather, waiting for the shenanigans to be over. He has vague hopes that his services as a pseudo pimp/cheap motel proprietor will be rewarded by a promotion at some point. Enter the complication: MacLaine is an elevator operator in the office building, Lemmon's crush, and MacMurray's long-suffering lady love. MacLaine really is in love with the scummy, cheating, two-faced MacMurray, and, realizing he'll never leave his wife, she tries to commit suicide in poor Lemmon's apartment. I won't give away the rest, but the last iconic line is, "Shut up and deal."
Thoughts: Fresh off the success of Some Like it Hot, this little gem of Wilder's won five Academy Awards including Best Picture, and in my opinion, totally deserved it. It is one of my favorite films and has been since the first time I saw it about a decade ago. I was on some weird Shirley MacLaine kick after I found out she was the sister of Warren Beatty (one of the greatest crushes of my teenage years thanks to Splendor in the Grass and Bonny and Clyde - even now in his 70s, his smile gives me butterflies) and I'd always loved Jack Lemmon, so this film was a match made in heaven for me. Their parallel prostitution in the emerging corporate culture of America displays a remarkable amount of equality between the sexes, especially considering it was made at the tail end of a decade where gender roles were being stringently redefined into his and hers worlds of home and not home. As mentioned above, MacMurray is cast against type, which seemed to be a bit of a habit with Wilder. His other film with MacMurray, Double Indemnity, has Fred playing a murderous, adulterous, duplicitous insurance agent. Bogart plays one of his softest characters ever in Wilder's Sabrina. His films play with conventions, they look at the world and say, "This is the way you think things are", and then shows you that they simply aren't. Cross dressing, gender equality, the tearing down of class boundaries. Not that I should be surprised at his genius - he is, after all, Austrian and therefore automatically at the top of my list.
Lemmon, in another one of Wilder's twists, is surprisingly not funny in this film. Well, that's not exactly true. He is funny, in fact, there are moments when he's very funny, but he's not his usual slap stick, manic laughter, crazed sort of funny (see the clips from the Tony Curtis post if you don't know what I mean). There's a sly, sardonic sort of humor at work here. He's equal parts pathetic, hopeful, human, and humorous and it's a great mix for him. It may be my favorite of his roles, though Grumpy Old Men is pretty high up there as well. MacLaine's portrayal of the ultimate corporate cliche - the woman who falls for her boss and convinces herself he loves her back - brings a level of humanity to that type that transcends the cliche and shows just how real and painful that situation would be. I had a writing teacher who told us once, "Only the specifics are universal." That's what I think of when I think of her performance in this, and really all of her films. She always plays an individual, even, or perhaps especially when she's playing a cliche.
To conclude, here's a short clip for your edification and enjoyment (just a bit of context for it - this is the moment Lemmon realizes that MacLaine is MacMurray's (Mr. Sheldrake's) girl on the side; I love it because Lemmon has started to morph into an executive type, a type that gives promotions for sexual favors, but he suddenly gets hit in the face with the fact that the girl he adores is already giving those favors to somebody else, and that he's been complicit in that transaction - it's sad and very typical of the kind of emotional conflict so common in Wilder films):
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