Get Yourself A Key And Come On In To The Wonderful Billy Wilder Film The Apartment

Calvin Clifford "C.C." Baxter (Jack Lemmon) is one super dutiful worker at the insurance company he toils away at. He's very popular with his superiors, which you can chalk up to his agreeable demeanor, his work ethic and also the fact that he allows his various bosses to bring their mistresses to his apartment for sex. Baxter gets no money for this service, he just slips his superiors the key to his place of residence in the hopes that this will put him in the good graces of the higher-ups at his company and ensure his ascension at his place of employment. It's not the easiest way to get ahead, but it's the way Baxter is trying to get himself promoted.


This system of using Baxter's apartment for covertly carried out affairs begins to hit a number of snags once some complications arise in the life of our lead character. For one thing, Baxter is becoming sweet on Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), a lady who runs an elevator at his job who may just share romantic feelings for Baxter too. However, Kubelik is attempting to work out her own relationship troubles that happened to intersect with Baxter's life and all the various lies Baxter has been using to get ahead as well as the deceit of those around him, including the selfish actions of his boss Jeff D. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), begin to collide in a most spectacular fashion.

Mid-20th-century American filmmaker Billy Wilder loves himself a movie all about the treachery of people and how it affects their lives, especially in regards to their relationships with other people. He tackled this with noir-drenched storytelling with Double Indemnity, he once again probed this concept with a screwball comedy with Some Like It Hot and now his 1960 motion picture The Apartment examines the costs lies can have on a person in the realm of a romantic-comedy. Something else shared by a number of Wilder's feature films is that they happen to qualify as top-caliber cinema and The Apartment is no exception to that trend.

Above all else, The Apartment is simply a brilliantly crafted movie on a script level. Right from the start, the film dunks the viewer head-first into Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond's screenplays quick-witted style of dialogue as C.C. Baxter delivers a voice-over monologue that reveals his own personality while gradually unveiling to the audience what exactly his superiors at work are using his apartment for. There's plenty of clever lines from Baxter and the rest of the cast to follow that opening sequence with the conversations between Baxter and Kubelik being particularly sharp and rife with well-executed verbal set-ups and pay-offs.

The script is also chock full of ingenuity in terms of structuring its story, with all kinds of individual plotlines intertwining on an individual level without coming off as scattered and then colliding in a satisfying fashion that feels oh so organic. In terms of those individual plotlines, it's particularly impressive just how fully-realized Fran Kubelik is as a character, her plight of feeling like an object her male superiors can just toss around without any consideration of her as a human being is given real emotional heft in Kubelik's dialogue. An early speech she gives at an eatery about the lack of commitment her then-lover is giving her knocked me right off my feet in terms of its emotional power and that sets the stage for the level of insight Fran gets as a character in The Apartment.

A level of creativity extends from the script to the way The Apartment is filmed, with Wilder and cinematographer Joseph LaShelle filming the motion picture in a noticeably wide aspect ratio that they proceed to use every inch of to maximum effect. The vastness of the canvas The Apartment is working with is put to great use in a variety of ways from emphasizing the size of the place Baxter works to depicting two different characters committing separate actions in Baxter's apartment all in the span of a single shot. Choosing to shoot the story in black-and-white coloring also feels just right for the story especially in the way it evokes noir films of yore, a genre whose emphasis on deceitful relationships pair nicely with the entire plot of The Apartment.

And then, of course, there are the performances, with two silver screen legends occupying the primary roles of note. As our lead character C.C. Baxter, Jack Lemmon channels the likes of Jimmy Stewart in terms of portraying a likable though sometimes awkward everyman while imbuing the role with his unique dashes of personality, particularly in regards to depicting his characters smooth as silk speaking pattern. That really helps sell Baxter as a character who could, for instance, convince his landlady that there's nothing shady going on in his apartment, though Lemmon is able to be similarly adept at portraying Baxter in his more vulnerable and sheepish moments.

Lemmon's specific way of speaking in this role has him engaging in some great banter with Shirley MacLaine, whose more than able to hold her own when it comes to delivering witty pieces of dialogue ("Don't tell them about my burst appendix, I don't want them to get the wrong idea about how you found out!"), while, like Lemmon, showing real versatility in also being able to handle her characters more emotional sequences in a tremendous fashion. These two just engaging in small talk would likely be riveting but put them together with The Apartment's phenomenal script full of rich characters and fantastic dialogue, not to mention being accompanied by some top-of-the-line filmmaking, and you've got a romantic comedy for the ages right here.