The Apartment — Love as Sublet

The gentlest comedy Billy Wilder ever made keeps a ledger, and every kindness in it carries a room rate.

The moment The Apartment stops being funny is small enough to fit in a woman’s hand. It is the office Christmas party. Gin in paper cups, tinsel over the file cabinets, and C.C. Baxter has just been made a junior executive for services he is still pretending not to understand. He wants Fran Kubelik, the elevator girl he adores, to see him in his new bowler, so she hands him her compact and lets him admire himself. The glass is cracked. He knows this compact. He found it on his own couch after one of his boss’s borrowed evenings and passed it back up the org chart like the good soldier he is, and now it has come back to him in the hand of the one person he had kept clean of the whole arrangement. Jack Lemmon then does the hardest thing an actor of his gifts can do, which is nothing. The party keeps roaring. The hat stays on. A man stands still and quietly files the worst piece of information of his life. And Fran, watching him look a beat too long, gives American comedy its saddest single line: “I like it that way. Makes me look the way I feel.”

Wilder walked around with this movie for fifteen years before the culture would let him make it. He saw Brief Encounter in 1945 and could not shake the one character that picture had no interest in: the friend who lends the lovers his flat and comes home to warm sheets and someone else’s perfume. What finally cracked the script open was an actual scandal. In 1951 a Hollywood producer shot a talent agent over an affair with his wife, and the detail the town chewed on longest was not the gun but the venue, a junior employee’s apartment, lent upward. An English weepie on one side, a parking-lot shooting on the other, and the whole film sits between them like a man on a park bench.

Here is the setup, plainly. Baxter is a clerk at Consolidated Life, desk 861, one of thirty-one thousand employees, and he can recite the statistics because reciting statistics is what the place has trained him to be. Four managers rotate through his West Sixty-Seventh Street walk-up like it is a motel with no register. They phone in reservations the way other men book lunch tables. They pay in efficiency reports. And when Sheldrake, the personnel director, sniffs out the racket, he does not shut it down. He consolidates it, the way big fish handle small operations everywhere, and Baxter trades the last private thing he owns for a private office. The joke of the title lands slowly and then all at once: the apartment is the only thing in the movie anybody actually wants, and that is exactly why the company takes it.

The images make the accusation before a word of dialogue does. Alexandre Trauner built the insurance floor in forced perspective, real desks and live extras up front shrinking row by row into half-scale furniture at the horizon, so that Joseph LaShelle’s widescreen camera can stare down an office that simply never ends. Photograph a man in that set and he stops being an employee. He becomes an entry. Then the film cuts to the apartment and the same lens turns warm and close, two shabby rooms that feel like the one heated pocket in all of New York, and the cruelty of the premise arrives in full. Of course the company annexed it. It was the best real estate on screen.

Lemmon plays Baxter as a body keeping a count his mouth will not admit to. He catches his famous cold waiting on a park bench, locked out of his own home while a manager entertains upstairs, and that sniffle runs the length of the picture like an eviction notice that follows him indoors. He strains spaghetti through a tennis racket and sells it as ingenuity, and the gag pays twice: once as charm, once as evidence of a man alone so long his kitchen has adapted around the absence. Shirley MacLaine answers him with the opposite instrument, which is stillness. Fran’s elevator-girl courtesy is armor plate, and when she finally lays out her worldview, “some people take, some people get took,” she says it flat, no self-pity, a woman reading her own file aloud. Between them stands Fred MacMurray, the second time Wilder borrowed America’s favorite nice guy for a villain, and this is the better crime. Sheldrake never seduces Fran. He administrates her. Caught without a Christmas gift, his solution is to peel a hundred-dollar bill off his money clip and tell her to buy herself something. She goes quiet, and the overdose that follows is not a twist. It is the receipt.

What happens next is the riskiest stretch of tone any American comedy had attempted to that point: sleeping pills in one room, slapstick in the next, and neither cheapens the other because Wilder plays both at the tempo of work. Dr. Dreyfuss from next door slaps Fran conscious, walks her up and down, pours coffee into her, and the movie holds its nerve by doing the next necessary thing, and then the one after that. Then come two days of convalescence that hold the entire romance. Gin rummy on the bed. Spaghetti at odd hours. Two ashamed people discovering how strange it feels to be fussed over honestly. The film’s idea of intimacy is not a kiss. It is a card game with someone who has decided you should stay alive.

The Apartment gets remembered now as the sweet grandfather of the office romance, and that memory is a flinch. Look at it straight and it is the most exact American movie ever made about the annexation of home by work, a comedy in which every promotion is paid for in privacy and the top of the company turns out to be the bottom with better furniture. Sixty-six years on, the annexation is finished. The desk came home for good, the job holds a key to everyone’s apartment now, and Baxter’s shame turns out to have been nothing worse than early. That is what the decades did to this picture. They kept confirming it.

The fair charge against it has aged too, and it deserves saying out loud. The film knows Baxter’s soul in full and knows Fran’s mostly by its bruises; her overdose functions, structurally, as his education, a conscience for the leading man billed to the leading lady’s account. And Wilder, who trusted objects more than any director of his generation, twice loses his nerve and lets the neighbor doctor speak the moral aloud, be a mensch, as if the cracked mirror had not already said it better. It had.

What answers the charge, mostly, is MacLaine, who plays every scene as a woman running sums of her own, and an ending that hands her the whole game. A champagne cork goes off upstairs like a pistol shot, and Fran runs toward the sound instead of away from it, because Baxter once told her about the gun and his knee and the girl he botched his own heartbreak over, and for one flight of stairs the film lets her carry the fear he carried on Christmas Eve. Then the bravest plain sentence Wilder ever wrote for a man: “I absolutely adore you.” And her answer, shuffling the deck: “Shut up and deal.” That is not a swoon. It is the first deal in the entire picture struck between equals, at nobody’s expense, with nothing changing hands but cards. The romance is not a prize for quitting the racket. It is what becomes possible the minute both of them are out of it.

So the film sits where it sits, at the very top of American comedy, and it belongs there on merit rather than nostalgia. It saw what the century was going to do to the space between love and work, and it fit the whole prophecy into one rented room with a tennis racket drying in the kitchen. The funniest thing Wilder ever made is also the most honest, and the two facts are not in tension. They are the same fact, cookie-wise.