Moving Up The Chain-Billy Wilder’s “The Apartment” (1960)-A Film Review

DVD Review 

By Sam Lowell

The Apartment, starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray, written directed by Billy Wilder, 1960   

I have mentioned on other occasions that sometimes when reviewing, as here with Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, an older film what I am looking for is a social “slice of life” aspect of the times in which the film took place. That is the case here where the main action takes place in late 1950s corporate New York. The “slice of life” aspect, although I am sure the versatile Mister Wilder had several bees in his bonnet is the extra-curricular “dating” habits of “happily married men” or maybe not so happily married in a large corporation. Most of that hanky-panky which would not pass muster these days in the office without a serious look see for sexual harassment by some Human Resources officer. And that is to the good.           

Here’s the play. C.C Baxter, played by Jack Lemmon, is a hungry up and coming office worker in a large insurance company who just so happens to have a very convenient apartment right in the city just made for the occasional tryst by those executives, male executives, who are further up the food chain and can do C.C. a world of good in moving up that same food chain by leaving a convenient key under the doormat of that apartment. And by offering those services C.C. does creak his way up. But C.C. also has his own love interests, love interest in one comely elevator operator from his office building, Fran, played by Shirley MacLaine. Problem, big problem though is that Fran has been courted by Sheldrake, played by Fred MacMurray last mentioned in this space after taking a couple of slugs from his estranged paramour Barbara Stanwyck in another Wilder classic, Double Indemnity, who is even further up the food chain than the guys he had been servicing previously. Of course like the others Sheldrake is married and just out for a lark.

But C.C. for a while anyway can only see the executive washroom in his plans until Fran in a fit of despair when Sheldrake lowers the boom on her one night and he comes to her rescue. After that C.C. will pursue her to the end, the end when she leaves the perfidious but now contrite Sheldrake for him. Yeah, a New York slice of life film which was well-written, well-acted and well-directed.