The Apartment

The other day, Miriam Bale, programmer extraordinaire, asked me to take part in a roundup that she was doing for The L Magazine on “underrated Christmas movies.” One of the two I mentioned was Billy Wilder’s 1960 sex comedy “The Apartment,” which I discuss in the clip below. It’s not exactly underrated—it did win a batch of Oscars, including best director and best original screenplay—but it’s rarely mentioned as a holiday movie, despite the fact that its dramatic climax takes place on Christmas eve and day and centers on a misjudged present. Wilder himself talked about it in slightly different terms, as recounted by the actor Paul Douglas’s widow, Jan Sterling (as reported by Ed Sikov in his biography of Wilder, “On Sunset Boulevard”):

We came out of a restaurant one night, and Billy said, “I want to do a movie about” (a word that starts with f and ends with g). “You’re the one to play the lead.”

Douglas died two weeks before the start of shooting, and was replace by Fred MacMurray in the role of Jeff Sheldrake, corporate philanderer. But the role wasn’t really the lead—that went to Jack Lemmon, as “Bud” Baxter, a young, low-level accountant at a big New York insurance firm who, as a single man, lends his apartment (at 51 West 67th Street) to his superiors for their trysts. Bud is a singular nebbish—polite, grovelling, fearful—and inwardly, inhibitedly romantic. Though the comedy’s drama entails, of course, a critical moment when he’s forced to stand up for himself, he actually proves to be strangely passive in making his destiny.

As Fran Kubelik, the elevator operator who is both men’s object of desire, Shirley MacLaine gives a performance of pert grace, concealing despair that is exemplary of the film’s more inhibited, more formal era—the manners that lend it a bygone charm are also a mask of inexpressible miseries.

An independent film, from 2005, offers a clever twist on Wilder’s movie. Michael Showalter is the director, writer, and star of “The Baxter,” about a young office worker who, shortly before his wedding, falls for his temp. As that temp, Michelle Williams brilliantly channels MacLaine’s mannerisms; her performance, channelled through Showalter’s modern rethinking of the role, is a wonder.