The Apartment

Buy This Item The Apartment by MGM (Video & DVD)  Available from Amazon  $14.95  on 10-4-2008     Romance at its most anti-romantic--that is the Billy Wilder stamp of genius, and this Best Picture Academy Award winner from 1960 is no exception. Set in a decidedly unsavory world of corporate climbing and philandering, the great filmmaker's trenchant, witty satire-melodrama takes the office politics of a corporation and plays them out in the apartment of lonely clerk C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon). By lending out his digs to the higher-ups for nightly extramarital flings with their secretaries, Baxter has managed to ascend the business ladder faster than even he imagined. The story turns even uglier, though, when Baxter's crush on the building's melancholy elevator operator (Shirley MacLaine) runs up against her long-standing affair with the big boss (a superbly smarmy Fred MacMurray). The situation comes to a head when she tries to commit suicide in Baxter's apartment. Not the happiest or cleanest of scenarios, and one that earned the famously caustic and cynically humored Wilder his share of outraged responses, but looking at it now, it is a funny, startlingly clear-eyed vision of urban emptiness and is unfailingly understanding of the crazy decisions our hearts sometimes make. Lemmon and MacLaine are ideally matched, and while everyone cites Wilder's <i>Some Like It Hot</i> closing line "Nobody's perfect" as his best, MacLaine's no-nonsense final words--"Shut up and deal"--are every bit as memorable. Wilder won three Oscars for <i>The Apartment</i>, for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay (cowritten with longtime collaborator I.A.L. Diamond). <I>--Robert Abele</I> Reader Reviews I watched this on the advise of a friend who thought this was "an essential". Robert Osbourne praised this on TCM too. Robert Osbourn commented it was neither a comedy, nor a drama but something in between or in it's own class. My friend thinks it is "hysterical". Everyone has opinions, sometimes they contradict as is the case with my view of this film. I think in it's day, yes it probably was hysterical.I think the problem is its aging badly. Also, I was not convinced a man would really sleep on a park bench rather than keep his job ranking. This is personal opinion.

The Apartment Available from Amazon Price: $14.95 Updated on 10-4-2008.

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