The Apartment

Directed by: Billy Wilder – 2 hours, 5 minutes – 1960 – USA – B&W – Blu‐ray – 2.35:1
Starring: Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray

C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) is an employee at a New York City life insurance company who is doing everything he can to become an executive. To win favor with his bosses, he has been lending out the key to his apartment most evenings as a convenient spot for his bosses and their mistresses to meet. Baxter spends his nights working late at the office or wandering the streets, while his neighbors and landlady listen through the walls and shake their heads at his hard‐partying, playboy lifestyle. Baxter finally works up the nerve to ask out Fran the elevator girl (Shirley MacLaine, who I dare you not to have a crush on by the end of the film), but doesn’t know that Fran has been having an affair with the big boss man, Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray). And then we have farce. But not exactly. The Apartment plays like a movie where someone took a wacky rom‐ com premise and let actual human beings in to muck it up, then filmed the whole thing. It’s sad and funny and bittersweet. Lemmon, who was mostly known as a comic lead, veers between manic office drone comedy and sad everyman pathos in the performance that established him as a capable dramatic actor. MacLaine has another career‐making performance as the Jaded Pixie Dream Girl, balancing world‐weariness and vulnerability. The boss Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), is played as the perfect heel, with MacMurray tarnishing his likeable leading man image by being cast against type by Wilder, who had heeled him up so well earlier in Double Indemnity.  

Trailer
IMDB page
Roger Ebert – Great Movies review [SPOILERS]