The Apartment centres on C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon), an employees of Consolidated Life, a major insurance company in New York City. As Baxter says in his opening narration, "You see, I have this little problem with my apartment." Quite simply, he allows four Consolidated Life executives to use his apartment for their clandestine affairs. Baxter's life is complicated by the fact that he is enamoured with elevator operator, Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine). Unfortunately for Baxter, Miss Kubelik is romantically involved with personnel director Jeff D. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray).
While The Apartment is not very often counted among the great holiday films, it is very much a Christmas movie. Indeed, it takes place over the entire holiday season, with it beginning on November 1 and ending on New Year's Eve, with the bulk of the plot unfolding during the holiday season itself. Furthermore, the office Christmas party plays an important role in the plot. Important events central to the plot take place on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. The movie's famous climax takes place on New Year's Eve itself. The Apartment actually takes in more of the holiday season than many other films shown at Christmastime.
The initial concept for The Apartment emerged when Billy Wilder first saw Brief Encounter (1945). In the film Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) meets with Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) in the apartment of a friend in the course of their affair (here it must be noted that they are both married). Billy Wilder was much more fascinated by the idea of the friend who let the two lovers use his apartment (and who is never actually seen in the movie) than the two people having the affair themselves. Another possible source for The Apartment was alleged affair between agent Jennings Lang and actress Joan Bennett, who at the time was married to producer Walter Wanger. Mr. Lang and Miss Bennett's met in the apartment of one of Mr. Lang's underlings. When Walter Wanger found out about this, he promptly shot Mr. Lang (for the sake of propriety, I won't say where). Walter Wanger plead insanity and served only four months in prison. Jennings Lang went on to marry songbird Monica Lewis, to whom he was married for forty years and with whom he had three sons. According to Billy Wilder's writing partner I. A. L. Diamond, another source of inspiration for The Apartment was a real life incident in which a woman committed suicide in a man's apartment after their affair had gone sour.
In casting The Apartment, Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond only had one actor in mind for the role of C. C. Baxter--Jack Lemmon. After Some Like It Hot (1959), Messrs. Wilder and Diamond both wanted to work with Mr. Lemmon again, and no other actor was even considered for the role. Character actor Paul Douglas was originally cast in the role of the oily insurance company executive Mr. Sheldrake. Sadly, Paul Douglas died on September 11 1959 from a heart attack. He was only 52. Fred MacMurray was then cast as Sheldrake.
Fred MacMurray was initially hesitant to take the role. Not only was he well known for having generally played nice guys over the years, but he was just beginning his long running TV sitcom My Three Sons and he had just signed a contract with Disney to star in a series of family films. Fortunately Billy Wilder was able to persuade Fred MacMurray to take the role. Mr. Wilder had previously persuaded Fred MacMurray to play against type as the none-too-nice Walter Neff (who also happened to be in the insurance industry) in Double Indemnity (1944).
The role of Baxter's neighbour, Dr. Dreyfuss, would also go to an actor other than the one Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond originally had in mind. They had originally intended for character actor Lou Jacobi to play the role. At the time Mr. Jacobi may have been best known for his work on Broadway in The Diary of Anne Frank. As it turned out Lou Jacobi was already committed to another Broadway play, The Tenth Man, and its producers would not release him from his contract so he could appear in The Apartment. Jack Kruschen was then cast as Dr. Dreyfuss. Jack Kruschen was a frequent guest star on television shows in the Fifties, and he had appeared in such films as The Buccaneer (1958) and The Man Who Understood Women (1959).
For her role as Fran Kubelik, Shirley MacClaine actually prepared for her role by operating an elevator in the Los Angeles Times building for a day. Because Billy Wilder did not want Shirley MacLaine to know how the movie ended, so he gave her only forty pages of the script. As a result, she thought the script wasn't finished. Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond would not allow even the slightest deviation from their script, which initially proved to be a bit of a problem for Shirley MacLaine, who was accustomed to improvising. While she initially resented Mr. Wilder's views on improvisation, she grew to appreciate him and the two would work together again on Irma La Douce (1963).
The Apartment premiered on June 15 1960 in New York City and San Francisco. It opened at Grauman's Chinese Theatre on June 21 1960. The Apartment received its share of positive reviews. In The New York Times Bosley Crowther gave the film a glowing review, calling The Apartment "...a gleeful, tender and even sentimental film." Variety also gave The Apartment a positive review, opening with, "Billy Wilder has furnished The Apartment with a one-hook plot that comes out high in comedy, wide in warmth and long in running time." As mentioned earlier, the film was controversial, so The Apartment did receive reviews that were less than complimentary. Hollis Alpert of The Saturday Review referred to it as "a dirty fairy tale" In Esquire Dwight MacDonald referred to The Apartment as possessing "slick cynicism and prurient sentimentality."
Regardless of what critics thought of The Apartment, audiences seemed to love the movie. It made $24.6 million at the box office. As mentioned earlier, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences also loved The Apartment. It was nominated for several Oscars and won quite a few as well
The Apartment remains highly respected to this day. In 1994 it was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the United States Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." In 2012 it was ranked as the 44th greatest film of all time in a poll of conducted by Sight and Sound magazine. It was included in the American Film Institute's 100 Years...100 Movies. In a 2017 poll of 253 film critics from 52 countries conducted by the BBC it was ranked as the 27th greatest comedy of all time.
Of course, beyond being regarded as one of the greatest movies of all time, The Apartment is very much a Christmas movie. Taking place through the whole of the holiday season and dealing with themes associated with the holiday, few movies are as closely tied to Christmas as The Apartment is.
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