Writer/director Billy Wilder may be the most overlooked comedic writer and director in American cinema. There are plenty of great directors in Hollywood history, including a number from the Golden Age of cinema, but Wilder doesn’t seem to quite have the name recognition of many of the others. That’s too bad. Wilder’s work often holds up well given its age, and quite frankly, there’s quite a lot to The Apartment that is still very relevant in 2023 and how some men treat women.
Or, you know, how such men would treat anyone they think they can use.
The Apartment tells the story of C.C. “Bud” Baxter (Jack Lemmon), someone I would call a cubicle dweller for an insurance company except the cubicle hadn’t been invented yet. Baxter has hoped to move ahead in the organization. He’s a hard worker, someone who knows his numbers since he spends all his time at work crunching them. Granted, he’s on the floor with a few dozen if not hundred other people doing the same thing. How would he get ahead? Well, he has this apartment that, due to its convenient location, he lets the various executives carry on their with their extra-marital affairs.
Meanwhile, Baxter has a thing for elevator operator Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), but she’s seeing Top Boss Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), and soon, Sheldrake is likewise in the rotation for men using Baxter’s apartment, an arrangement that often leaves Baxter staying out late or sleeping on park benches, something that isn’t good for his health or peace of mind. Basically, Baxter is a pushover who lets the powerful men of his firm use his living space, drink his liquor, eat his food, and ruin his reputation with his neighbors who assume Baxter’s the one bringing all those women over.
I noted before that The Apartment is basically a film about two lonely people, and while I believe that is still very much the case, there’s more to it than that. The way Baxter and Miss Kubelik eventually get together is sweet. Baxter is the only man in the company that’s interested in Miss Kubelik as a human being while the other men just see her as, for lack of a better way of phrasing it, a pretty toy to play with. The scene where Baxter realizes who Sheldrake has been seeing in his apartment is a heart wrenching one. Baxter was on top of the world, oblivious to Kubelik’s sudden turn of mood in many ways, and only really getting it when she hands him the compact mirror he’d found in his apartment and given to Sheldrake to return to the unknown woman Baxter had no idea was the same woman he was asking out. Kublik’s mirror is shattered down the middle, something that splits Baxter’s face as his whole mood changes from delighted to realization, and all Miss Kubelik can say is she likes the broken mirror because it reflects her mood as well as her face.
By the by, Wilder’s film has some really subtle moment of humor that there are those I am only noticing for the first time even after multiple rewatches. For instance, earlier in the scene described above, Kublik asks Baxter how much he’s had to to drink at the office holiday party. He says not many, only three, but he’s holding up four fingers when he says it while holding his hand a bit low in the frame.
So, what does all this have to do with how the executives, embodied best by Sheldrake, treat both Baxter and Kubelik? Simple: they are transactional men who only see people for what they can give them personally and not what they can do for those people in return. Basically, it is as Baxter realizes in the end, that it’s a good idea to be a mensch as his Jewish doctor neighbor advised. Sheldrake is not a mensch, and neither are the other men using Baxter’s apartment. If anything, Baxter treats them all with far more respect than they deserve. He could have surely saved himself a lot of trouble if he just told his neighbors or even Kublik’s cabbie brother-in-law the truth about what was going on in his home, but he doesn’t to protect the reputation of men who don’t deserve it. Kubelik’s reputation isn’t exactly being helped by the fact everyone in the building seems to assume Baxter is the one who upset her enough to attempt suicide. Why protect Sheldrake?
That’s a good question. Sheldrake doesn’t seem interested in getting to know Kubelik as a person as she is just the latest of a long line of mistresses. He doesn’t care about Baxter’s work ethic or ability to do the jobs he keeps getting promoted to either. He only cares about Baxter’s apartment, and while Baxter initially assumes that once he gets the promotion he wants that he will no longer be expected to hand over his key, that is not the case as no matter how high up he goes in the company, there’s still some executive that expects him to hand over the key to his own apartment. One man’s complaints about having to take his mistress to a drive-in theater in his son’s car isn’t exactly the sort of thing that solicits sympathy.
So, is all this because of the corporate culture of the insurance company? I suppose that could be possible. The men running the company see the Baxters and the Kubeliks of the world in a way that isn’t completely different from how Baxter sees people at the start of the film. The executives see Baxter and Kubelik as something to give them pleasure by allowing them to screw around in different ways while Baxter initially sees people as stats on a page. That said, he’s also different. He takes his hat off in the elevator, something Miss Kubelik appreciates, and he seems to talk to her like a person. Really, Baxter’s decision to quit the company and move out of his apartment and find some happiness with Miss Kubelik could probably be read as an implied condemnation of the corporate/capitalist system.
Then again, I ran this film for students at my school once as part of a film appreciation club, and while there weren’t many in attendance, the ones who did show were quick to point out he was trying to get somewhere with a woman while not having a job or money, something they all figured was a really bad idea. Maybe it is, but somehow, I don’t think either of them cared at that moment as two lonely people were a lot less lonely while seeing success and money aren’t everything.
NEXT: If The Apartment is potentially an implied condemnation of corporate capitalism, there’s no mistaking the next film in the Countdown as being very much against a condemnation of a system. Be back soon for my thoughts on the harrowing and horrifying 2013 film 12 Years a Slave.
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