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Rated: NR
Starring: Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, et al.
Director: Billy Wilder Review
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 Some Like It Hot
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 The Apartment, for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best
Screenplay (cowritten with longtime collaborator I.A.L. Diamond). --Robert
Abele
------------ This movie is a great Billy
Wilder. It deserves the recognition it gets. Jack Lemmon is great as the
nervous 'doormat' business man, who rents his apartment to his CEOs for
them to have their affairs so Jack Lemmon can get a promotion. His
character is great, and his style of nervous, jumpy, manic depressive
character is perfect for the part. You really get attached to him. The
doctor who lives next to him is great as well. Shirley Maclaine, in her
beauty, plays a confused and misused elevator attendant. Jack Lemmon falls
in love with her, but she only likes the boss, who mistreats her badly.
This is a great film, where people do very human things instead of acting
like clichés. Sometimes I yelled at the screen to try to make them
understand that they were doing the wrong thing. That's how involved I got
to this movie. A masterpiece indeed.
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