The Apartment

Judged on structure and on the screenplay’s economy, which is the film’s chief glory. The subtractive test meets resistance almost everywhere, because nearly every object is planted and paid. The broken compact, returned to Sheldrake as lost property, comes back in Fran’s hand at the Christmas party and tells Baxter, and the viewer, whose woman she is. The key travels up the hierarchy, and its refusal is the act of the film. The neighbours’ belief that Baxter is a rake prepares the doctor at the bedside; the gin rummy of her recovery is the last scene’s game; the cork on New Year’s Eve pays the pills. What gives: the parade of borrowing executives repeats one joke too often, Baxter’s cold is stretched, and the bar pickup on Christmas Eve is longer than its work.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: in the modern corporation advancement is bought by renting out what is private, and the man who rents his home and the woman passed between men are the same commodity on different floors. Trauner’s office, rows of identical desks receding to a vanishing point, says it in image before a word is spoken. Beneath it lies a harder truth about loneliness in a city of millions: a TV dinner, a film on television broken by commercials, two people who each nearly die of being used. Fran’s knowledge of what she has been to Sheldrake is stated and earned. What holds it short of the top: the romance gathers the disclosure into a happy ending, Sheldrake is undone by a fired secretary’s telephone call rather than by the system, and the economy that made him stands untouched.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The register is comedy, dry and bright, and elevation is not its usual mode; when the film rises, it rises in desolation more than grandeur. The opening descent onto the office floor, a sea of desks under fluorescent light, has a cold grandeur of its own. Christmas Eve is the summit: Baxter drinking alone in a bar while Fran, in his bed, takes the pills, and then his discovery of her, the comedy dropping away at once. The night with the doctor and the coffee forced into her are dread played straight. The New Year’s run through the streets and the cork’s report on the stairs give the release. Held at its figure by frequency: long stretches are office farce, elegant and level, and the theme’s strings sometimes supply a feeling the image has not reached.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The patterns are present and partly load-bearing. The little man inside the machine, one desk among hundreds, is the modern Everyman, and his climb is a fall: each step up the building costs him more of himself. The key is the film’s archetypal object, a gate to the private room handed upward as tribute and at last refused; the executive washroom key, the gift of rank, is its counter. Christmas sets a death and a resurrection in one bed, and Dreyfuss, the Jewish doctor next door, is the village elder who names what a man is. The Cinderella romance is inverted: the prince is the seducer, the commoner the rescuer. What holds it: the myth is evoked through situation and emblem more than built into the world, and the figures do not deepen as the film goes.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The inheritance is the Hollywood romantic and office comedy, Lubitsch above all, with The Shop Around the Corner and its clerks; the sex comedy of the late 1950s; and Wilder’s own path from Double Indemnity (1944), Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Ace in the Hole (1951) to Some Like It Hot (1959). The turns are real: a romantic comedy whose centre is adultery as an office perquisite and a heroine’s suicide attempt, played in a bedroom the comedy has made familiar; the change of tone carried without a seam; Fred MacMurray, a star of decent family pictures, made the smiling predator. The stake was real in 1960, with the Production Code still nominally in force. Held below the bar because the wager was placed on proven paths: Wilder’s own mixture of cynicism and sentiment, and the Lubitsch touch extended.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. The comedy is the instrument of the indictment: the viewer laughs at the scheduling of the apartment as Baxter does, and so is implicated when the bed it schedules holds a dying woman. The turn at Christmas is not a change of genre but a disclosure of what the farce was. The widescreen frame is used to know: Trauner’s forced-perspective office makes Baxter interchangeable, and the narrow, cluttered apartment is the one space he owns and the space he has sold. Keys and floors make the hierarchy spatial, and the ending keeps feeling in the idiom of the comedy, spoken as a game of cards. What holds it: much of the first act is a well-filled comic container rather than the instrument, and the score frames feeling more than it knows.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Sixty-six years of return, and the film yields on two lines. Formally, the screenplay is studied as a model of setup and payoff, and its change of tone is a standing lesson in joining comedy to despair. Morally and socially it has been read as a critique of corporate America and the organisation man, as a feminist text before its time about women as office currency, as a Christmas film of loneliness, and as a ground of the period workplace drama. The questions it leaves open are real but few: whether Fran’s choice is freedom or another dependence, whether Baxter’s refusal changes anything beyond himself, how far its cynicism is answered by its sentiment. What holds it: the readings converge once the economy of the key is seen, much of the return is to craft and performance, and the meaning stands open at first viewing more than it deepens after.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Released in 1960, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1960s. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of tone more than of means: the film showed that American comedy could hold adultery, suicide and corporate corruption without breaking, and made the comedy-drama a mainstream form of its own. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: five Academy Awards, Best Picture among them; Jack Lemmon fixed as the American everyman of anxious decency for two decades; the stage musical Promises, Promises (1968); the office established as a moral setting for later American film and television. What holds it: the redirection is of tone and setting more than of the medium’s means, and its decade was moved more by the European new waves and by the dissolution of the studio forms this film perfected.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the film survives as released, in its one version, and restorations are repair. Presence has been continuous for sixty-six years and of the widest kind: television and repertory without a break, every home format, seasonal viewing at Christmas and New Year, teaching in screenwriting above all, and a standing place in the critics’ and the industry’s lists of the century’s films. The surface is of its moment, the office mores of 1959, the switchboard, the bowler hat, the elevator girl; but the film is about those mores and their cost, so they age as subject, not as fashion, and its sexual economy is read now with more recognition, not less. The black-and-white fabric is the smallest charge. Survival is credited as fully as sixty-six years allow a film.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares. The making bears weight throughout. The Wilder and Diamond script is among the most exactly built in the American cinema: every line of setup is paid, and its catchphrases, “cookie-wise” among them, carry character. LaShelle’s black-and-white widescreen holds both the vast floor and the cramped flat; Trauner’s sets, with small figures and false perspective at the back of the office, are a design argument. Lemmon plays comedy and despair in one body, a tennis racket for a strainer, a face at the bar; MacLaine gives Fran humour and damage at once; MacMurray’s ease is the menace. Mandell’s cutting keeps the comic rhythm and drops it when it must. The costs: the borrowing executives are broad types, Lemmon’s mugging is at times too much, and the score underlines.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the executives haggling over Baxter’s calendar like men booking a squash court, and Fran unconscious in his bed on Christmas Eve. One law governs both: everything is lent, borrowed, rented or exchanged, keys, apartments, women, a hundred-dollar bill as a Christmas present, a promotion for a key. The only acts outside the law are the ones that refuse an exchange: the doctor’s care, Baxter handing back the washroom key, Fran’s flight from the restaurant. The neighbours’ comedy, the brother-in-law’s punch and the gin rummy obey the same law, so the range from farce to near death is very wide and held. The strain: the law relaxes in the comic set pieces, where broadness serves the laugh, and the resolution comes by a secretary’s revenge, from outside Baxter’s own choice.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Judged on what a film of about 125 minutes holds. Labour and the corporation are held fully: a great insurance company as hierarchy, floors as ranks, keys as currency, promotion as moral corrosion. Consciousness is Baxter’s from inside and Fran’s in strong part. Sexuality and gender enter in the office’s sexual economy and the women it uses; medicine and death in the overdose and the doctor’s night; community in the neighbours and the city’s solitude. The sacred is a calendar, Christmas and New Year, and a word. What holds the axis lowest: the state, history and the natural order do not enter; the family is glimpsed at the margins, a wife and children by telephone and a brother-in-law; and the world is one city in one season, carried through two rooms and one building. The scope is the form’s.

Score: 7.2 / 10