The Apartment

The Apartment

Opening Shot

C.C. Baxter recites statistics about the population of New York City, the number of office workers, the square footage of his insurance company, while Joseph LaShelle's camera cranes over a sea of identical desks stretching to infinity. Baxter is desk number something. He is a number who loans his apartment to bigger numbers so they can cheat on their wives. Wilder opens with the corporate machine and the man it's grinding, and the voice-over's cheerful tone tells you Baxter hasn't figured out he's being destroyed.

What It Does

LaShelle's black-and-white widescreen compositions use the Panavision frame to isolate Baxter within spaces that should be full. His apartment has no visitors he invited. His office desk is one of hundreds. The Christmas party scene uses the wide frame to show celebration happening everywhere around a man sitting alone at a table. LaShelle turns loneliness into a geometric problem: there's a person in the center of the frame and too much empty space on either side.

Adolph Deutsch's score is light, jazzy, and deliberately mismatched with the darker material. A woman attempts suicide in this film. A man is exploited by his employers. The score keeps the tone just buoyant enough that the darkness slides in sideways, which is Wilder's method: hit them with the joke, then while they're laughing, show them the knife.

Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine give two of the best performances in American comedy. Lemmon plays Baxter as a man who has mistaken accommodation for virtue, who thinks being helpful to powerful people will make him one. MacLaine's Fran Kubelik is funnier and sadder, a woman who knows she's being used and keeps showing up anyway. Their scenes together are the film's warm center: two people who recognize each other's loneliness but can't quite name it.

Why It's on the List

The Apartment is the sharpest satire of corporate culture ever filmed, and it doubles as the most emotionally complex romantic comedy Hollywood ever produced. Wilder understood that the system that exploits workers is the same system that exploits lovers, that the transactional logic of the office and the transactional logic of the affair are identical. The film won Best Picture and it deserved it, and it's more relevant now than in 1960 because the corporate ladder Baxter climbs looks exactly like every open-plan office in every tech company in America.

The Argument Against

The romantic resolution requires Fran to forgive a pattern of behavior (dating her married boss, being hospitalized after a suicide attempt) with a speed that the film's own darker material doesn't fully support. Wilder's tonal balance between comedy and genuine despair is extraordinary but not flawless; the suicide attempt aftermath is handled with a lightness that can feel dismissive. And Baxter's moral awakening, while satisfying, arrives conveniently late in the third act.

Closing Image

Fran runs through the streets on New Year's Eve to Baxter's apartment. Firecrackers pop outside. She thought he shot himself; he was opening champagne. "Shut up and deal," she says, picking up the cards. The game resumes. It's the most romantic line in American cinema and it's about a card game. Wilder knew that love doesn't announce itself. It just sits down across the table.