La garçonnière

What a wonderful way to spend an evening--dinner, Christmas and New Year's with CC Baxter (Jack Lemmon) and 'friends', accompanied by much champagne and laughter, and spaghetti and meatballs lovingly prepared by the host himself. There's even a game of gin rummy to get into that Baxter and Fran can't ever seem to finish--here's hoping it never does!

THE APARTMENT is one of those truly classic classic movies--for one thing, it has an absolutely top-notch cast, featuring Jack Lemmon (at his wryly humourous best); Shirley MacLaine (a glowing screen presence); Fred MacMurray (smarm personified); and a younger Ray Walston (still wisecracking, still hilarious). They also benefit from a clever, perceptive and timelessly relevant script by Billy Wilder, under his capable direction. Though there are plenty of brilliant one-liners, the best of the dialogue feels true and real, which adds to the feeling that you've known Baxter et al for years. I loved the score to the movie as well, artfully attributed to the Rickshaw Boys and used to great effect.

There are so many good moments scattered throughout the film (I can't even begin to enumerate them all here!). A lot of them are little touches that must have been added by the actors themselves (Jack Lemmon humming as he prepares the meatball sauce is just *so* funny!). I love the madness of the Christmas party scene, and when Baxter's doctor-neighbour takes charge of the situation with Fran, slapping her awake and marching her around the living room. I also love it when Baxter first starts playing gin rummy with Fran, and she reveals how she has a talent for falling for the wrong guy all the time. Best of all, Lemmon makes such a believable, sweet pushover that you often want to shake him and hug him at the same time--the things he would do for Fran! It makes his final scene with MacMurray that much more satisfying for the audience.

If you see this gem of a movie on a video store shelf, or (even better) playing in the cinema, don't let it pass you by. Join Baxter, Fran, Mr. Sheldrake and everyone else, and have a great time!

With thematic content that is still relevant today anywhere from NYC to Tokyo, the heart of this very real human dramedy is that quiet, simple love endures and triumphs in the end, and that there is hope for the millions of people feeling trapped and lonely in what seems to be otherwise insignificant lives.

The Apartment is a beautiful and endearing film that shows its audiences the greater meaning behind the vanities of life. How love, modest elegance and principles in character ultimately overrule self centredness, indulgence, and materialistic corporate ladder decadence. In fact, regardless of the corporate settings for the main character, the essential element of the rat race that everyone plays today, as well as the content delving into extramarital adulterous liaisons, considered taboo during its time, is what ensures the film its very timeless quality, and its relevance to the modern world till today. It is these qualities that have caused the film to earn labels like, being 'ahead of its time' or a 'classic'. And what a classic it is.

Billy Wilder, the writing talent behind such brilliant works as "Ninotchka", makes this film his second outing after the highly celebrated "Some Like it Hot". Many felt he might be hard pressed to top that, but in a totally different direction thematically, does so with this film. The story is much more about the dramatic pinpricks of human tragedy and loneliness insofar as it is laced with comedic turns about a man who loans his apartment out to bosses for their extramarital liaisons in order to gain their approval and climb the ladder at work. But complications ensue when he discovers a beautiful woman he desires to court is actually inimically one of the objects exploited beguilingly by his very boss in his very apartment, forcing him into an impugning quagmire. Wilder blends these elements in perfect harmony in this film, with the chemistry between the cast of the wry humoured Jack Lemmon and the cloy beauty of Shirley MacLaine (Wilder would pair them again for Irma Douce) neatly balanced with the pure wit and pacing of the script, whilst always undergirding the whole film with a sense of a genuine sanctity for compassion for the whole plot. Far from considering the film an insult on the many who play sycophantic roles on the way up the rat race or corporate ladder, or the adulterous men, the cynicism can be construed with much verecund indignation as it highlights the sadness of it all without being condescending. In fact, the characters speak of the struggle each City dweller in modern living can identify with.

There is no condescending need to present anyone as perfect, overtly altruistic, overtly feminine nor elegant (MacLaine's character is a lift attendant) nor flawless in their life choices. They make mistakes, sweat over them, and regret. A real rarity for films emerging out of Hollywood on the back of the 1950s with swashbuckling heroines and heroes. Lemmon's character is a simple bachelor with an air of inevitable loneliness in the meanderings of life in a NY apartment. That's why they call them a-part-ments. You live apart. And alone. He is an amalgam of a laid back yet pre-emptively self serving corporate machine, who ostensibly is forced into playing the only role he knows in order to better his predicament of being merely yet another average diploma staffer on Wall St- to climb up the corporate-ladder in his General insurance firm. The real beauty here in Wilder's script is that Lemmon, and also Maclaine (who makes the wrong choices by being mistress to Lemmon's boss), is that both characters harness a true propensity for love and care that is nestled within, waiting to exhale whilst in the midst of them being stuck in their cyclical ruts of despair.

The real satisfaction comes when both these characters reconcile each others pains, heal each other (literally too in the classic doctor scene) and find love amid the hustle bustle of the rat race in the world that goes on around them, championing each other on. They play gin rummy in the final scene, in heart wrenchingly beautiful emotional overtones, kept painfully modest by Wilder, and celebrating the simple love that triumphs over all hurts. The themes are relevant till today, and the quality of what this film achieved stylistically (as the last of the B&W generation) remains extant in full living colour today, because of the sheer timeless message of hope this film carries to anyone who's ever been that insignificant other, or ordinary person to be forgotten in that apartment out there.

For that alone, it deserves an 8/10.

By Stephen Thanabalan

Jack Lemmon is the man.

The Apartment really surprised me. The Best Picture winner starts off right in the middle of the action, but yet the first hour seems long and overrun. Too much time seems spent in trying to develop the characters (and oh so many of them) and not enough time is spent on just seeing what will happen. Just when I was about to lose faith, the film picks it up like I have never seen before. The whole sub-plot of the four guys wanting to use Lemmon's apartment for their evening tyrsts is dropped and Wilder smartly concentrates on Lemmon, MacLaine and MacMurray and the film creates true magic.

The Apartment is more of a drama than a comedy and balances the two elements perfectly. Just after one of the more dramatic moments of the film, we see Lemmon straining his pasta with a tennis racquet. The use of the doctor and his wife in supporting roles are completely there for comedy and yet add so much to the film. The ending also rates up there with the best of all time using an old device that doesn't seem at all cliched in this film. Some say that "Some like it hot" was Wilder's best, but now I have to disagree. The Apartment is better and surely would have made my top ten had the first hour not been so predictable.

How Jack Lemmon didn't win Best Actor is beyond me. His is a great performance, getting to act on more than one scale. MacMurray, another Wilder favourite is perfectly cast in the role of a family-wrecker. I wish they would have put a scene in which his wife confronts him with "The News". MacLaine glows on the screen even when she is sick and in bed.

I fully recommend this film to all, it being Wilder's best makes it a must see.

8/10 stars.

Certain films travel in time, undisturbed. Always relevant. "The Apartment" is such a film. Jack Lemmon at the top of his form and the luminous Shirley MacLaine at the center of this bitter romantic comedy. The cynics with the keys and the ambition are also the corruptors of the little man. The ones dangling the golden carrot. Billy Wilder finds a way out, where love, if not triumphs, survives. Fred MacMurray is a surprisingly believable corruptor, living a socially acceptable life, at least on the surface. The laughs are well earned but with that Wilderian aftertaste that makes "The Apartment" a unique piece of film art.

Written by the great filmmaker Billy Wilder, this is a serious, sardonic comedy for people who've known what's its like to feel the pressure of compromising your principles or your self- respect for the sake of getting ahead in life. And there are very few over the age of consent who haven't had to at one time or another. This isn't the laugh out loud comedy of Jim Carrey or the Farrelly brothers, but a subtle, nuanced comedy about two people who have both been jaded in love and yet continue to hope again and again that it will someday work out for them -- mainly because despite the unlikeable things they do, they are both basically decent, nice people. Flawed and even weak at times, but good people. This is a movie that doesn't just make it you laugh, it makes you think. A rare find indeed.