10 / 10
The Apartment is Billy Wilder’s 1960 American comedy-drama about an ambitious insurance company clerk who lends his Manhattan apartment to senior executives for their extramarital affairs in exchange for career advancement, until he discovers the boss’s mistress is the elevator operator he has been quietly in love with for months. Jack Lemmon plays C.C. Baxter. Shirley MacLaine plays Fran Kubelik. Fred MacMurray plays Jeff D. Sheldrake. Ray Walston plays Mr. Dobisch. David Lewis plays Mr. Kirkeby. Jack Kruschen plays Dr. Dreyfuss. The screenplay was written by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond. The Mirisch Company and United Artists produced and released the film in June 1960. The Apartment won five Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay.
The film is set against the Christmas-New Year holiday window because Wilder needed the season to do work the screenplay otherwise could not do. Office Christmas parties give Baxter and Fran their key drunken-honest exchange. The Christmas-Eve realization in his apartment sets up the New Year’s-Eve resolution. The cumulative effect frames the film as a Christmas story without ever being marketed as one. The Christmas elements are integrated so deeply into the screenplay’s mechanism that they are inseparable from it, and consequently the film belongs in any serious Christmas-cinema canon despite its primary identity as a corporate-corruption character study.
Jack Lemmon’s Baxter
Lemmon’s performance is one of the finest in American film. Baxter is required to be sympathetic while doing genuinely contemptible things: facilitating other men’s adultery in exchange for promotions, lying about why his apartment is unavailable to colleagues, pretending illness to cover for executives. Lemmon plays the moral compromise as something Baxter himself can no longer fully see, which is the only choice that lets the audience stay with him through the screenplay’s harder material.
The transformation from corporate striver to morally awake character is shaped through small gestures rather than declarations. The way Baxter holds his tennis racket while making martinis. The way he plays solitaire alone on Christmas Eve before Fran’s overdose. The way he says ‘shut up and deal’ in the closing scene. Lemmon’s career had several great roles. Baxter is the deepest of them.
For Writers
Characters who do genuinely wrong things can hold sympathetic narrative position when the actor plays the moral compromise as habit rather than choice. Lemmon never lets Baxter feel his own complicity until the film forces him to.
Shirley MacLaine as Fran
MacLaine was twenty-six during production and her Fran is the film’s wounded heart. The character has to be both genuinely vulnerable and genuinely intelligent, both attractive enough to plausibly be Sheldrake’s mistress and self-aware enough to recognize what the affair is doing to her. MacLaine plays both registers without ever choosing one over the other.
The overdose sequence and its aftermath are the film’s longest and most demanding passage for MacLaine. She plays the recovery scenes with Lemmon at low key, her exhaustion and shame held under the dialogue rather than performed through it. The gin rummy sequences in Baxter’s apartment have a tenderness that the film has not earned through plot but earns moment by moment through the two performances.
For Writers
Vulnerable characters in serious comedy require performances that resist the comic energy of the surrounding screenplay. MacLaine plays Fran straight even when Lemmon’s Baxter is being funny around her.
Fred MacMurray’s Sheldrake
MacMurray took the role over considerable reluctance about playing an adulterous corporate predator. His casting against the wholesome-father type he had established in the 1950s gives Sheldrake real menace. The audience cannot read Sheldrake as the cad they would expect from typecasting, which makes his actions colder.
Sheldrake’s Christmas-Eve treatment of Fran, where he gives her a hundred-dollar bill as a Christmas present after she demands more from the relationship, is the film’s worst single act and reads worse because MacMurray plays it with mild irritation rather than cruelty. The character does not think he is doing anything wrong. The performance captures the specific corporate-executive entitlement of the period exactly.
For Writers
Casting against type strengthens villainous performances when the audience is forced to adjust expectations. MacMurray’s wholesome history makes Sheldrake’s corruption land harder than a typecast actor’s would.
Craft Note
Wilder and Diamond wrote the screenplay specifically with Lemmon in mind after their successful collaboration on Some Like It Hot the previous year. The film was Wilder’s first since Sunset Boulevard to fully integrate his darker thematic instincts with his commercial comedy capabilities. Joseph LaShelle’s black-and-white cinematography captures the office tower’s gridlike conformity and the apartment’s loneliness with equal precision. Adolph Deutsch composed the score, with the famous theme later released as a Ferrante and Teicher hit single.
Verdict
The Apartment is one of the finest American films of the 1960s and one of the most consequential Christmas films ever made. The five Academy Awards including Best Picture were entirely warranted. A primary text for anyone interested in American cinema, in the romantic comedy as a serious form, or in the Christmas film outside its conventional emotional registers.
FAQ
Who directed The Apartment?
Billy Wilder directed the film. He also co-wrote the screenplay with I.A.L. Diamond and produced through The Mirisch Company.
How many Academy Awards did The Apartment win?
Five: Best Picture, Best Director (Wilder), Best Original Screenplay (Wilder and Diamond), Best Film Editing, and Best Art Direction in Black and White.
Is The Apartment really a Christmas movie?
Yes. The film is set during the Christmas-New Year season and uses Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve as structural pillars. The Christmas elements are not decorative but integral to the screenplay’s machinery.
Why was Fred MacMurray cast as Sheldrake?
Wilder specifically wanted MacMurray’s wholesome 1950s television-father image working against the predatory corporate-executive character. Several actors had refused the role before MacMurray accepted.
Was the apartment a real location?
The apartment interior was a soundstage set built for the production. The exterior establishing shots used a real Manhattan brownstone on West 67th Street.
How did The Apartment perform commercially?
The film grossed approximately twenty-five million dollars on a three-million-dollar budget, an excellent return that made it one of 1960’s most profitable releases.
What is the film’s rating?
The Apartment is unrated. The modern equivalent would be PG for thematic content including infidelity, attempted suicide, and adult situations.