The Apartment

This small movie seems a little misplaced between epics and big extravagant movies like Ben-Hur, West Side Story, and Lawrence of Arabia. At just over 2 hours it is the shortest  but its the writing and Jack Lemmon's performance that elevates the movie to greatness.The movie zips along and doesn't feel that long at all. Its one of those rare movies that can combine comedy and tragedy to capture the everyday life of an ordinary man. Jack Lemmon portrays the everyman as only he could do. With a sense of humor and a sense of sadness.

The Apartment is about this guy Bud played by Jack Lemmon who is trying to move up in the corporate world. So, he decided to lend out his apartment to the executives so they can have flings with their mistresses. He falls in love with this women Fran(Shirley Maclaine) who unbeknownst to Bud is one of the girls his boss Jeff Sheldrake(Fred MacMurray) is having an affair with. One night after Fran and Jeff have a fight in the apartment she attempts suicide and Bud comes home to find her passed out from an overdose. After getting the doctor from next door to help her Bud realized that she might not be as sweet and innocent as he thought. But he doesn't want to do anything to make the executives mad because he just got a big promotion.

All the actors are amazing. Jack Lemmon really makes this movie work. He pulls off the goofiness of the character but also the sadness when he realizes the girl of his dreams isn't what she appears to be. Shirley Maclaine starts off the movie as a perky girl who has a reputation as a good girl, but ends up just being as lost as everyone else. Billy Wilder wrote and directed another great movie. He wrote this one after Some Like it Hot which was named funniest movie of all time by AFI. Here he combines humor with some ugly situations. It is not very often you find a suicide in the middle of a comedy, but he some how makes it all work. It has the feel of everyday life both funny and tragic. The movie was kind of a sign of the times. Moving from more modest films of the 50's to the more sexual provocative movies of the 60's,  where adultery and divorce are treated as the norm and no consequence's are shown.

How this movie didn't win any Oscars for the main actors is beyond me. Billy Wilder did win Best Director, Best Writing, and as a producer got an award for Best Picture making him one of the only men to win all three awards in the same year. The one movie in my opinion that came out in 1960 that got overlooked by the academy was Psycho. It was was nominated for 4 awards including Best Director for Hitchcock, and lost all. But it was not nominated for Best Picture, or Best Actor for Anthony Perkins great performance as Norman Bates or the now famous score.  A few other things about the 1960 awards. Shirley Jones best known for playing the mother on the Partridge Family won the Best Actress award for Elmer Gantry, and The Apartment was the last all black and white movie to win best picture(Schindler's List which was mostly black and white won in 1993 had a few shots in color).

By the Numbers
Number 93 on AFI's 100 Greatest Movies in 1997 and number 80 in 2007
Number 20 on AFI's 100 Greatest Comedies and Number 62 on AFI's 100 Greatest Passions
Currently number 91 on IMDB Top 250