# The Apartment

The Apartment is a 1960 American romantic comedy-drama film directed and produced by Billy Wilder from a screenplay he co-wrote with I. A. L. Diamond. It stars Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, and Fred MacMurray, with Ray Walston and Edie Adams in supporting roles.
The film follows an insurance clerk (Lemmon) who, in hopes of climbing the corporate ladder, allows his superiors to use his Upper West Side apartment to conduct their extramarital affairs. He becomes attracted to an elevator operator (MacLaine) in his office building, unaware that she is having an affair with the head of personnel (MacMurray).
The Apartment was distributed by United Artists to widespread critical acclaim and was a commercial success, despite controversy owing to its subject matter. It became the 8th highest-grossing film of 1960. At the 33rd Academy Awards, the film was nominated for ten awards and won five, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay. Lemmon, MacLaine, and Jack Kruschen were nominated for Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Supporting Actor respectively, and Lemmon and MacLaine won Golden Globe Awards for their performances. Promises, Promises, a 1968 Broadway musical by Burt Bacharach, Hal David, and Neil Simon, was based on the film.
The Apartment has come to be regarded as one of the greatest films ever made, appearing in lists by the American Film Institute and Sight and Sound magazine. In 1994, it was one of 25 films selected for inclusion to the Library of Congress National Film Registry.

## Plot

C.C. "Bud" Baxter is a lonely minor office worker at a large insurance company in New York City. To climb the corporate ladder, he allows four company managers to take turns borrowing his Upper West Side apartment for their extramarital affairs. Baxter meticulously juggles the "booking" schedule; a steady stream of women and liquor bottles convince his neighbors that he is a playboy.
Baxter earns glowing performance reviews from the four managers, flagging the attention of personnel director Jeff Sheldrake. He deduces the scheme, but promises Baxter a promotion in return for a key, starting that night. As compensation for such short notice, he gives Baxter two tickets to The Music Man. Bud asks Fran Kubelik, an elevator operator in the office building to whom he is strongly attracted, to join him. She explains she already has a date for the evening, but agrees to meet him at the theater before showtime. It turns out to be with Sheldrake, whom she had been trysting before breaking it off. When Sheldrake tells her that he plans to divorce his wife to be with her they head to Baxter's apartment, while Baxter waits forlornly outside the theater.
During the company's raucous Christmas Eve party Sheldrake's secretary, Miss Olsen, tells Fran that her boss has had numerous affairs with office personnel, including herself. Fran betrays this to Sheldrake at Baxter's apartment. She gives him a wrapped present - he can do no better than pull a $100 bill from his wallet and tell her to buy herself something expensive. Claiming he loves her, he rushes for the train back to his family in White Plains. Receiving money in return for her love strikes Fran to her core.
Realizing that Fran is the woman Sheldrake has been taking to his apartment, Baxter gets thoroughly drunk at a local bar. Killing time before he can go home dancing with a married woman, he lets himself be picked up. Shoed out by the bartender they head back to his apartment. There, he discovers Fran passed out on his bed from an overdose of his sleeping pills. He ditches the woman and enlists his neighbor, Dr. Dreyfuss, to revive Fran. Baxter implies that he was responsible for the incident. Dreyfuss scolds him for philandering and advises him to "be a mensch."
Fran spends two days recuperating in Baxter's apartment, during which a bond develops between them, especially after he confesses to an earlier suicide attempt over unrequited love back in his hometown of Cincinnati. Fran says that she has always suffered bad luck in her love life.
During Fran's stay one of the managers arrives for a tryst. Baxter persuades him to leave, but the manager recognizes her and later informs his colleagues. Though impressed, they are nonetheless annoyed that they have not had the same ready access to the apartment since Baxter's promotion.
When Fran's brother-in-law Karl shows up at the office building looking for her, he is sent to Baxter's apartment, catching him in the middle of preparing a romantic dinner. Baxter deflects Karl's anger over Fran's wayward behavior by once again assuming all responsibility. Karl slugs him, prompting Fran to kiss Baxter on the forehead for protecting her.
When Sheldrake had learned that Miss Olsen had ratted him out to Fran, he had fired her. She had retaliated by spilling all to his wife, who threw him out. Now free, Sheldrake welcomes the opportunity to renew his pursuit of Fran. Having promoted Baxter to Assistant Personnel Director, Sheldrake expects to be lent the key to his apartment yet again. Baxter produces one - to the building's "executive washroom" - proclaiming that he is quitting the firm in favor of becoming a mensch. Back home, he begins to pack his things at his apartment room.
That night at a New Year's Eve party Sheldrake indignantly tells Fran about Baxter quitting, complaining that Baxter refused to let him use his apartment, particularly with her. Events jelling all at once for her, she abandons Sheldrake and runs to the apartment. At the door, Fran hears an apparent gunshot, but Baxter opens the door holding a bottle of frothing champagne. Fran retrieves a deck of cards to resume a game of gin rummy they had left unfinished earlier. He declares his love for her. She smiles and says: “Shut up and deal”.

## Cast

* Jack Lemmon as Calvin Clifford (CC) "Bud" Baxter, an office worker
* Shirley MacLaine as Fran Kubelik, an elevator operator
* Fred MacMurray as Jeff D. Sheldrake, personnel manager, Baxter's boss and apartment user
* Ray Walston as Joe Dobisch, public relations manager and Baxter's apartment user
* Jack Kruschen as Dr. David Dreyfuss, Baxter's neighbor
* Frances Weintraub Lax as landlady Mrs. Lieberman
* David Lewis as Al Kirkeby, claims department manager and Baxter's apartment user
* Edie Adams as Miss Olsen, Sheldrake's secretary
* Hope Holiday as Mrs. Margie MacDougall, a woman whom Baxter meets at the bar
* Joan Shawlee as Sylvia, Al's partner
* Naomi Stevens as Mrs. Mildred Dreyfuss, David's wife
* Johnny Seven as Karl Matuschka, Fran's cab driving brother-in-law
* Joyce Jameson as the blonde in the bar
* Hal Smith as Santa Claus in the bar
* Willard Waterman as Mr. Vanderhoff, manager and Baxter's apartment user
* David White as Mr. Eichelberger, manager and Baxter's apartment user

## Production

Immediately following the success of 1959's Some Like It Hot, Wilder and Diamond wished to make another film with Jack Lemmon. Wilder had originally planned to cast Paul Douglas as Sheldrake; however, after he died unexpectedly, Fred MacMurray took his place.
The initial concept was inspired by Brief Encounter by Noël Coward, in which Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) meets Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) for a tryst in his friend's apartment, which ends up thwarted. However, Wilder was unable to make the Comedy about adultery he envisioned in the 1940s due to Hays Code restrictions. Wilder and Diamond also based the film partially on a Hollywood scandal in which agent Jennings Lang was shot by producer Walter Wanger for having an affair with Wanger's wife, actress Joan Bennett; during the affair, Lang had used a low-level employee's apartment for trysts. Another element of the plot was based on the experience of one of Diamond's friends, who returned home after breaking up with his girlfriend to find that she had committed suicide in his bed.
Although Wilder generally required his actors to adhere exactly to the script, he allowed Lemmon to improvise in two scenes. In one, he squirts a bottle of nasal spray across the room, and in the other he sings while cooking spaghetti (which he strains through the strings of a tennis racket). In another scene, where Lemmon was supposed to mime being punched, he failed to move correctly and was accidentally knocked down. Wilder chose to use the shot in the film. Lemmon also caught a cold (he was supposed to come down with in the script) when one scene on a park bench was filmed on a bitter Autumn night.
Art director Alexandre Trauner used forced perspective to create the set of a large insurance company office. The set appeared to be a very long room full of desks and workers; however, successively smaller people and desks were used, ending up with children. He designed the set of Baxter's apartment to appear smaller and shabbier than the spacious apartments that usually appeared in films of the day. He used items from thrift stores and even some of Wilder's own furniture for the set.

### Music

The film's title theme, written by Charles Williams and originally titled "Jealous Lover", was first heard in the 1949 film The Romantic Age. A recording by Ferrante & Teicher, released as "Theme from The Apartment", reached #10 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart later in 1960.

## Reception

The film made double its $3 million budget at the US and Canadian box office in 1960. Critics were split on The Apartment. Time and Newsweek praised it, as did The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther, who called the film "gleeful, tender, and even sentimental" and Wilder's direction "ingenious". Esquire critic Dwight Macdonald gave the film a poor review, calling it "a paradigm of corny avantgardism". Others took issue with the film's controversial depictions of infidelity and adultery, with critic Hollis Alpert of the Saturday Review dismissing it as "a dirty fairy tale".
MacMurray, having generally played guileless characters, related that after the film's release he was accosted by women in the street who berated him for making a "dirty filthy movie", and one of them hit him with her purse.
In 2001, Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert gave the film four stars out of four, and added it to his Great Movies list. The film critic Clarisse Loughrey has identified it as one of her two favorite movies, along with the 2010 film Boy. The film holds a 93% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 103 reviews with an average rating of 8.8/10; the site's consensus states that "Director Billy Wilder's customary cynicism is leavened here by tender humor, romance, and genuine pathos". On Metacritic, the film has a score of 94 out of 100 based on 21 reviews, and was awarded the "Must-See" badge.

## Awards and nominations

| Year | Award | Category | Nominee(s) | Result |
| 1961 | Academy Awards | Best Motion Picture | Billy Wilder | Won |
| 1961 | Academy Awards | Best Director | Billy Wilder | Won |
| 1961 | Academy Awards | Best Actor | Jack Lemmon | Nominated |
| 1961 | Academy Awards | Best Actress | Shirley MacLaine | Nominated |
| 1961 | Academy Awards | Best Supporting Actor | Jack Kruschen | Nominated |
| 1961 | Academy Awards | Best Story and Screenplay – Written Directly for the Screen | Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond | Won |
| 1961 | Academy Awards | Best Art Direction – Black-and-White | Alexandre Trauner and Edward G. Boyle | Won |
| 1961 | Academy Awards | Best Cinematography – Black-and-White | Joseph LaShelle | Nominated |
| 1961 | Academy Awards | Best Film Editing | Daniel Mandell | Won |
| 1961 | Academy Awards | Best Sound | Gordon E. Sawyer | Nominated |
| 1960 | British Academy Film Awards | Best Film | Best Film | Won |
| 1960 | British Academy Film Awards | Best Foreign Actor | Jack Lemmon | Won |
| 1960 | British Academy Film Awards | Best Foreign Actress | Shirley MacLaine | Won |
| 1960 | Cinema Writers Circle Awards | Best Foreign Film | Best Foreign Film | Won |
| 1960 | Directors Guild of America Awards | Outstanding Director - Motion Pictures | Billy Wilder | Won |
| 1960 | Golden Globe Awards | Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy | Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy | Won |
| 1960 | Golden Globe Awards | Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy | Jack Lemmon | Won |
| 1960 | Golden Globe Awards | Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy | Shirley MacLaine | Won |
| 1960 | Golden Globe Awards | Best Director – Motion Picture | Billy Wilder | Nominated |
| 1960 | Grammy Awards | Best Soundtrack Album | Adolph Deutsch | Nominated |
| 1960 | Laurel Awards | Top Comedy | Top Comedy | Won |
| 1960 | Laurel Awards | Top Male Comedy Performance | Jack Lemmon | Won |
| 1960 | Laurel Awards | Top Female Dramatic Performance | Shirley MacLaine | Won |
| 1960 | National Board of Review Awards | Top Ten Films | Top Ten Films | 8th Place |
| 1960 | National Film Preservation Board | National Film Registry | National Film Registry | Inducted |
| 1960 | New York Film Critics Circle Awards | Best Film | Best Film | Won |
| 1960 | New York Film Critics Circle Awards | Best Director | Billy Wilder | Won |
| 1960 | New York Film Critics Circle Awards | Best Screenplay | Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond | Won |
| 1960 | Venice International Film Festival | Golden Lion | Billy Wilder | Nominated |
| 1960 | Venice International Film Festival | Best Actress | Shirley MacLaine | Won |
| 1960 | Writers Guild of America Awards | Best Written American Comedy | Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond | Won |
Although Lemmon did not win the Oscar, Kevin Spacey dedicated his Oscar for American Beauty (1999) to Lemmon's performance. According to the behind-the-scenes feature on the American Beauty DVD, the film's director, Sam Mendes, had watched The Apartment (among other classic American films) as inspiration in preparation for shooting his film.
Within a few years after The Apartment's release, the routine use of black-and-white film in Hollywood ended. Since The Apartment only two black-and-white movies have won the Academy Award for Best Picture: Schindler's List (1993) and The Artist (2011) (Oppenheimer was in partial black and white).
In 1994, The Apartment was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. In 2002, a poll of film directors conducted by Sight and Sound magazine listed the film as the 14th greatest film of all time (tied with La Dolce Vita). In the 2012 poll by the same magazine directors voted the film 44th greatest of all time. The film was included in "The New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made" in 2002. In 2006, Premiere voted this film as one of "The 50 Greatest Comedies Of All Time". The Writers Guild of America ranked the film's screenplay (written by Billy Wilder & I.A.L. Diamond.) the 15th greatest ever. In 2015, The Apartment ranked 24th on BBC's "100 Greatest American Films" list, voted on by film critics from around the world. The film was selected as the 27th best comedy of all time in a poll of 253 film critics from 52 countries conducted by the BBC in 2017.
American Film Institute lists:
* AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies (#93),
* AFI's 100 Years...100 Laughs (#20),
* AFI's 100 Years...100 Passions (#62),
* AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) (#80).

## Stage adaptation

In 1968, Burt Bacharach, Hal David and Neil Simon created a musical adaptation titled Promises, Promises which opened on Broadway at the Shubert Theatre in New York City. Starring Jerry Orbach, Jill O'Hara and Edward Winter in the roles of Chuck, Fran and Sheldrake, the production closed in 1972. An all-star revival began in 2010 with Sean Hayes, Kristin Chenoweth and Tony Goldwyn as the three leads; this version added the Bacharach-David compositions "I Say a Little Prayer" and "A House Is Not a Home" to the roster.