The Apartment

C.C. "Bud" Baxter is a lonely office drudge at an insurance corporation in New York City. To climb the corporate ladder, he allows four company managers to take turns regularly borrowing his Upper West Side apartment for their extramarital liaisons. Bud meticulously juggles the "booking" schedule, but the steady stream of women in and out convinces his neighbors that he is a playboy, bringing home someone else every night.

Bud solicits glowing performance reviews from the four managers and submits them to personnel director Jeff Sheldrake, who then promises to promote him—but Sheldrake also demands use of the apartment for his own affairs, beginning that night. As compensation for this short notice, he gives Baxter two theater tickets for that evening. Bud asks his secret crush, Fran Kubelik, an elevator operator in the office building, to join him. She agrees, but first meets up with a "former fling," who turns out to be Sheldrake. When Sheldrake dissuades her from breaking up with him, promising to divorce his wife, they head to Bud's apartment, as Bud waits, stood-up, outside the theater.

Later, at the company's raucous Christmas party, Sheldrake's secretary, Miss Olsen, tells Fran that her boss has had affairs with other female employees, including herself. Later, at Bud's apartment, Fran confronts Sheldrake. He professes genuine love for her, but then takes off, heading back to his suburban family, as usual.

Bud—realizing that Fran is the woman Sheldrake has been taking to his apartment—lets himself be picked up by a married floozy at a local bar. But when they arrive at his apartment, he discovers Fran, passed out on his bed from an apparent suicidal overdose of his sleeping pills. He sends away the woman from the bar and enlists Dr. Dreyfuss, a medical doctor living in the next-door apartment, to revive Fran. Bud intentionally makes Dreyfuss believe that he was the cause of the incident. Dreyfuss scolds Bud for philandering and advises him to "be a mensch, a human being."

While Fran spends two days recuperating in the apartment, Bud cares for her, and a bond develops between them, especially after he confesses to his own suicide attempt over unrequited feelings for a woman who now sends him a fruitcake every Christmas. During a game of gin rummy, Fran says she's always suffered bad luck in her love life. As Bud prepares a romantic dinner, one of the managers arrives for a tryst. Bud persuades him and his companion to leave, but the manager recognizes Fran and informs his colleagues. Later confronted by Fran's brother-in-law, Karl Matuschka, who is looking for her, the jealous managers direct Karl to Bud's apartment. There, Bud deflects the brother-in-law's anger over Fran's wayward behavior by once again assuming all responsibiity. Karl punches him, but when Fran kisses Bud for protecting her, he just smiles and says it "didn't hurt a bit."

When Sheldrake learns that Miss Olsen tipped off Fran about his affairs, he fires her, but she retaliates by spilling all to Sheldrake's wife, who promptly throws her husband out. Sheldrake believes that this situation just makes it easier to pursue his affair with Fran. Having promoted Bud to an even higher position, which also gives him a key to the executive washroom, Sheldrake expects Bud to loan out his apartment yet again. Bud gives him back the washroom key instead, proclaiming that he has decided to become a mensch, and quits the firm.

That night at a New Year's Eve party, Sheldrake indignantly tells Fran about Bud quitting. Realizing she is in love with Bud, Fran abandons Sheldrake and runs to the apartment. At the door, she hears an apparent gunshot. Fearing that Bud has attempted suicide again, she frantically pounds on door. Bud opens up, holding a bottle of champagne whose cork he had just popped, celebrating his plan to start anew. As the two settle down to resume their gin rummy game, Fran tells Bud that she is now free, too. When he asks about Sheldrake, she replies, "We'll send him a fruitcake every Christmas." He declares his love for her, and she replies, "Shut up and deal."

Jack Lemmon in a still from the film's trailer. The Apartment marked his second collaboration with Billy Wilder after Some Like It Hot.

Immediately following the success of Some Like It Hot, Wilder and Diamond wished to make another film with Lemmon. Wilder had originally planned to cast Paul Douglas as Sheldrake; however, after he died unexpectedly, MacMurray was cast.

The initial concept came from Brief Encounter by Noël Coward, in which Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) meets Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) for a thwarted tryst in his friend's apartment. However, due to the Hays Production Code, Wilder was unable to make a film about adultery in the 1940s. Wilder and Diamond also based the film partially on a Hollywood scandal in which high-powered agent Jennings Lang was shot by producer Walter Wanger for having an affair with Wanger's wife, actress Joan Bennett. During the affair, Lang used a low-level employee's apartment.[4] 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 scene, he squirts a bottle of nasal spray across the room, and in another, he sings while cooking spaghetti (which he strains through the grid 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 of the genuine punch in the film. Lemmon also caught a cold when one scene on a park bench was filmed in sub-zero weather.

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 placed to the back of the room, 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.[5]

Shirley MacLaine in the trailer for the film.

In 1960, the film doubled its $3 million budget at the U.S. box office.[9][10][11] Critics were split on The Apartment.[9][12] Time and Newsweek praised it,[10] as did The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther, who called the film "gleeful, tender, and even sentimental" and Wilder's direction "ingenious".[13] Esquire critic Dwight Macdonald gave the film a poor review,[12] calling it "a paradigm of corny avantgardism".[14] Others took issue with the film's controversial depictions of infidelity and adultery,[12] with critic Hollis Alpert of the Saturday Review dismissing it as "a dirty fairy tale".[9]

MacMurray relates 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.[5] 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.[15] The film currently holds a 94% "Certified Fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 66 reviews with an average rating of 8.7/10; the site's consensus states that "Director Billy Wilder's customary cynicism is leavened here by tender humor, romance, and genuine pathos."[16]

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 had ended. As of 2014, only two black-and-white movies have won the Academy Award for Best Picture after The Apartment did: Schindler's List (1993) and The Artist (2011).

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).[19] In 2006, Premiere voted this film as one of "The 50 Greatest Comedies Of All Time".

American Film Institute lists:

• AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies (#93),[20]
• AFI's 100 Years...100 Laughs (#20),[21]
• AFI's 100 Years...100 Passions (#62),[22]
• AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) (#80).[23]
• AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes:
  • Fran Kubelik: "Shut up, and deal." – Nominated

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 famous Bacharach/David songs "I Say a Little Prayer" and "A House Is Not a Home" to the roster.

• List of American films of 1960
• Life in a... Metro
• Raaste Kaa Patthar

Wikimedia Commons has media related to The Apartment.

• The Apartment essay by Kyle Westphal at National Film Registry
• The Apartment essay by Daniel Eagan in America's Film Legacy: The Authoritative Guide to the Landmark Movies in the National Film Registry, A&C Black, 2010 ISBN 0826429777, pages 566-558
• Quotations related to The Apartment at Wikiquote
• The Apartment at AllMovie
• The Apartment at the American Film Institute Catalog
• The Apartment at IMDb
• The Apartment at Rotten Tomatoes
• The Apartment at the TCM Movie Database