David Lewis Archives - Sean Kelly On Movies

This Review Will Contain SPOILERS The holiday season kicked off for TIFF Cinemateque with a special screening of the 4K restoration of Billy Wilder's 1960 Oscar winning romantic comedy The Apartment. C.C. "Bud" Baxter (Jack Lemmon) is a worker for an insurance company, who often spends long nights at the office. Part of the reason for this is that he frequently lends his apartment to many of her superiors, including Joe Dobisch (Ray Walston) and Al Kirkeby (David Lewis), as a place where they can partake in their extramarital affairs. The news of Bud's arrangements reaches his boss Jeff D Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), who offers Bud a promotion in exchange for the key to the apartment. It soon turns out that the woman Sheldrake is having an affair with is Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), the office's elevator operator, whom Bud has taken a liking to. The Apartment Synopsis The Apartment is the second collaboration between co-writer and director Billy Wilder and actor Jack Lemmon, following 1959's Some Like It Hot. The film was arguably the breakthrough role for a quite young Shirley MacLaine, who is at the centre of the film's central love triangle between Lemmon's protagonist of C.C. Baxter and Fred MacMurray was Baxter's womanizing boss Jeff D Sheldrake. Baxter also has to deal with his disapproving Jewish neighbours Dr David Dreyfuss (Jack Kruschen) and his wife Mildred (Naomi Stevens), who believe Baxter to be solely responsible for all the shenanigans going on in the apartment. My Thoughts on The Apartment For a film released in 1960, The Apartment has some surprisingly risqué subject matter for the time period. Indeed, The Apartment was controversial at the times for its depictions of infidelity and adultery. The film can still be seen as controversial for the film's outdated gender roles, including the very casual sexual harassment and objectification by the majority of the film's main characters. I wouldn't be surprised if the chauvinist character of Jeff D Sheldrake ended up being an inspiration for the similarly womanizing character of Don Draper from the 1960s-set AMC series Mad Men. While for all intents and purposes, The Apartment is a romantic comedy, the film takes on a more dramatic tone in the film's second half, as C.C. Baxter comes to realize the consequences of lending out his apartment as a way to further his career. The turning point comes when Shirley MacLaine's character of Fran Kubelik realizes that she is just the latest of Jeff D Sheldrake's multiple extramarital affairs and that he has no real intention to divorce his wife for her. As a result, Baxter returns to his apartment to find Fran on his bed, having overdosed on sleeping pills. It is during his time nursing Fran back to health that Baxter has second thoughts about lending his apartment out to his superiors, and he would rather follow the advice of Dr David Dreyfuss and become a "mensch." As the chemistry between Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine was impeccable, I kept hoping that C.C. Baxter and Fran would end up together by the time the end credits rolled. At one point, this didn't seem like it was going to happen, as Fran was still hung up on Jeff D Sheldrake, whose wife eventually leaves him after his fired secretary spills the beans. However, in the film's final New Year's Eve set sequence, after finding out that C.C. Baxter quit his job after refusing to give Sheldrake his apartment key, Fran runs to Baxter, as he is preparing to move from the apartment. With a final line to rival the "Nobody's Perfect" phrase from Some Like It Hot, C.C. Baxter expresses his love for Fran as they are preparing to resume the gin rummy game they started earlier in the film, with Fran simply just looking at him and saying "Shut Up and Deal." The Apartment was the 8th Highest Grossing film of 1960, and it won five of the ten Academy Awards it was nominated for, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Art Director, and Best Editing. Today, The Apartment is regarded as one of the greatest films of all time and, as of this writing, is ranked at Number 100 on the IMDB Top 250. I have to be compelled to agree for the acclaim given to The Apartment, as this is the type of film they don't make anymore. The film was quite bold at the time for its frank depictions of adultery and a plot line involving an attempted suicide. It is the more dramatic elements of The Apartment that helps the film to stand apart from other romantic comedies to be a film that should be on everyone's must-watch list.

The Apartment – Premium Classics

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