The Apartment [Media Notes 63]

I’ve just watched The Apartment, a romantic comedy from 1960. According to its Wikipedia entry the film “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 the 25 films selected for inclusion to the United States Library of Congress National Film Registry.” It’s also strange. Not creepy strange or puzzling strange, but really? strange.

It stars Jack Lemon as a clerk in a large insurance company located in New York City. He falls in love with Shirley MacLaine, who is an elevator operator in the building where the company is headquartered in New York City. She’s having an affair with his supervisor, played by Fred MacMurray, but he doesn’t know this, at least not at the beginning of the film. Here’s the strange part: somehow he’s gotten himself into a situation where he loans out his Upper West Side apartment to four different managers so they can conduct affairs. This, we’re supposed to believe, is so he can climb the corporate ladder. And it works!

Really!?

Who dreamt that one up? As the film was written by Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond, I supposed it’s one of them. Where’s they get that idea from? They only thing that halfway makes any sense is that they wanted to do a male parallel to a story in which a woman sleeps her way to a promotion but couldn’t come up with any direct way to pull it off. And so this is what they came up with. Now, I’m not suggesting that they went through some conscious decision process to arrive at this result. I’d guess is was one of those sudden “light bulb” inspirations: Hey! Wouldn’t it be funny if... But somehow the psycho-cultural forces involved are along the lines I’ve suggested. The tit-for-tat in this exchange game is mechanical and explicit and Lemon does in fact advance as he loans out his apartment. It’s the mechanical nature of this game that makes me suspicious of the underlying psycho-dynamics. (I note, however, that the Wikipedia article suggests other inspirations for the plot.)

Of course, the obverse of this screwy scheme is that the film was about adultery, as all the manages were married. That made it a bit scandalous in its time (1960). I suppose we can read the screwy mechanism as a of distracting attention from the adultery the fueled the merry-go-round.

Anyhow, MacMurray wasn’t one of the four managers originally in on the scheme. But he knew about the scheme and decided to avail himself of Lemon’s apartment for a tryst with MacLaine. And that’s how Lemon discovered that she was having an affair with his boss. Of course, there are twists and turns along the way, and she attempts to commit suicide, he nurses her back to health, she falls in love with him, he quits his job (after receiving a promotion that entitles him to the executive washroom), and then film ends with the two of them happily playing gin rummy in his apartment.

The film was a hit.

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It would be interesting to compare three 1960s films, the original Ocean’s 11 (1960), Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1960), and The Apartment (1960), with recent series, Mad Men (2007-2015), but set in the early 1960s.