The Apartment

The Apartment (1960) was sold as a comedy and contains a suicide attempt. Billy Wilder never balanced a tone this dangerously in any other film. Bud Baxter is a minor clerk at a large insurance company who finds a route upward: he lends his apartment to executives for their affairs and is promoted in return. Then he falls for Fran, the elevator operator, and discovers that the place she has been meeting her married boss is his own flat. The nerve of it is this. In 1960 the film describes workplace coercion, the arrangements married men make, and what that arrangement does to a woman, all of it dressed as comedy. And it forgives nobody easily. It won Best Picture and remained the last black and white film to do so for thirty three years. The scene where he strains spaghetti with a tennis racket, and the final line, both entered film history. We are deliberately not quoting the ending. The chemistry between Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine is the entire picture. Good for: classic Hollywood, bitter comedy, and writing of a quality that is rare now. Less good for: the suicide attempt is central and the comic register makes it more uncomfortable rather than less. Anyone expecting a light romantic comedy is mistaken.