Where the young lovers of Before Sunrise have turned thirty, those of 1960's The Apartment have now reached retirement age. It's not just that they're older and wiser; in places, indeed, they appear clairvoyant, much like the palm reader in the Linklater film. What the movie they're in foresaw, with writer-director Billy Wilder's usual wit and wisdom, is corporate creep into our private lives, an altogether unhappy toppling of the work-life balance. The offices of Wilder's enduring classic aren't the happy, healthy spaces of The Front Page or His Girl Friday, but already turning toxic in their transactions. You'll likely know the basics. Our putz hero, Jack Lemmon's claims adjuster CC Baxter, has had his cramped W. 67th St bachelor pad appropriated as a home away from home for his straying bosses. Agreeing to this affords Baxter a certain upward mobility - especially after he falls into the orbit of Fred MacMurray's Nixon-in-waiting CEO Sheldrake - but it comes at a grave personal cost, especially after Sheldrake takes up with the object of our boy's affections, Shirley MacLaine's lift operator Fran Kubelik, who doesn't have Baxter's sunny optimism to keep her going. The script, worked out by Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond like accounts in a pocketbook, is full of such gains and losses. That it was so wise to these office politics can surely be attributed to the fact everybody behind the camera was operating with between thirty and forty years of experience under their hats: Wilder and Diamond drawing on their close observation of human behaviour (this being a time when our creatives were still in regular correspondence with the audience's hopes, dreams and fears), set designer Alexandre Trauner providing the lived-in, scrambled, contested territory, and setting a certain mood besides. The apartment in question visibly connected to Trauner's creations in the field of French poetic realism (1938's Quai des brumes, 1939's Le Jour se lève): it matters that it was a bit crummy and worn-down (all a corporate flunky could afford in 1960), and it really matters that it's the antithesis of the bright, spacious insurance office (being a refuge for troubled and compromised souls).
What do we witness there? A prized night in - a movie night - interrupted by adverts. (Better to see The Apartment in a cinema than on its current streaming home Prime Video, where it's "this movie is brought to you with limited interruptions".) The personal unhappiness that follows from professional insecurity. The unnecessary admin required just to get through the working week. Wilder's film is being reissued to mark the romantic milestone of Valentine's Day, but it's among the most Marxist films ever arrived at under the Hollywood studio system - the American Vivre sa vie - spotting as it does that capitalism always intervenes whenever we least want it, but never does when we do. It bears down heavily on the performances: Lemmon's boyishness wears off as the casualties pile up, while MacLaine's pixiecut, signifier of arguably the first modern movie heroine, only frames the sadness in Fran's eyes as she realises Baxter is in danger of becoming one of them. The foremost achievement of this script, one of the greatest ever typed, lies in how close this comedy comes to outright tragedy: it's a rare romcom where the heroine has almost to die before a corrective course is taken. (One unspoken but quietly powerful idea: she only survives because it's Christmas, doesn't have to work, and thereby has time to recover.) Even so, The Apartment seems an infinitely sadder film in 2025 than when I first saw it thirty years ago, because its warnings have gone unheeded in the years since. Sheldrake and sons have regained control; CC Baxter left Consolidated Life only to go into real estate (1992's Glengarry Glen Ross); the suits' way of thinking and dealing is now the only game in town. Everything has been enshittified; even Santa is a lush. It's a miracle Wilder got Lemmon to keep his chin up, let alone develop a backbone, but it's crucial he does, because it ensures The Apartment still functions as a whistleblower-movie. It knows too much about how the world works: how existing in the corporate sphere involves watching other, often far less deserving people thrive while you struggle to keep a roof over your head, and working yourself sick so that others can have it all. You can watch a lot of movies from 1960 that bear no relation whatsoever to life as it's lived a quarter of the way into the 21st century. The Apartment is not one of them.
The Apartment returns to selected cinemas from today.
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