I used to think I was not a Jack Lemmon fan but the more movies I see him in, the more I like him. I really liked him in The Apartment from 1960, which I watched in July.

He starred in this one with Shirley MacClaine, Fred MacMurray, and Jack Krushan.

The movie is about C.C. Baxter (Lemmon) who rents his apartment out to the various bosses in the very large company he works for so those bosses can meet up with their mistresses.

This arrangement is sometimes an inconvenience, but helps Baxter get perks and promotions so he continues to do it until a wrench is thrown in the system when he finds out the president of the company (MacMurray) wants to use his apartment to meet up with the girl from work that he has a crush on (Fran Kubelick, Shirley’s character).

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this movie since I didn’t do any research going in. Was it a comedy? A drama? A parody?

Turns out it was a dramatic/romantic comedy directed by Billy Wilder, written by Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, and in 1961 it won five Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director,  Best Story and Screenplay, Best Art Direction Black and White (Alexandre Trauner and Edward G. Boyle), Best Cinematography (Joseph LaShelle), and best film editing (Daniel Mandell).

Lemmon was also nominated for best actor, MacLaine for best actress, and Jack Krushan for best supporting actor.

This was a thought-provoking, sad, funny, dark-yet-light, movie that I would recommend watching at least once in your life.

If you are sensitive to the topic of suicide, please be aware it does come up in this movie.

The theme for The Apartment was written by Ferrante and Teicher and rose to number 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1960.

“With this film, [Wilder] managed to make a commercially successful entertainment that, for all its laughter and romance, took a serious stab at the prevailing attitudes and way of life of a country in which getting ahead in business had become the greatest measure of personal success,” Rob Nixon wrote for TCM.com.

The film was released in mid-June and by the end of the year had doubled it’s cost to be made, which was $3 million.

“I always felt that Billy Wilder grew a rose in a garbage pail with this one,” Jack Lemmon, later stated. “He was throwing cold water right in our faces about the terrible false premises with which most of our society lives. He challenged our priorities and the way we rationalize our behavior on the grounds of getting ahead in America – at a time when it wasn’t fashionable to challenge these things. He gave us a pretty good jolt, and it hasn’t been done a hell of a lot better since then.”

Some interesting trivia:

• This was the last black-and-white film to win Best Picture until Schindler’s List (1993), a project Wilder was once considered to direct.
• In 1994, The Apartment was selected for preservation in the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
• Shirley MacLaine, drove Wilder nuts because she kept ad-libbing.  He forced her to do one of the elevator scenes five times because she kept missing one word.

• Wilder and cinematographer Joseph LaShelle sometimes argued about the look of the film. LaShelle wanted to use more close-ups, but Wilder didn’t like close ups. “In film making, I like the normal set-up, like Wyler uses, like John Ford, like Chaplin,” Wilder once said. “I’m against this fancy stuff.  It reminds an audience that artisans have intruded.  I don’t want them to grab their partner and say, ‘My God, look at that!’”

I own this one on Blu-Ray but you can find it streaming on most streaming services.

Up next in my Autumn of Jack feature is  My Fellow Americans.

My complete list of movies for this feature:

Phffft (September 18)

It Should Happen To You (September 24)

The Fortune Cookie (Oct 2)

The Apartment (Oct. 8)

My Fellow Americans (Oct. 15)

The Notorious Landlady (Oct. 22)

The Odd Couple (Oct. 29)

Irma Dey Deuce (November 5)

Save the Tiger (November 12)

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Sources or additional resources:

https://www.jaysclassicmovieblog.com/post/the-apartment-1960

https://www.tcm.com/articles/021572/awards-season-the-apartment-1960

If you are interested in more reviews or blog posts about old movies, you can find a link to my past reviews at the top of the page and you can also visit The Classic Movie Blog Association.