H and I prepared to ring in the new year by catching an early showing of The Apartment, a movie I hoped I would still love a decade after seeing it the first time. Impossible to say at this distance what struck me anew and what I’d merely forgotten, but it had not gone flat. In some ways schematic and stagy, in other ways it’s a wondrously odd work, such that H’s immediate review was, “That was good. So weird.”
You could say The Apartment is a 1960 Billy Wilder film about an ambitious young insurance clerk (Jack Lemmon) in love with an elevator operator (Shirley MacLaine) and drawn into a farce by the executives who pressure him into lending his conveniently located bachelor pad to conduct their extramarital affairs. Or you could say it is a dark comedy about a young human woman (Shirley MacLaine) trapped in a world of cartoon characters, mostly malevolent (everyone else).
Fran Kubelik is not necessarily written as though she inhabits a deeper reality than the blowhards and airheads that populate the movie; you can imagine the role going to some more conventional actress and producing a very different effect within the same lines. After all, she is suffering for love of perhaps the worst of those blowhards (Fred MacMurray, displaying the same woodenness of visage and soul that Wilder put to good use 15 years earlier in Double Indemnity), for no reason one can imagine except that, of course, everyone in her world is a malevolent cartoon character—so why not, when one has grown so weary, finally sink into the arms of the tallest, handsomest such character in sight?
It’s MacLaine’s performance that compels this reading. Her performance, and the fact of her face, which we could look at endlessly, and fortunately the camera thinks so, too. She’s beautiful in precisely the way a distant coworker you develop a disproportionately intense crush on might be beautiful, which is to say it’s a face you almost never get to cherish on a screen—too real, too idiosyncratic. When she smiles fully she looks like an attractive Bugs Bunny, though here irony or longing usually tamps it down. One more readily remembers the scenes where she cries. Watch her fold around herself as MacMurray barely tries to comfort her, how she uses her posture to create a private space to hold her sorrow—patently the sorrow of one bad thing ending with nothing better, anywhere in the universe, to replace it.
And just as patently, Jack Lemmon’s Bud is not really an adequate replacement. I’d remembered him as rather soulful; he isn’t, really; only sad. He speaks with all the gravitas of a goldfish blowing bubbles, and the same helpless expression. Nearly all his thoughts and utterances are handed down intact from his environment: the corporate bureaucracy, the television, the free-floating misogyny. Every so often you feel Bud, or perhaps Lemmon, reaching for a little ironic distance between himself and what he’s parroting, but he can’t quite pull it off—can’t push himself free, because there is nowhere else to go. The glorious Hope Holiday, as a woman who picks him up in a bar by blowing straw wrappers at his face, describes her 5’2” convict husband as “like a little chihuahua,” which is about the same flavor of affection one might feel for Bud as well. But he is saved by his misfortune, which reaches him in the nick of time to prevent his becoming another smarmy bureaucrat.
The Apartment makes two in a strange genre of classic films set at Christmastime that hinge on suicidality—the first, of course, being It’s a Wonderful Life. When Bud rescues Fran from an overdose of sleeping pills on Christmas Eve, it’s possible to see him as some degraded version of the bumbling angel Clarence. But it is not really possible for Fran to awake and conclude that it’s a wonderful life. As much as Bud or anyone might care for her (along with the kindly neighbors who aid her revival—and by the way, note what a share of the film’s affection is reserved for these Jewish neighbors, cartoons, too, but good ones), whatever love’s on offer in this world is almost certainly not worth living for.
Yet she lives. The next film MacLaine made was The Children’s Hour, in which her character successfully dies for a doomed love, but it’s less moving than her survival here. Once I made a miscalculation: not a suicide attempt, but something that resembled it enough to enough of the people one must deal with in trying to manage one’s life that it made things very difficult for me for a while. What The Apartment gets right about this state is the embarrassment, the ugliness of needing others to help clean up the mess you’ve made. The scene in which Fran is revived is quite startlingly long and graphic. We hear her vomit, see her get injected and have coffee sloshed into her mouth. Again and again, the kindly doctor slaps her; back and forth for minutes on end she is marched half-conscious across the floor. And this is played neither for laughter nor for pathos. What is there is there: the bleak comedy of what happens after such a failure, the fear that it will happen again, and then the bleak comedy of Bud’s frantic measures to ensure that it will not. (Hide the razor blades, pocket the pills.)
As it happens, obtuse, milquetoast Bud turns out to be the perfect man for the job, for it turns out he once tried to kill himself, too. So he does exactly what one would hope for in Fran’s situation: helps concoct a cover story, distracts with gin rummy, improvises an endless pig-Italian aria while cooking a spaghetti dinner. One can finally begin to root for his pursuit of Fran at just about the very moment his fear for her makes him back off and coax her married lover to return.
Not many comedies dance this near to tragedy—certainly not so nimbly or with such respect for the abyss they skirt. Bud may not entirely deserve Fran Kubelik, but then again, who can claim that we in our world entirely deserve this film?
