Pass the Keys to Cultural Revolution
A Contemporary Historical Approach to The Apartment (1960)
[Contains some spoilers and discussion of suicide]
The Apartment (1960) – Contemporary History
What could be more Christmassy than manipulative sexual relationships, suicidal contemplation, and a cheery dose of corruption in the workplace? Nothing, I say, and so does Billy Wilder in his The Apartment (1960). The Review Roulette wheel spun up Contemporary History for our lens this week and I audibly said “oh thank god” because LFG this is entirely in my wheelhouse. Christmas? 1960? The darker sides of a holiday that has been manipulated into single syllable positive buzzwords like “hope”, “cheer”, “joy”, “snow”? Get out. We so got this. As a reminder, we’re keeping it casual as I have Christmassy business to attend to!
So, contemporary history, where are we historically by 1960 (June 1960 specifically when The Apartment was released)? Politically, we are in the Cold War, we’re a month before the 1960 Democratic National Convention so JFK isn’t the nominee yet, Nixon was the presumptive Republican nominee, we’re in year 5 of US involvement in Vietnam with Eisenhower having sent military advisors in 1955. Socially, the conservatism of the 1950s is starting to wear a bit thin. The Civil Rights Movement is gaining some traction after years of direct action and a particular spark with the Greensboro sit-ins starting in February 1960 and inspiring anti-segregation action across the south. Challenges against power structures were being enshrined in the courts including Brown v. Board of Education (segregated schools are unconstitutional) and Hernandez v. Texas (all historically marginalised American communities have equal protection under the 14th Amendment), both decided in 1954. These federal challenges to strict white supremacist power structures in the US, among many other things that don’t quite fit in a paragraph, were important steps in the gradual strengthening of civil rights across gender, race, and sexuality as the 1960s counterculture builds and continues to challenge “the man”, the system, the people in power who like it that way.
But it would be insane to say “1960s Counterculture started in 1964 when Haight-Ashbury and the Village were flooded with hippies” or “second-wave feminism started in 1963 with Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique”. Those are ludicrous statements I see all the time as though cultural movements have definitive start dates and are not built upon years of varied influences converging and challenging ideas within themselves. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was published in French in 1949 and in English translation in 1953 when it was made available in the US. Allen Ginsburg published Howl in 1956 sparking an obscenity trial for its vivid and frank depictions of drugs and homosexuality. Jack Kerouac published On the Road in 1957 – there are countless examples of shifts, small and large in the cultural make-up of the late 1950s that challenged the mainstream social conservatism of the nuclear family and the happiness of forcefully trying to forget that the atomic bomb existed at all by staying so damn focused on suppressing human needs and desires and thoughts into a tight little bundle of sexual repression after popping out 2.5 kids and keeping that picket fence so gosh darn white.
Billy Wilder knew this and liked a cheeky bit of challenging the status quo (see more in the bonus section). The Apartment fits into this timeline of counterculture before The Counterculture. This film is about a guy (C.C. Baxter played by Jack Lemmon) who passes his keys to his bosses to use his apartment for extramarital affairs in order to leverage himself for a promotion. He isn’t a sleazy guy himself; he actually comes off as a nice kind of guy apart from the facilitating of affairs and lying to all his neighbours. The bosses are all sleazy right up to the executive personnel director Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray) who is the absolute worst kind of guy. It’s revealed that he has slept with so many women in the company and keeps promising them he’s leaving his wife for them until the manipulation no longer works or he gets bored and has to move onto the next woman in his employ. He sucks so bad that Fran (Shirley MacLaine), devastated by the relationship between the two, knowing he will leave her the moment the whim takes him, and after he handed her a hundred-dollar bill “for Christmas”, decides to commit suicide in Baxter’s apartment after an argument with Sheldrake during their Christmas Eve scheduled sexing. Baxter nurses her back to health while Sheldrake distances himself from the situation, refusing to see her for fear his wife will learn of the affair.
This film does not suggest on any level that Sheldrake is a good person. He is very fully the villain. The high up executive as well as all of the others using Baxter’s apartment for affairs are exploiting their workers, cultivating a sexually manipulative work environment, and high fiving over the corruption within the company (an insurance company at that!). All of the structures of power here are being called into question, as well as their morals (as tied to financial status) as they all (but particularly Sheldrake) believe that they are entitled to this man’s home, they can purchase people’s loyalty, and they are doing nothing wrong so long as they come out well and fulfilled in the end.
It's an excellent film and it fits into a very fascinating moment in American history between the peak of mainstream social conservatism and the budding countercultural and Civil Rights movements that would escalate in the coming years. We should also note that The Apartment is as mainstream as it gets – it isn’t some niche hidden film that no one saw or only the beatniks crowded in an art house cinema for. The Apartment made $24.6 million, in the top ten highest grosses of the year, and received ten Oscar nominations winning five including Best Motion Picture, Best Screenplay and Best Director. This was the year of Hitchcock’s Psycho, Kubrick’s Spartacus, John Wayne’s The Alamo, Disney’s Swiss Family Robinson, Otto Preminger’s Exodus. It’s a big year for film and the fascinating thing is that this film challenging the power structures of society and the morality of the exploitation of one’s employees (especially sexual exploitation of female employees) was declared disgusting and mentally damaging amid all of it. It fits not only so perfectly into the mainstream Hollywood moment as it began to return to more social and psychologically concerned films, but also into the wider shifts gaining momentum around the country asking questions about why the structures of society are built in the ways they were and why they have to stay that way at all.
Also, it’s Christmas. If you can find it in a cinema near you that plays classic films, I’d highly recommend trying to fit it in this Christmas as I’m sure the experience seeing it on the big screen is even better.
Because I’m Never Done When I Say I Am
Auteur
Quickly, Billy Wilder made some of my favourite films including Double Indemnity (1944), Sunset Boulevard (1950), Sabrina (1954), and now this one I’m adding to that list. These films in particular have complex female characters and many of his films feature death or suicide attempts. What I really enjoy about Wilder’s films is the depth he gives to emotions that are normally seen (and portrayed in his films) as silly woman things. Sunset Boulevard, for instance, is about a woman (norma Desmond played by Gloria Swanson) who is played as so overly dramatically; she’s a washed-up silent film star who lost her fame when the talkies came in. She is so extreme in her mannerisms and diction and appearance that it almost feels like a drag persona satirising the idea Hollywood had (even in 1950!) that women are washed up by 50 years old, unable to perform, simply unconscionable. But Wilder hired a 50-year-old actress to perform that part. He didn’t doll up a younger woman; he fully made that point. In Sabrina, Audrey Hepburn is looked down on the entire film as a young fool for getting caught up in a romance that couldn’t possibly work out, but ultimately and subversively, she has the most poise and expresses the best logic in the film. Wilder had a subtle way with women in at least the films of his I’ve seen and loved, and I find it very subtly beautiful.
The Apartment is such a special film. As a Wilder fanatic I have a very hard time picking his best picture but The Apartment is arguably the one that most encapsulates all of his strengths and is undeniably human. It is when he and IAL Diamond perfectly nailed the Wilder version of Ernst Lubitsch, who was Wilder’s idol. Wilder had a lot of similarities with Lubitsch but was also more of a realist and definitely more cynical.
The Apartment is also the most multifaceted of Wilder’s landmarks and in not having the bleaker and harder impact of Double Indemnity, Sunset Blvd or Ace in the Hole it has I think been somewhat overlooked for how impactful and daring it is especially for 1960. After the failure of Ace in the Hole, Wilder had to resort to much lighter fare through the 1950s and this is really him coming back to what was always in his heart.
It remains the most touchingly honest film about how life can really suck in a bitterly ironic way, and even more so around the holidays. For me it’s a love letter to Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner (and other films like The Crowd) but also is the best example of Wilder’s complete understanding of American society. The choice of black and white scope photography only increases the bleak landscape our characters find themselves in and it perfectly underscores the drama. The ending is a much more touching version of Some Like It Hot and predates The Graduate doing a version by seven years.
And yes it absolutely plays even better in a theater where the scope visuals REALLY open up. I was lucky to see a print years ago and would love to do so again!
You can’t tell that ever since I first saw the film as a kid (letterbox vhs rental when I had a cold) that deep down I knew my cinematic spirit animal was C.C. Baxter...(Lemmon not getting the Oscar is one of the all time Oscar snubs but then again he was up against Burt Lancaster unleashed in Elmer Gantry.)