The Apartment

C.C. "Bud" Baxter is a lonely office drudge at a national insurance corporation in a high-rise building in New York City. In order to climb the corporate ladder, Bud allows four company managers to take turns borrowing his Upper West Side apartment for their various extramarital liaisons, which are so noisy that his neighbors assume that Bud is a playboy bringing home a different woman every night.

The four managers write glowing reports about Bud, who hopes for a promotion from the personnel director, Jeff D. Sheldrake. Sheldrake does promote Bud, but he knows why they were so enthusiastic and demands exclusive privileges to borrow the apartment himself, starting that same night. As compensation for such short notice, he gives Baxter two tickets to The Music Man.

After work, Bud catches Fran Kubelik, an elevator operator he has had his eye on, and asks her to go to the musical with him. She accepts, but first has to meet a former fling. He is Sheldrake, who convinces her that he is about to divorce his wife for her. They go to Bud's apartment as Bud waits forlornly outside the theater.

Later, at the company's raucous Christmas party, Sheldrake's secretary Miss Olsen (Edie Adams) drunkenly tells Fran that Fran is one of many female employees Sheldrake has seduced into affairs with the promise of divorcing his wife, including Miss Olsen herself. At Bud's apartment, Fran confronts Sheldrake, upset with herself for believing his lies. Sheldrake maintains that he genuinely loves her, but then leaves to return to his suburban family as usual.

Meanwhile, Bud accidentally learns about Sheldrake and Fran when he notices Fran's broken hand mirror, the same one which he returned to Sheldrake. Heartbroken, he lets himself be picked up by a woman at a local bar. When they arrive at his apartment, he is shocked to find Fran in his bed, fully clothed and unconscious from an intentional overdose of his sleeping pills. He sends his pick-up away and enlists the help of his neighbor, Dr. Dreyfuss, to revive Fran without notifying the authorities. To protect his job, Bud takes advantage of his playboy reputation, letting Dreyfuss believe Fran had attempted suicide after a lovers' quarrel with him.

Fran spends two days recuperating there, while Bud tries entertaining and distracting her from any suicidal thoughts. He tells her he once attempted suicide himself. They begin playing gin rummy. Bud dissuades her from phoning her family until her head is clear. During this period one of the executives arrives with a woman; Bud sends them away, but the man sees Fran. Then Fran's brother-in-law Karl Matuschka comes to the office looking for her. Resenting Bud for denying them access to his apartment, the executives direct Karl there. When Bud again takes responsibility for Fran's actions, Karl punches him. Fran kisses Bud on the forehead for not revealing her affair with Sheldrake and, sensing that she now cares for him, Bud smiles and says it "didn't hurt a bit."

Sheldrake rewards Bud with a further promotion, and fires Miss Olsen for what she told Fran. However, Miss Olsen retaliates by telling Sheldrake's wife, who promptly throws him out. Sheldrake moves into a room at his athletic club, but now figures that he can string Fran along while he enjoys his newfound bachelorhood.

But when Sheldrake asks Bud for the key to the apartment, Bud instead gives back the key to the executive washroom and quits the firm. That night at a New Year's Eve party, Sheldrake indignantly tells Fran about this. She finally realizes that Bud is the man who truly loves her. She runs to his apartment, but at the door, she hears a loud noise like a gunshot. Fearing he has attempted suicide again, Fran pounds on the door until Bud opens it, holding an overflowing bottle of champagne which was the source of the noise. Bud has been packing, planning to find a new job and a new home, but is surprised and delighted to see her. Fran insists on resuming their gin rummy game, telling Bud that she is now free as well. He declares his love for her, and she replies lovingly, "Shut up and deal."

Calvin Clifford "Bud" Baxter (Jack Lemmon) and Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), in a still from the film's final scene: "Shut up and deal."

• Jack Lemmon as Calvin Clifford (C.C.) "Bud" Baxter
• Shirley MacLaine as Fran Kubelik
• Fred MacMurray as Jeff D. Sheldrake, personnel manager, Baxter's boss and apartment user
• Ray Walston as Joe Dobisch, office manager and Baxter apartment user
• Jack Kruschen as Dr. Dreyfuss, Baxter's neighbor
• David Lewis as Al Kirkeby, manager and Baxter apartment user
• Edie Adams as Miss Olsen
• Hope Holiday as Mrs. Margie MacDougall
• Joan Shawlee as Sylvia
• Naomi Stevens as Mrs. Mildred Dreyfuss
• Johnny Seven as Karl Matuschka (Fran's cab driving brother-in-law)
• Joyce Jameson as the blonde in the bar
• Hal Smith as Santa Claus in the bar
• Willard Waterman as Mr. Vanderhoff, manager and Baxter apartment user
• David White as Mr. Eichelberger, manager and Baxter apartment user

Jack Lemmon in a still from the film's trailer. The Apartment marked his second collaboration with Billy Wilder after Some Like It Hot.

Immediately following the success of Some Like It Hot, Wilder and Diamond wished to make another film with Lemmon. Wilder had originally planned to cast Paul Douglas as Sheldrake; however, after he died unexpectedly, MacMurray was cast.

The initial concept came from Brief Encounter by Noël Coward, in which Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) meets Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) for a thwarted tryst in his friend's apartment. However, due to the Hays Production Code, Wilder was unable to make a film about adultery in the 1940s. Wilder and Diamond also based the film partially on a Hollywood scandal in which high-powered agent Jennings Lang was shot by producer Walter Wanger for having an affair with Wanger's wife, actress Joan Bennett. During the affair, Lang used a low-level employee's apartment.[2] Another element of the plot was based on the experience of one of Diamond's friends, who returned home after breaking up with his girlfriend to find that she had committed suicide in his bed.

Although Wilder generally required his actors to adhere exactly to the script, he allowed Lemmon to improvise in two scenes: In one scene, he squirts a bottle of nasal spray across the room, and in another, he sings while cooking spaghetti (which he strains through the grid of a tennis racket). In another scene, where Lemmon was supposed to mime being punched, he failed to move correctly, and was accidentally knocked down. Wilder chose to use the shot of the genuine punch in the film. Lemmon also caught a cold when one scene on a park bench was filmed in sub-zero weather.

Art director Alexandre Trauner used forced perspective to create the set of a large insurance company office. The set appeared to be a very long room full of desks and workers; however, successively smaller people and desks were placed to the back of the room, ending up with children. He designed the set of Baxter's apartment to appear smaller and shabbier than the spacious apartments that usually appeared in films of the day. He used items from thrift stores and even some of Wilder's own furniture for the set.[3]

Shirley MacLaine in the trailer for the film.

In 1960, the film doubled its $3 million budget at the U.S. box office.[7][8][9] Critics were split on The Apartment.[7][10] Time and Newsweek praised it,[8] as did The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther, who called the film "gleeful, tender, and even sentimental" and Wilder's direction "ingenious".[11] Esquire critic Dwight Macdonald gave the film a poor review,[10] calling it "a paradigm of corny avantgardism".[12] Others took issue with the film's controversial depictions of infidelity and adultery,[10] with critic Hollis Alpert of the Saturday Review dismissing it as "a dirty fairy tale".[7]

MacMurray relates that after the film's release he was accosted by women in the street who berated him for making a "dirty filthy movie", and one of them hit him with her purse.[3] In 2001, Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert gave the film four stars out of four, and added it to his Great Movies list.[13] The film currently holds a 94% "Certified Fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 66 reviews with an average rating of 8.7/10; the site's consensus states that "Director Billy Wilder's customary cynicism is leavened here by tender humor, romance, and genuine pathos."[14]

Although Lemmon did not win the Oscar, Kevin Spacey dedicated his Oscar for American Beauty (1999) to Lemmon's performance. According to the behind-the-scenes feature on the American Beauty DVD, the film's director, Sam Mendes, had watched The Apartment (among other classic American films) as inspiration in preparation for shooting his film.

Within a few years after The Apartment's release, the routine use of black-and-white film in Hollywood had ended. As of 2014, only two black-and-white movies have won the Academy Award for Best Picture after The Apartment did: Schindler's List (1993) and The Artist (2011).

In 1994, The Apartment was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. In 2002, a poll of film directors conducted by Sight and Sound magazine listed the film as the 14th greatest film of all time (tied with La Dolce Vita).[17] In 2006, Premiere voted this film as one of "The 50 Greatest Comedies Of All Time".

American Film Institute lists:

• AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies (#93),[18]
• AFI's 100 Years...100 Laughs (#20),[19]
• AFI's 100 Years...100 Passions (#62),[20]
• AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) (#80).[21]
• AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes:
  • Fran Kubelik: "Shut up, and deal." – Nominated

In 1968, Burt Bacharach, Hal David and Neil Simon created a musical adaptation titled Promises, Promises which opened on Broadway at the Shubert Theatre in New York City. Starring Jerry Orbach, Jill O'Hara and Edward Winter in the roles of Chuck, Fran and Sheldrake, the production closed in 1972. An all-star revival began in 2010 with Sean Hayes, Kristin Chenoweth and Tony Goldwyn as the three leads. This version added famous Bacharach/David songs "I Say a Little Prayer" and "A House Is Not a Home" to the roster.

• List of American films of 1960
• Life in a... Metro
• Raaste Kaa Patthar

Wikimedia Commons has media related to The Apartment.

• The Apartment essay by Kyle Westphal on the National Film Registry site.
• Quotations related to The Apartment at Wikiquote
• The Apartment at AllMovie
• The Apartment at the American Film Institute Catalog
• The Apartment on IMDb
• The Apartment at Rotten Tomatoes
• The Apartment at the TCM Movie Database