Blogging the AFI’s top 100 films of all time: #93, ‘The Apartment’

Because somebody's got to do it...

You’d be forgiven for thinking I’m not, that I’d in fact given up on the whole dumb idea and hoped you wouldn’t notice, but I am still blogging the AFI’s ‘Top 100 American Movies of All Time’ list, from 100 to 1.

So far we’ve asked if ‘Pulp Fiction’ still holds up (it does). We’ve spent time on the horse helpin’ the duke Search the hills for hide or hair of his Injun-stained niece. We hung out in front of the pork store chewin’ the fat with the ‘GoodFellas.’ Before that, we spent an aggressively unfunny two hours ‘Bringing Up Baby,’ forgave ourselves for previously dissin’ ‘Unforgiven’, and boarded two hilarious time machines: ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,’ (go ahead guess; you’ll never get it!) and ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy,’ about whose title song we wondered, Does any of this actually make sense? (Not so much).

But that’s all in the past, the distant distant past. Ancient history, man. You wouldn’t think I’d need a break after watching only the first (or last) six of the hundred, but I did. Or maybe I didn’t. It’s not that I’d hit a wall. I hope I don’t hit a really bad wall until I’ve got fifty of these babies under my belt. The real problem was that I’d already seen #93, Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, more than once. More than twice, even. And I had no interest in seeing the damned thing again.

Not that it’s a bad picture. It’s not a bad picture. It’s actually a very fine picture. Billy Wilder knows his stuff. So does his writer, Itzek Dominici or “I.A.L. Diamond” as he called himself when he started publishing articles in the Spectator, Columbia University’s student paper. His writing attracted such attention at Columbia that Hollywood offered him a contract right out of school.

Less than five minutes into The Apartment, all my trepidation melted away. The voice-over that begins the film was so direct, so simple, yet so perfectly written, that I was immediately, once again, won over by the film.

This was New York.

On the first frame, an aerial shot of an incredibly polluted Manhattan, Jack Lemmon starts talking. “On November 1, 1959, the population of New York city was eight million, forty two thousand, seven hundred and eighty three,” he says, by way of introduction. “I know these things because I work in an insurance company.” Oh, riiiiiight. That explains it. The last time I sat down with an insurance agent, he spent an hour telling my wife all the nasty ways in which I could be killed or, even better, incapacitated. I don’t remember hearing any funny little anecdotes.

Working a half day, I see.

We see Lemmon (as C.C. Baxter) punching away at this very charming antique adding machine that’s about the size of five laptops. It’s a cute moment, and a great example of how Wilder infuses otherwise banal bits with a little something extra. As the machine computes his figures, rather musically, Lemmon watches it, bemused, his head nodding ever so slightly to the rhythm. It’s really nothing to jump up and down about, but at the same time, it’s quite nice. If this movie were made today, they’d overplay the moment. Jim Carrey’s head would flop around on his rubbery neck. The machine would burst into flames. Someone would fart. It would be hilarious.

When Lemmon looks up it’s 5:19. At 5:20, he explains, the workday ends… with a freaking bell. Bbbbbrrrrrriiiiiinnnnngggg! And look at what happens!

Where the hell do you think you're going?

Everybody…. just…… leaves! They drape specially-made (probably in the U.S. of A.) nylon covers over their hulking antiques and skedaddle. Probably to a bar for three or four martinis. Or, I don’t know, home, for… what’s that ancient idea called…? Quality time? Quality time with the family? Is that what that concept was called? Some of these people will be home before six o’clock. They’ll have somewhere around six hours to just… do whatever. See their friends. Hang with the family. Catch a play, a movie, dinner, drinks, all of the above. Another way to say this is that roughly one-third of their waking day will be spent NOT WORKING. At all. No blackberry. No freaking email. No files lugged home on the subway. Jesus.

How did we screw this up?

One of the best (or, depending, the worst) reasons to watch old movies like this is the glimpse they afford into another era. A bygone era. It would be bittersweet if the difference between then and now weren’t such a shocker. It’s been half a century since The Apartment came out. The voice-over continues from Lemmon, who has stayed behind to work, the only one who has done so, and not to “catch up” or “brown nose,” but because “I have this little problem… with my apartment.”

He's probably earning overtime!

Then we dissolve to a row of very nice brownstones, and Lemmon, and Wilder, and Diamond, kick us when we’re down. “I live in the west 60’s,” he says, “just half a block from central park.” Uh… what? Let me get this straight, Mr. C.C. Baxter. You, one of several thousand insurance company employees, just a normal working stiff, nothing special, live, basically, next door to, like Bono.

His apartment (“A nice apartment,” he says) costs him $85 a month. “It used to be $80 until last July, when Mrs. Lieberman put in a second-hand air conditioning unit.” I’m gonna table that crime for a moment. I mean, how much could a “second-hand air conditioning unit,” probably one of those enormous window sill babies, just waiting to flatten someone on the sidewalk some day, cost in 1959? Thirty bucks? These days, C.C., in addition to taking our work home with us and turning ourselves into OCD zombies we also, uh, install our own freaking air conditioners. Mrs. Lieberman’s no dummy, it seems. That thing’s paying for itself over and over again. But let’s get back to the rent. $85 a month. Upper West Side. Steps from the park.

Adjusted for inflation, that rent would today be – wait for it… $609. That’s right. Six hundred and nine dollars. I looked for a one bedroom apartment, which is what C.C. Baxter has, with an eat-in kitchen, a fireplace (which he also has), and lovely period details, for six hundred and nine dollars. Yeah, I didn’t find that. But I did find this:

Look, there's a kitchen in my living room.

It’s half a block from the park, and it costs $2100. The sad thing is, every New Yorker out there just said, “That’s actually not that bad,” including me. But it’s a far cry from C.C. Baxter’s swanky bachelor pad:

I know, I know, it's a set. But still.

Look at the size of it! You could ride a horse in there. And that molding! Baxter’s salary, he tells us (because he’s a New Yorker and we talk about these things out in the open) is $95 a week. That sum, adjusted for inflation, would be an annual $35,000 and change in today’s dollars, which is probably on the low side of what an insurance stiff would make. But I know this much: today, all the insurance stiffs live in Queens. But the important thing to note is that back then, less than one-quarter of Baxter’s pay went to housing. Which is, I’m told, the way it used to be around these parts. Today, or at least before the economy went to hell in a shopping cart, that ratio had steadily crept up to between one-third and one-half.

The story of The Apartment is classic high concept. Pretty much every man that Baxter works with has a mistress. Back then men had time for both family and affairs, and wives were so put upon and bored by the whole thing that they didn’t care that their men were nailing every secretary in the pool. These men don’t want to shell out for hotel rooms all the time, so they use Baxter’s pad. Makes sense. They drink his liquor, listen to his records, annoy his neighbors, and soil his sheets, while poor Baxter waits, often in the rain, for them to finish their dirty business and give him back his key. This situation creates one of those perfect “misunderstanding scenarios” that are so easily exploited for comedy. Growing up in the 80’s, I always thought that the writers of Three’s Company invented this trope. Mr. Roper was always overhearing something halfway through and making that face he liked to make. I was a normal Midwestern kid. I didn’t read Shakespeare. I’d never heard of Plato or Aristotle. I lived in a paper bag in the middle of the road and I was lucky! My inadequate public school education is almost as quaint as Baxter’s eighty dollar rent.

The Apartment really is an enjoyable movie. It’s clever and funny throughout, but not afraid to go dark. And the script is a wonder of craftsmanship, particularly the excellent dialogue, which is never predictable. When Baxter first asks Mrs. Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine) to see a play (he’s been given tickets by boss Fred MacMurray in exchange for, you guessed it, his apartment), he spouts off all of her stats. Her height, weight, social security number, her address, her roommate’s name, the fact that she’s had her appendix out. There’s very little of what he’d found out that he doesn’t share. In real life, Mrs. K would have, of course, called the cops. Or learned karate. Or something. In the movies, she’s basically like, “Oh really? Haha. That’s so funny. You’re not creepy at all! What color panties am I wearing?” Ah, simpler times.

The movie is also filled with great moments of visual storytelling. Baxter finds a compact with a broken mirror in his apartment the night his boss (Fred MacMurray, good about half the time) used it. When he gives it back, MacMurray tells him that his mistress chucked it at him. The nerve! “They expect you to leave your wife or something,” he jokes. Women! So silly. Later, when Lemmon has fallen for MacLaine, whom he thinks is a “nice girl,” and he’s in need of a mirror, out comes the compact. Doh! It’s a great moment of visual storytelling, packed in a way that not only forwards the plot but deepens the movie’s themes.

Later, at a bar on New Year’s eve, Lemmon orders a martini. It’s obvious he’s been there a while, but we only know how long when the barkeep brings the drink. Lemmon plucks the olive from the glass and lays it down, adding it, we see for the first time, to several others. He’s building himself a circle. I actually counted the olives. There were 7. Later, after meeting a girl and dancing to closing time, we get another glimpse of his olive collection. Now there are 13. Thirteen martinis! Ah, simpler times.

In the end, the only real criticism I have is that Wilder and Diamond basically wanted to have their cake and eat it to. The dramatic question of the film is: will Baxter and Mrs. Kubelik end up together? But the deeper, more meaningful questions is: will Baxter ever stand up for himself. Will he, as his neighbor, the doctor, urges, finally “be a mensch”? The more meaningful questions are always about our own character. At first it seems like these answers will end in perfect discord which results, I think, in a perfect level of catharsis. No he doesn’t get the girl, so it’s sad, but he stands up for himself, locates his moral compass, and becomes a stand-up guy. So it’s satisfying without being too easy. But Wilder and Diamond couldn’t resist chucking in a resolution that sends MacLaine running back to Baxter’s pad. It’s not a bad move, per se. I’m not against “happy endings.” I’m not all like, “The glass is half empty, damn it!” I just think it would have been a better movie without it. So sue me. I’m going apartment hunting.

The Final Judgement from the mighty ‘Closely Watched’ tower:

Top 100 of All Time? Really? Or somebody made a mistake? Top 100, definitely.

Check in next time for #92, A Place in the Sun. And since I’ve never actually seen this one, it won’t take me three months to actually watch it. I promise.