The Apartment (1960)

MOVIE-WISE, THERE HAS NEVER BEEN ANYTHING LIKE IT - LAUGH-WISE, LOVE-WISE, OR OTHERWISE-WISE!

There’s a school of thought that suggests that Billy Wilder is the best director of all time, the reasoning simply being that he, arguably, mastered every genre he touched. If you were to ask someone what the best film noir of all time is, a regular answer is Double Indemnity. Asking about the best comedy ever, many will say Some Like it Hot. Many cite Sabrina as on of the best romantic comedies of all time, and Stalag 17 one of the best war pictures. In 1960, he released what many believe to be his best work, which won him three Oscars in the process – The Apartment.

C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) is a mid-level insurance clerk looking to rise through the ranks of his company, and who loans his apartment to company executives to use as place to take their mistresses. Things become more complicated when he develops a crush on a fellow employee Fran Kubelick (Shirley MacLaine), who is having an affair with the man who controls the promotions, Jeff Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray).

There is story that’s often recounted about The Apartment, that Billy Wilder got the initial idea for the film when watching David Lean’s bittersweet tale of unconsumated love, Brief Encounter. So it goes that the thought occurred to him of a character we never actually see in that film, a friend of Alec’s whose home they go to for some physical congress, only to be interrupted by the friend’s unexpected return home. Wilder considered this character, someone who would climb into his own bed, which has only just recently vacated by two lovers… I know, kind of creepy, right? It’s not exactly the kind of light-hearted notion that rests at the heart of many films described by many as “romantic comedy.” Still, using this singular idea as the basis, Wilder and co-writer I.A.L. Diamond constructed the story of C.C. Baxter, a lonely bachelor trying to climb the corporate ladder by, essentially, loaning out his home and bed to a few company executives for illicit trysts with women who aren’t their wives. Really, in the hands of anyone else, this is the kind of thing that could go horrendously wrong and wind up starring Rob Schneider. It could have been too schmaltzy, too sordid or just incredibly depressing.

Thankfully, Wilder is much smarter than that. Clearly, he knew that, like all projects, it’s the rendering of the characters and how they would find themselves in such a situation that will help sell the film entire. Characters in The Apartment spend their time effectively compromising their own morals or their own current happiness, deferring to the whims of someone else, The Boss, hoping that it will lead to something better down the line. Once that’s been achieved, they can get on with their real lives. Baxter is a relatively faceless employee at the company, just another body sitting at a desk on the 19^th floor (the shot of the vast sea of people at similar desks shows just what kind of odds Baxter must rise above). Owing to a simple favour to someone long ago and snowballing from there, he has begun to basically pimp out his own home as some sort of quick-stop motel to his superiors, who each make endless promises to put in a good word for him come promotion time. Baxter is so poor at confrontation, so susceptible to vague threats of not being considered for executive positions that he literally puts himself out constantly, sometimes even after he’s gone to bed.

Fran Kubelik is of a similar ilk, in that she is willing to sacrifice her own happiness, her own personal standing and self respect, all in the hopes of achieving something more down the road amidst promises from callous and rather despicable people. In the same way that Baxter wants to one day be the boss, Kubelik wants to be the boss’ wife. Again like Baxter, this puts her at the mercy of the rather insensitive personnel director Sheldrake, a married man who peppers her with promises of leaving his wife, just as soon as the time is right. It’s certainly not like Baxter or Kubelik are stupid people who can’t recognise that they’re unhappy or that they’re being walked on. They see it, but they’ve made the conscious decision to enter into these engagements because they genuinely believe that they can benefit from it later. And they do get some reward, so they’re not just operating on blind hope. They think it's just something they'll have to put up with for now.

The performances go a long way balancing out what could be a small gaggle of rather cynical and unrelatable characters. Baxter would actually be somewhat repellent as an individual if not for Jack Lemmon’s performance, which makes him appear so likable and sympathetic that you really feel like he’s being taken advantage of. That’s really the greatness of Lemmon here – he makes Baxter seem like the put upon Everyman. Shirley MacLaine is superb as Kubelik, taking her away from the kind of ditzy, naïve girl she could have been, and giving her a quiet dignity and intelligence which in turn gives her a great depth. Just watch how she plays out the whole Christmas scene with MacMurray’s Sheldrake. Most of it is done with just her eyes, but it’s a torrent of emotion writ in quiet expression. Fred MacMurray himself is on fine form as Sheldrake, a loathsome and unfeeling swine who’s gotten used to holding influence and power over people to his advantage, as his string of past workplace conquests can attest.

What has always rather troubles me about the legacy of The Apartment is that it is remembered and regarded as one of the great all time comedies. The American Film Institute put at number 20 in its list of 100 Laughs, and, in 2006, Premiere voted it as one of the 50 greatest comedies ever (the list itself was unranked). Don’t get me wrong, there is some wonderfully wry humour going on in the film, and it can be genuinely very funny, but all of this somewhat negates the more tragic side of things. I just always have visions of people sitting to enjoy their first watch of a classic comedy and being so completely blindsided by a mid-film suicide attempt of one of the main characters that they turn it off. It’s not even what you’d easily regard as a black comedy since they don’t really try to wring humour from these moments of sadness or moderate bleakness. It’s a drama, with a wide scope reaching into comedy and tragedy with equal focus and equal success. The funny stuff is funny, but the tragic stuff is tragic. In the same kind of way that it seems a little unfair to class American Beauty, which was greatly influence by The Apartment, simply as a comedy, this classification seems to be doing it a slight disservice. What should really be taken from this is the amazing skill and deft touch that Wilder is able to use to achieve these two very distinct modes and bring them together so beautifully and seamlessly.

The Apartment is a great and steady mix of wit, charm, and humour, but also pathos, sadness and a dose of cynicism. The script is tight and wonderfully written; Wilder’s direction is so delicately, but firmly controlled; the cinematography is crisp; and the performances are all excellent. It’s misleading to just call it a comedy, since such a description would belie the moments of tragedy and darkness it holds, but it is an absolutely wonderful film to take in precisely because of this excellent blend of comedy and sorrow. Whether or not you will agree that Wilder is the greatest director ever, there is no denying his great talent here.

Annie Hall (1977)

A NERVOUS ROMANCE

One of the most commonly held criticisms of romantic comedies is that they’re all the same, that they all follow the same basic structure and fall into the same basic conclusions. What exactly can people take from this constant slew of generic output? How can you make any kind of personal connection to a story that is so wilfully generalised that it could have been written by a photocopier? It’s not often that you see a romantic comedy that feels like the person that wrote it actually knew what it was like to be in a relationship. That they understand all of the pain and joy that comes with the back and forth of a love story, and are still able to make it both honest and funny and personal. In 1977, one of the world’s most idiosyncratic filmmakers, Woody Allen, gave the world his romantic comedy – Annie Hall.

After breaking up with his girlfriend Annie Hall (Diane Keaton), comedian and perpetual ball of neuroses Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) looks back over their relationship, taking a stream of consciousness journey through the past and his own personality flaws trying to find out where it all went wrong.

I’m going to say it off the bat… I think Annie Hall is one of the best scripts ever. At the film’s opening, Alvy addresses the audience directly, telling two jokes that sum up how he feels about life (“full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it’s all over much too quickly.”) and relationships (“I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member.”). This is frankly one of the most impressively concise and economical openings in film. In less than two minutes, Allen has touched on comedy, tragedy, name-checked Groucho Marx and Sigmund Freud and summed up his main character with a depth and simplicity that’s rarely come across these days. It’s already identified itself as being intelligent and sincere, funny and cynical. The influences are clear and the heart equally so. It’s a hell of a start.

This precision is strewn throughout the film, and is full of so many great lines and memorable characters, that it’s truly something to behold. A scene in which Alvy mentally revisits his old school, recalling the beginnings of his fascination with girls and all they represented to him in later life, is brilliance and sheer comedy gold, especially as some of his classmates announce where they are when all grown up. If you’ve seen the film, you know what I’m talking about… If you haven’t seen the film, I’m not spoiling it for you. Just watch it and thank me later.

The intelligence on display is so striking that it’s almost a bit intimidating, which is perhaps why we really don’t get stuff like this anymore. Characters openly and eruditely discuss art, film, history, death, psychology, media theory, politics, war… and the amazing thing is that you never feel beaten down by it, or left behind by it, because it’s all related back to the central relationship so well that it seems like the most natural thing for these people to do.

And it’s so damn funny. You could blindly point a finger at any page of the script and find a great line, from the very dark (“My grammy never gave gifts. She was too busy getting raped by Cossacks.”) to the satirical (“they don’t throw their garbage away, they turn it into television shows.”) to the oft classics (“Hey, don’t knock masturbation. It’s sex with someone I love.”). Christ, the rate of jokes being fired off could almost rival Airplaine!.

The original title of Annie Hall was meant to be Anhedonia, which is the inability to derive pleasure or joy from anything, and is most definitely the thing that defines Alvy. Annie herself is described as polymorphously perverse, which means she can derive pleasure or joy from anything. The fact that the title was changed shortly before release because it would have been too difficult to explain is neither here nor there. This so wonderfully sums up the nature of the central relationship of the film. It identifies why these two, given their track record, find each other so appealing, but also why it can never work for them. She’s open to everything new; he’s open to nothing new. She sees the glass half full; he sees no point in discussing the contents of some glass because we’re all going to die someday. The fact that Alvy tells us at the beginning that this relationship never works out still doesn’t detract from our hopes as we watch it grow. They look they’re having such fun with each other, they seem to compliment each other so well in that ‘opposites attract’ kind of way. It may be clear that it never works out, but… how can it not work out? And who hasn’t been there in a relationship? This is what I was talking about earlier, about the feeling you get that the person talking to you in the film knows the realities of relationships. The giddy awkwardness of first attraction, the comfort of the intimacy, the gradual dulling of intensity, the sense of restlessness of at least one half of the couple, the bitterness and pain in the break-up… it’s a hell of a roller coaster when you look back on it all, full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it’s all over much too quickly.

Allen’s direction is as rich and dextrous as his script, and is something of scattergun genius because of it, always alive and engaging. The whole film is a flashback as recounted by Alvy, whom we know to be someone so full of splintered thoughts and half- contained neurotic diatribes that it’s a wonder he can get anything done without working himself into knots. Allen’s direction, therefore, matches this sensibility perfectly. The film is a melting pot of filmic techniques and methods that help to tell the story: split-screen; flashbacks within flashbacks; subtitles to show what character’s are really thinking during a conversation; Alvy dragging other people into his story for help and advice; Alvy directly addressing the camera; other characters addressing the camera; and scenes of fantasy, from dragging in intellectual theorists to settle arguments to a straight animated sequence where Alvy can’t even hold a decent relationship with the queen from Snow White. This sounds like an absolute torrent to deal with, but it remains so absolutely approachable that we never lose the train of Alvy’s thoughts or his heartache. It also goes without saying that Wendy Green Bricmont and Ralph Rosenblum’s editing is rock solid.

The acting is above reproach, even in the little roles. Christopher Walken damn near steals the whole show as Annie’s seriously unnerving brother; Paul Simon makes a convincingly slimy L.A. douche type; and Shelley Duvall and Carol Kane make a great, but understated impression as past girlfriend’s of Alvy. Allen himself is on top form, though it’s often said that he presented himself no great challenge since he’s playing himself. However, that’s just it, he’s not playing himself, not really. He’s playing a heightened version of himself, more shambolic and nervous, more prone to brazen self-importance. His half-apologetic defiance of a police officer in L.A. is great to watch. Above all, you can see and feel Alvy’s sincerity when he talks about himself or his views or, most importantly, Annie. And it’s not hard to see why. Diane Keaton is utterly superb as Annie, every inch the smart, ditzy, frustrated, radiant woman in Alvy’s heart. There’s not a moment where you don’t fall for her a little yourself every time you see her. And Allen and Keaton work so damn well together.

The true wonder of this wonderful film is found in how it ends. Yes, we know they don’t wind up together, even though you may spend the whole film wishing it so. Despite this, the film ends on a hopeful note. It’s hopeful because even though Alvy is still obsessed with death and a paralysed with self-analysis and psychosis and he didn’t get the girl, he came close. He got to see and feel genuine love for someone else and if he can do it, anyone can.

To this day, Annie Hall remains as funny and sad and poignant as it was when it was released, and is still one of the best examples of what a romantic comedy can be when done right. I love this film, and I do hope that you will give it a try if you haven’t already.