Airing Thursday, March 3rd at 8:00 PM ET
Academy Awards for Best Picture, Director (Billy Wilder), Screenplay (Wilder, I.A.L. Diamond), Editing (Daniel Mandell), Black-and-White Art Direction/Set Decoration (Alexander Trauner, Edward G. Boyle)
Nominations for Best Actor (Jack Lemmon), Actress (Shirley MacLaine), Supporting Actor (Jack Kruschen), Black-and-White Cinematography (Joseph LaShelle), Sound (Gordon Sawyer)
In the second half of 1960, you could hardly turn on the radio without hearing the theme from The Apartment by the piano duo Ferrante and Teicher or tune to a television variety show without seeing the pair pound away at the lush romanticism of the melody. The instrumental rose to number 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, a measure of the popularity of the picture it was taken from, the story of a minor cog in a vast corporate machine who gets ahead by lending his apartment to the company’s executives for their extramarital affairs.
One of the most successful writer-director-producers of his time, Billy Wilder created in The Apartment what many consider the summation of all he had done on screen up to that point. He was the master of a type of bittersweet comedy that had a sadness and a barbed commentary of modern life at its core. Even his darkest dramas – among them Double Indemnity (1944), Sunset Boulevard (1950) and The Big Carnival (aka Ace in the Hole, 1951) – had elements of sardonic, macabre satire. With this film, he managed to make a commercially successful entertainment that, for all its laughter and romance, took a serious stab at the prevailing attitudes and way of life of a country in which getting ahead in business had become the greatest measure of personal success.
In a way, The Apartment was as much a film of its time as The Graduate (1967) would be at the other end of the decade. Both intended to be sharp comic-dramatic satires of the moment, sharing a jaundiced view of the contemporary world of status and ambition and a cynical take on sex and relationships tempered by a sweet sentimentality. Each ended with its central couple finally overcoming misunderstandings and romantic roadblocks to face an uncertain future together.
The films received similarly divided critical reactions when they first came out; The Apartment was praised for being “gleeful, tender” and “ingenious” and slammed as “a paradigm of corny avant-gardism,” much as the later film was considered both a sincere snapshot of youthful alienation and a superficial sell-out. Both gave rise to hit records and were hugely successful at the box office. Released in mid-June, Wilder’s film brought in more than double its $3 million budget by year’s end, finishing at number 8 in the highest-grossing releases of 1960. And the Academy Awards were still to come.
Best Picture
When nominations were announced on February 27, 1961, The Apartment scored ten, the most of any of the year’s releases. By the time of the Academy Award presentations on April 17, it had already won awards from the British Academy, the Golden Globes and the New York Film Critics Circle. At the Oscar ceremony, it won the most, five altogether, beating out the year’s biggest production, Spartacus, which wasn’t even up for Best Picture. All in all, not a bad night for a film that featured adultery, suicide and amoral corporate culture – and a comedy at that.
“I always felt that Billy Wilder grew a rose in a garbage pail with this one,” the picture’s leading man, Jack Lemmon, later stated. “He was throwing cold water right in our faces about the terrible false premises with which most of our society lives. He challenged our priorities and the way we rationalize our behavior on the grounds of getting ahead in America – at a time when it wasn’t fashionable to challenge these things. He gave us a pretty good jolt, and it hasn’t been done a hell of a lot better since then.”
The movie was a hallmark in Lemmon’s career. The young actor had already made a name for himself as the freshest, most talented comic performer in movies, especially in his work with Wilder on Some Like It Hot (1959). The Apartment was created with Lemmon in mind, and it marked his transition into the more dramatic roles that established him as one of the leading actors of his time. He said he signed onto the picture after Wilder told him the story but before he ever saw a line of the script: “I’d have signed even if he said he was going to do the phone book.” He was rewarded with an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor and would go on to make a total of seven films with Wilder.
It was also an important role for Shirley MacLaine as Lemmon’s love interest, elevator girl Fran Kubelik. Her Best Actress nomination for this performance helped establish her as a serious actress of great career longevity. She and Lemmon reunited under Wilder’s direction for Irma La Douce (1963).
Even Soviet-bloc critics loved The Apartment, lauding it as an indictment of the American system and a story that could only have happened in a capitalist city like New York. At a dinner honoring him in East Berlin, Wilder said the movie “could happen anywhere, in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Rome, Paris, London.” When Wilder said the one place it could not have happened was Moscow, the East Germans broke into thunderous applause and cheers. After the ovation died down, Wilder continued: “The reason this picture could not have taken place in Moscow is that in Moscow nobody has his own apartment.” The remark was met with grim silence.
This was the last black-and-white film to win Best Picture until Schindler’s List (1993), a project Wilder was once considered to direct. In 1994, The Apartment was selected for preservation in the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
Best Director
This was far from Billy Wilder’s first time at bat with Oscar. His three nominations for this film (picture, director, screenplay) brought his total to 20 at this point, most of them for writing and eight for directing. (His only other win as director was for The Lost Weekend, 1945). His wins as producer, director and co-writer of The Apartment made him only the second director of nine to pull off such a triple play.
Wilder’s brilliance at balancing light and dark material is evident in the scene where Lemmon’s character comes home drunk with a bar pick-up to find Fran (MacLaine) unconscious on his bed with an empty bottle of sleeping pills next to her. Lemmon goes back and forth between the kooky pick-up in the living room, which is all comedy, and the dying girl he loves in the bedroom. Wilder walks the tightrope between humor and tragedy and creates sympathy for his morally ambiguous characters in a way very few filmmakers could pull off.
Lemmon said he learned much about filmmaking from Wilder, particularly the director’s use of “hooks,” bits of business the audience remembers long after they’ve forgotten other aspects of the movie. One such hook was the passing of the key to Baxter’s apartment. Lemmon said for years after the picture’s release, people would come up to him and say, “Hey, Jack, can I have the key?”
Wilder gave Lemmon free rein to fill in the character of C.C. “Bud” Baxter in performance. He compared the actor favorably to Charles Chaplin and thought he could do no wrong. He even kept in a funny moment – the exaggerated stream of the squeezed nasal spray – that Lemmon improvised. “With Wilder, like with [John] Ford, the best way is to do it rather than talk about it,” Lemmon explained, obviously thinking back on when Wilder and co-writer I.A.L. Diamond deliberated for 20 minutes before consenting to Lemmon’s request to say “yes” twice.
Wilder was not so loose with Shirley MacLaine, who reportedly drove him and Diamond to distraction with her ad-libbing. Absolute sticklers about their script, the director forced her to do one of the elevator scenes five times because she kept missing one word.
Wilder and cinematographer Joseph LaShelle were occasionally at odds over the look of the film. LaShelle, who had worked with directors who came primarily from television, wanted to use more close-ups, a shot Wilder prefers to avoid. “In film making, I like the normal set-up, like Wyler uses, like John Ford, like Chaplin,” Wilder once said. “I’m against this fancy stuff. It reminds an audience that artisans have intruded. I don’t want them to grab their partner and say, ‘My God, look at that!’”
Nonetheless, Wilder’s sets were known to be easy-going, energetic and full of humorous interaction. He also added touches that cater to an actor’s need for small details to make them feel secure. For instance, for Fred MacMurray, playing against type as a sleazy executive, he created memo pads and stationery with his character’s name on them, even though no one but the actor ever saw them.
Best Screenplay
Billy Wilder always worked best with a script collaborator. He had created several successful films in the 1930s and 40s with Charles Brackett before they ended their association. It wasn’t until the mid-50s before Wilder found another writer he could work as well with. The quiet, introverted I.A.L. Diamond had a dramatically different personality from the outgoing Wilder, but they shared a common European immigrant background, the same dry sense of humor and an interest in many of the same themes and characterizations, such as the use of tangled webs of deception. They had two successful pictures under their belt – Love in the Afternoon (1957) and Some Like It Hot– when they started this one.
The premise of the plot was inspired by the British romance Brief Encounter (1945), in which the two would-be lovers meet at an apartment borrowed from a friend. Diamond also based a plot point on the experience of a friend who broke up with his girlfriend and found her dead in his bed, a suicide.
Wilder and Diamond did not have an ending to their film until the completion of shooting. They handed Lemmon and MacLaine wet mimeographed script pages 20 minutes before shooting the final scene. Quick studies, the two did the scene in one take.
The Writers Guild of America ranked the film's screenplay the 15th greatest ever.
Best Editing
It’s not out of the question to consider just how much of a contribution editor Daniel Mandell made to the picture. As in many previous productions, Wilder kept Doane Harrison, himself a noted editor, on the set with him at all times as associate producer and never made a shot until they both discussed it. As a result, he was able to shoot sparingly, cutting the film in the camera and eliminating costly set-ups that might never be used.
According to director Cameron Crowe, who spoke with Wilder about the film many times, “When filming on The Apartment was completed, so exact was Wilder’s execution that the entire movie was edited in a matter of days.” Crowe said Wilder only exaggerated slightly when he told him there was about five feet of unused film.
Still, Mandell’s talents are without question. In his long career he was also nominated for editing The Little Foxes (1941) and Wilder’s Witness for the Prosecution (1957) and won for The Pride of the Yankees (1942) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Mandell edited nine films by William Wyler, a director known for shooting far more footage than Wilder.
Best Black-and-White Art Direction/Set Decoration
To create the effect of a vast sea of faces laboring grimly and impersonally at their desks in the huge insurance company office, designers Alexander Trauner and Edward G. Boyle devised an interesting technique. Full-sized actors sat at the desks in the front and smaller and smaller people were used at ever tinier desks moving toward the rear, followed by even smaller desks with cut-out figures operated by wires. This forced perspective gave the effect of a much larger space than could have been achieved in the limited studio space.
Unlike the spacious apartments usually seen in films of the day, the title apartment was designed to look shabbier and more cramped and used items from thrift stores and even some of Wilder's own furniture for the set.
