The Apartment is better

I watched The Apartment (1960) thinking that I could write this blog more easily by comparing this film with the Billy Wilder film we watched previously, Some Like It Hot (1959). They’re both comedies, they were released within a year of each other, and they were directed and acted by the same two men; easy, right? These two films, however, seem almost not to have been made by the same director. The Apartment is an excellent blend of comedy and drama, its trailer appropriately describing that “There are laughs. . . There are tears. . . There is action. . . every night in The Apartment.” Some Like It Hot lacks the maturity of The Apartment, which deals with issues such as loneliness, social hierarchy, and suicide, yet I believe that somehow more in the latter film than the former, we laughed at the more inappropriate moments.

I didn’t think that The Apartment, although visually spectacular, was particularly original in the way that it was shot, and neither does Mark Cousins (The Story of Film, p.8), who has recently become my good friend. I noticed several uses of a crane (like people bustling into the elevator near the beginning), interesting pan shots (like Miss Kubelik running to Baxter’s apartment near the end), and camera angles that create illusions (like the seemingly infinite number of office desks all throughout the film), but the film wasn’t progressive in its style. Yet despite its lack of innovation, this film is beautiful: It’s evident that every scene was well thought-out, and you could stop the film anywhere, and it wouldn’t be mundane. My favorite scene is when Baxter is forced out of his apartment and hangs out on a park bench (0:16:02). As Flo pointed out while we were watching, the leaves are falling incredibly quickly, and I made an immediate connection with the “Autumn Leaf Duel” scene in Hero (2002). Even though Baxter is sitting in B&W and Moon and Flying Snow are fighting in vivid color, I think both scenes are equally beautiful, the same image of falling leaves connecting the separate technologies of their times.

The key to Baxter’s apartment obviously symbolizes secrets—A key opens a lock that is hiding something, and all the men who pass around Baxter’s key are all living secret lives—but it more interestingly and kind of pathetically represents Baxter’s dignity and power. It is the key to his home, the one place that he has authority, yet it is passed around by all of his superiors against his true wishes. He lets them do it, however, with the promise of a promotion. Baxter is whoring himself to climb to a higher rung on the ladder of corporate success, and he does this by giving away his key, giving away what little power—albeit symbolic—he has. He later triumphantly regains his dignity when he keeps his apartment key and instead gives Sheldrake the washroom key; he quits his job, which, to anyone else, was his only source of power, and keeps his symbolic power instead, which is the one that really counts (I guess).

Ebert, another good friend, points out that both Baxter and Fran are obsessed by the concept of “boss,” and it is their devotion to it that leads them to all the unfortunate instances of sadness. Baxter sucks up to “boss” by giving out his key, but this leads him to be miserable, not to mention catch a cold. Fran wants to marry “boss,” but she never thinks about what’s right for her, which eventually leads to a suicide attempt. Their mutual devotion to “boss” ultimately leads to their mutual loneliness.

The loneliness is portrayed so well in this film, and it is done so using several different techniques. Beginning with a shot of Baxter working amid other frantic employees who eventually fade away, leaving only him at his desk, the film sets the somber tone. The scene I mentioned earlier about workers rushing into an elevator explains that he is simply an unimportant person in a sea of faces. The office Christmas Eve party is shot overhead, showing Baxter pushing through a mass of people, some of them going at it. These shots in themselves represent the insignificance of Baxter in a world full of people.

Solitude is also portrayed by some of the action. When Baxter goes to a bar on Christmas Eve, he depresses even the guy dressed up as Santa Claus. He later tells Fran that he’s got a date and points toward a lady, but as he starts walking toward the lady, another man grabs her, and we see that Baxter is actually walking toward a rack of books. When Fran and Baxter play gin when she’s recovering from her overdose, she barely even plays, giving up not on the card game but on life.

Sadder still is the use of dialogue to show the characters’ loneliness. Fran has some of the most depressing lines ever. She remarks about her broken mirror, “I like it that way. Makes me look the way I feel,” and when she goes to meet Sheldrake at the restaurant, she sighs, “Same sauce: sweet and sour.” Even Baxter is lonely in his little jokes: Fran asks, “Do you usually have dinner alone?” to which he replies, “Oh, no, sometimes I have dinner with Ed Sullivan, or sometimes Dinah Shore, Perry Como. The other night I had dinner with Mae West.”

Luckily for them, the film is not a tragedy, and through their loneliness, they find each other. “Ya know, I used to live like Robinson Crusoe; I mean, shipwrecked among 8 million people. And then one day I saw a footprint in the sand, and there you were.”