The 1960 film about a downtrodden insurance worker and his burgeoning crush is full of staccato repartee and unforgettable jokes. It’s barely aged a day
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or romantic comedies and Christmas movies alike, a little misery can go a long way. No one understood this balancing act more than Billy Wilder, whose films ran the gamut from bottomless cynicism (Ace in the Hole) to gender-bending farce (Some Like it Hot). His 1960 film The Apartment splits the difference.
Like another yuletide classic, Carol, the film finds inspiration in David Lean’s Brief Encounter, which depicts an extramarital affair briefly consummated in the bed of a friend’s apartment. In an old interview, Wilder says he was compelled by a character “who comes back home and climbs into the warm bed the lovers just left”, and so The Apartment’s hero, CC “Bud” Baxter, was born.
Baxter, played by Jack Lemmon (hired right off the back of Some Like it Hot), is an insurance worker who scales the corporate ladder by leasing his bedroom to a rotating cast of middle managers. The concept isn’t far removed from an Airbnb, though Baxter weathers the additional humiliations of accommodating his superiors’ sexual conquests outside work. On one sorry occasion, a late request sees him stranded in Central Park on a winter’s night.
