Baxter, an office worker, makes his apartment available to philandering executives at his office in order to move up the corporate ladder. Things become complicated when his boss takes an elevator girl Baxter has taken a shine to back to his pad.
In this Billy Wilder film, Jack Lemmon is on hand with another effective comic performance. He seemed to be good at playing under-dog characters .We root for him here even though we know he is a bit of a weasel that bends over backwards for unlikable bosses. It's testament to Lemmon's charisma that we are never in doubt that he is a sympathetic character. He is more than matched by Shirley Maclaine here as the elevator girl, though. She was an elfin beauty and it's very easy to understand Baxter's infatuation with her. She is probably the best thing in this film to be honest. Her character undergoes the most extreme story arc, where she veers from comic scenes to an attempted suicide. It's because of this especially that The Apartment is a light film that has some pretty dark undercurrents. The central plot-line was pretty racy stuff for its time as well, with the apartment of the title being a den of iniquity and vice. But on the whole it's pretty light-hearted despite this. But it's often when it gets darker that it gets more interesting, the whole post-suicide attempt sequence was probably the best part of the film. The drama often outweighs the comedy in this one. While it is a romantic comedy, it's not really full of laughs and the plot-line is more melancholic a lot of the time. It also displays a definite cynicism towards the practices of big business in their carefree immorality and misogyny. It's probably a little overlong in fairness and some of the side characters and comedy don't add too much. But overall it's good enough, if perhaps a little over-rated.
In this Billy Wilder film, Jack Lemmon is on hand with another effective comic performance. He seemed to be good at playing under-dog characters .We root for him here even though we know he is a bit of a weasel that bends over backwards for unlikable bosses. It's testament to Lemmon's charisma that we are never in doubt that he is a sympathetic character. He is more than matched by Shirley Maclaine here as the elevator girl, though. She was an elfin beauty and it's very easy to understand Baxter's infatuation with her. She is probably the best thing in this film to be honest. Her character undergoes the most extreme story arc, where she veers from comic scenes to an attempted suicide. It's because of this especially that The Apartment is a light film that has some pretty dark undercurrents. The central plot-line was pretty racy stuff for its time as well, with the apartment of the title being a den of iniquity and vice. But on the whole it's pretty light-hearted despite this. But it's often when it gets darker that it gets more interesting, the whole post-suicide attempt sequence was probably the best part of the film. The drama often outweighs the comedy in this one. While it is a romantic comedy, it's not really full of laughs and the plot-line is more melancholic a lot of the time. It also displays a definite cynicism towards the practices of big business in their carefree immorality and misogyny. It's probably a little overlong in fairness and some of the side characters and comedy don't add too much. But overall it's good enough, if perhaps a little over-rated.