Billy Wilder died 10 years ago this week. His films, though, have the gift of eternal life. The Apartment, along with Some Like It Hot, is probably the most cherished of these (okay, I’ll be completely uncontroversial and say the best). It will be back in UK cinemas in June. This is the second or third re-release of the film that I can remember in the last 15 years. My instinct in these circumstances is to complain about the same old titles being wheeled out again, and to protest that the resources should be splashed instead on digging out the ones that are overlooked or forgotten (such as Wilder’s own fascinating and incomplete The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, which was re-released 10 years ago).
But it’s hard to stay gruff for long when faced with The Apartment. Instead I find myself thinking how wonderful it will be to see it again on a large screen. The last time I watched it was on TV a year or two ago. It was three or four in the morning, I was ill, unable to sleep, knocking back the Lemsip. But finding The Apartment on TV was the best pick-me-up of all. It’s snappy and jolly but with the unmistakably Wilderesque strains of regret, melancholy and scepticism running through its romance.
The stench of the immoral or the venal in Wilder’s work is so potent as to be made tolerable only by the crispness of the storytelling — if Double Indemnity and Ace in the Hole were not such wildly compelling entertainments, they would plunge us forever into an inescapable pessimism. Wilder’s unshowy brilliance, his meticulous x-rays of human fallibility, make great art out of the pitiful. (How he would have hated that: “I don’t make cinema,” he said. “I make movies. I make movies for amusement.”)
Fresh off Some Like It Hot, Wilder, his co-writer, I A L Diamond, and their star, Jack Lemmon, waltzed straight into The Apartment. “While I was working with Mr. Lemmon for the first time on Some Like It Hot,” Wilder said in a delightful interview with The Paris Review,
I thought to myself, “This guy’s got a little bit of genius. I would love to make another picture with him, but I don’t have a story.” So I looked in my little black book and I came across a note about David Lean’s movie Brief Encounter, that story about a married woman who lives in the country, comes to London, and meets a man. They have an affair in his friend’s apartment. What I had written was, “What about the friend who has to crawl back into that warm bed?”
CC “Bud” Baxter (Lemmon) is the poor sap in question. He’s rising fast at work, one promotion after another, but the secret of his success is that he loans out his apartment to the company executives for their trysts, one 45-minute slot at a time. It’s a sleazy little set-up, and Wilder keeps the movie galloping along so briskly that we can overlook the unpleasantness at first. But then reality starts to creep in as Baxter realises that the woman he longs to bring home in his arms — chirpy elevator assistant Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine) — has already been to his apartment, in the company of his boss (Fred MacMurray). The question of how Baxter finds out allows Wilder and Diamond to demonstrate their knack for succinct storytelling: one broken compact mirror is all it takes to make his heart break.
In fact, they are unbeatable at turning out these “moments” — witness also Baxter’s classic straining-spaghetti-through-a-tennis-racket scene, born out of Diamond’s realisation that “Women love seeing a man trying to cook in the kitchen.”
Such stand-out scenes never impede the film’s precise, fluid rhythm. Wilder shot the picture in 50 days flat, and edited it in under a week. “We had three feet of unused film,” he said proudly in Cameron Crowe’s excellent book Interviews with Billy Wilder. (Read Andrew O’Hagan’s lively review of it here. Wilder, you see, had been Crowe’s first choice to play Tom Cruise’s mentor in Jerry Maguire, a role the late director sadly declined.)
Fifty-seven days! That only enriches the film’s miracles. This is lean, funny film-making, expertly paced and played, ending in a romantic flourish to swoon over. It won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay. Wilder said: “It was ideal for Lemmon, the combination of sweet and sour. I liked it when someone called that picture a dirty fairy tale…” It was, he reckoned, “the picture [of mine] that has the fewest faults.”
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