| | | "Movie-wise, There Has Never Been Anything Like ""The Apartment"", Love-wise, Laugh-wise or Otherwise-wise!"
Features: DVD, Widescreen, Aspect Ratio 2.35:1, English, Spanish, Subtitled, Sensormatic
Winner of five 1960 Academy Awards including Best Picture, The Apartment is legendary writer/director Billy Wilder at his scathing, satirical best, and "one of the finest comedies Hollywood has turned out" (Newsweek). C.C. "Bud" Baxter (Jack Lemmon) knows the way to success in business...it's through the door of his apartment! By providing a perfect hideaway for philandering bosses, the ambitious young employee reaps a series of undeserved promotions. But when Bud lends the key to big boss J.D. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), he not only advances his career, but his own love life as well. For Sheldrake's mistress is the lovely Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), elevator girl and angel of Bud's dreams. Convinced that he is the only man for Fran, Bud must make the most important executice decision of his career: lose the girl...or his job.
"...an extraordinarily well-told story that has its audience right where it wants them every step of the way." At-A-Glance Film Reviews
"Superb comedy-drama that manages to embrace both sentiment and cynicism." Leonard Maltin's Movie & Video Guide
"...[one of] the finest comedies Hollywood has turned out..." Newsweek
"Quite simply one of the finest comic romances ever made." Rich Cline, Shadows on the Wall
"Gleeful! Ingenious! A smashing good comedy!" The New York Times
Editor's Note
Billy Wilder's THE APARTMENT blends his customary harsh cynicism with a humane streak that appears only fleetingly in his films. It stars Jack Lemmon as C.C. Baxter, an office clerk who curries favor with the executives in his office by giving them the key to his small apartment for the odd afternoon dalliance. Among them his is his callous boss, J.D. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), who Baxter eventually learns is using his place to sleep with Miss Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), the sweet elevator operator the clerk has loved from afar. When Sheldrake coldly dumps the vulnerable young woman, she tries to commit suicide, but is saved by the intervention of Baxter. As the clerk lovingly nurses the young woman back to health he begins to realize, with the help of epigrammatic neighbor Dr. Dreyfuss (Jack Kruschen), exactly how much of a fool he has been. Wilder brilliant depiction of the average American office as a place of brutality, coldness, and alienation conjure up Kafka and Marx. The director seduces the audience into what appears to be an unusually frank sex comedy, but turns the tables in displaying the consequences of the executive's cold indifference. Lemmon and MacLaine both give career performances and MacMurray is memorable as the blandly smiling snake.
| Features | Audio: English Dolby Digital Mono | | Interactive Menus | | Scene Selection | | Subtitles: English, Spanish |
| Technical Info
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Release Information
| | Studio: TCFHE/MGM |
| Release Date: 2/3/2009 |
| Running Time: 125 minutes |
| Original Release Date: 1960 | | Catalog ID: 110080 | | UPC: 00883904100805 | | Number of Discs: 1 |
Audio & Video
| | Original Language: English | | Available Audio Tracks: English [CC], English | | Available Subtitles: English, Spanish | | Video: B&W |
Aspect Ratio | | Widescreen 2.35:1 |
| Cast & Crew
| Awards |
Winner (1961) | | | British Academy Awards, Billy Wilder, Best Film from any Source | | | British Academy Awards, Jack Lemmon, Best Foreign Actor | | | British Academy Awards, Shirley MacLaine, Best Foreign Actress | | | Golden Globe, The Apartment, Best Motion Picture - Comedy | | | Golden Globe, Jack Lemmon, Best Motion Picture Actor - Musical/Comedy | | | Golden Globe, Shirley MacLaine, Best Motion Picture Actress - Musical/Comedy | | | Oscar, Edward G. Boyle, Alexander Trauner, Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White | | | Oscar, Billy Wilder, Best Director | | | Oscar, Daniel Mandell, Best Film Editing | | | Oscar, Billy Wilder, Best Picture | | | Oscar, Billy Wilder, I.A.L. Diamond, Best Writing, Story and Screenplay - Written Directly for the Screen | |
Winner (1960) | | | Venice Film Festival, Shirley MacLaine, Volpi Cup - Best Actress |
| Memorable Quotes| "Miss Kubelik, one doesn't get to be a second administrative assistant around here unless he's a pretty good judge of character, and as far as I'm concerned you're tops. I mean, decency--wise and otherwise--wise."----C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) to Miss Kubelick (Shirley MacLaine) | | "You know, I used to live like Robinson Crusoe----shipwrecked among eight million people. Then one day I saw a footprint in the sand, and there you were."----Baxter to Kubelick |
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| | Professional Reviews | Total Film
"...This seductive, bittersweet 1960 classic was Billy Wilder's last great film....Its layers of satire and genuine tenderness resonate..." -- 5 out of 5 stars 01/01/2000 p.101Entertainment Weekly
"...Fresh....[MacLaine's performance] breaks through Lemmon's brittle good cheer..." -- Rating: A- 10/21/1994 pp.70-2 Ultimate DVD
5 stars out of 5 -- "Lemmon gives on of his best performances ever, in a part written specifically for him..." 05/01/2008 p.89 Chicago Sun-Times
"By the time he made THE APARTMENT, Wilder had become a master at a kind of sardonic, satiric comedy that had sadness at its center." 07/22/2001 ReelViews 10 of 10
What is it they say about real estate? Location, location, location. That's certainly the case with the flat of C. C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) in Billy Wilder's The Apartment. Viewed by many as one of the best comedies to come out of the 1960s (it was the last black-and-white film until Schindler's List to win the Best Picture Oscar), The Apartment works equally well as a source of humor, drama, and romance. With tremendous performances by the two leads (Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine), this is yet another "must see" title to be found on Wilder's resume...The Apartment came at the end of Wilder's most fruitful period as a director. The film was widely recognized by the Academy, with ten nominations (five wins). It was Wilder's final nomination (and victory) for Best Director. He would receive only one more nomination, as a screenwriter for 1966's The Fortune Cookie. There are those who believe The Apartment represents Wilder at his most complete - seamlessly weaving the lighthearted and the serious without encountering a snarl or tangle. My personal preference is Sunset Blvd, but I'll acknowledge that The Apartment is in the upper echelon not only of Wilder's personal canon, but of all the films made during this era. - James Berardinelli
Chicago Sun-Times 10 of 10
There is a melancholy gulf over the holidays between those who have someplace to go, and those who do not. ''The Apartment'' is so affecting partly because of that buried reason: It takes place on the shortest days of the year, when dusk falls swiftly and the streets are cold, when after the office party some people go home to their families and others go home to apartments where they haven't even bothered to put up a tree...When Billy Wilder made ''The Apartment'' in 1960, ''the organization man'' was still a current term. One of the opening shots in the movie shows Baxter as one of a vast horde of wage slaves, working in a room where the desks line up in parallel rows almost to the vanishing point. This shot is quoted from King Vidor's silent film ''The Crowd'' (1928), which is also about a faceless employee in a heartless corporation. Cubicles would have come as revolutionary progress in this world...Wilder was fresh off the enormous hit ''Some Like it Hot'' (1959), his first collaboration with Lemmon, and Lemmon was headed toward ''The Days of Wine and Roses'' (1962), which along with ''The Apartment'' showed that he could move from light comedian to tragic everyman. This movie was the summation of what Wilder had done to date, and the key transition in Lemmon's career. - Roger Ebert
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