The Apartment (1960)

Studio: MGM
Theatrical Release: June 15th, 1960
Blu-Ray Release: Jan. 24th, 2012
Rating: Unrated!
Directed By: Billy Wilder
Review by Craig Sorensen

C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemon of Airport ’77) has a problem.  He has a decent apartment in New York which his bosses like to use to cheat on their wives.  He can live with that though.  But when his boss Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray of The Swarm) uses Baxter’s apartment with the pretty elevator girl Fran (Shirley MacLaine of Cannonball Run 2), Baxter’s life is turned upside down.

I’m having a hard time with this review.  The Apartment is damn near a perfect film.  I don’t want to just say that the movie was good but I really can’t seem to think of anything constructive.  Every component is exactly what it needs to be to work.  Joseph LaShelle’s cinematography is absolutely beautiful.  It has an almost noirish quality to it, which doesn’t seem like it would be a good fit for a romantic comedy.  At it’s heart though, The Apartment is a comedy about moral depravity.  It’s a comedy about sexual indiscretions.  It also has a suicide attempt in the middle (and a suicide joke near the end that The Artist kind of rips off).  There are still some very funny things in the film.  It’s not as zany as Wilder’s previous film Some Like It Hot but it still has it’s moments.  There’s a funny bit with Ray Walston and a Marylin Monroe impersonator at the beginning and some funny bits with C.C. Baxter’s neighbors (played by Jack Kruschen and Hope Holiday) who think he’s a womanizing jerk who drives girls to suicide.

The script by I.A.L. Diamond and Billy Wilder is fantastic but it really comes alive in the
performances of it’s leads.  Jack Lemon is usually good in just about anything with the right script, which he certainly does here.  It’s now a cliché of the genre but it is nice seeing him grow a backbone and stand up for himself.  I doubt that that would work with a lesser actor.  It doesn’t hurt that Lemon usually has charm to spare.  He’s a sad-sack ‘schnuck’ in this so you really need an actor that you can instantly identify and empathize with.  Speaking of identifying with an actor, Fred MacMurray was mostly known for playing good natured leads in family friendly fare.  In this, he’s a bastard.  He’s perfectly cast against type.  And of course you get Shirley MacLaine, who I don’t think has looked cuter in anything.  She’s able to bring such a believable vulnerability to the role that it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the role.  You also get some great supporting players in David Lewis, Ray Walston and Willard Waterman as lecherous office workers in the insurance firm.

MGM’s new Blu-Ray of The Apartment looks absolutely beautiful.  They must have taken very good care of the film because it’s in flawless condition.  There isn’t a speck of dirt or a scratch anywhere to be seen.  I can’t see any kind of noise reduction or edge enhancement at all.  Everything looks simply gorgeous.  There is a huge jump in detail which you can see in the textures of the apartment itself.  You can really see the texture of the wallpaper.  This is one of the best looking Blu-Ray’s I’ve seen in a while.  For audio you get a newly remastered 5.1 DTS-HD track.  The film was originally released with plain old mono so I wish that they would have put that on the disc but I really can’t complain with what you get.  I was afraid that the audio would be remixed to have sound effects whipping around my front room for no apparent reason, but that isn’t the case.  It’s a very subtle surround remix and it sounds very nice.  You also get French and Spanish audio tracks in 2.0 mono and subtitles in English, Spanish and French.  You also get an audio commentary from Bruce Block and two short featurettes.  Inside the Apartment is a nice little piece made up of interviews with critics and the surviving cast & crew.  Magic Time: The Art of Jack Lemon is a short about, well, the art of Jack Lemon I guess.  To round out the package you also get the original theatrical trailer.