Bud Baxter (Jack Lemmon) kicks off The Apartment with a voiceover that makes him sound like a caricature of one of us trivia players:
On November 1st, 1959, the population of New York City was 8,042,783. If you laid all these people end to end, figuring an average height of five feet six and a half inches, they would reach from Times Square to the outskirts of Karachi, Pakistan. I know facts like this because I work for an insurance company.
Those facts suck, Buddy-boy. But Bud’s not trying to get ahead by learning trivia; instead, he hopes that letting his bosses use his apartment as a place to cheat on their wives will net him a promotion. We watch as Bud is sexiled late at night, as he’s forced to wait in the rain, as he cleans up after his bosses’ trysts.
Bud’s shot at love is with elevator operator Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), but when he finally asks her out, she stands him up to reunite with an old flame. That “old flame” is Bud’s boss, Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), and Mr. Sheldrake has news for Miss Kubelik: he tells her he’s finally going to leave his wife. That’s all she ever wanted to hear and they go hook up at Bud’s apartment.
Months later, on Christmas Eve, when Miss Kubelik realizes that Mr. Sheldrake isn’t actually going to leave his wife, she takes a bunch of sleeping pills in Bud’s apartment. When Bud gets home and discovers the dying Miss Kubelik, he revives her and cares for her over Christmas. This earns Bud a promotion from Mr. Sheldrake.
But Mr. Sheldrake does leave his wife—or rather, she leaves him when she finds out about his affairs. Mr. Sheldrake, now living at the strictly-stag Athletic Club, requests the key to Bud’s apartment to see Miss Kubelik again, and Bud, finally growing a backbone, refuses and quits his job. When Mr. Sheldrake offhandedly tells this to Miss Kubelik on New Year’s Eve, she realizes Bud’s the one she should be with. She rushes to the apartment to see him and asks to play cards. When he confesses he loves her, she smiles and tells him to “shut up and deal.”
Rating: 8/10. Remember, nice guys: all you have to do to get the girl is wait, and wait, and wait, and take care of her after she attempts suicide, and then wait some more, and then yes, you’ll end up with her!
Cast and Crew
Wow, for someone who once said “the best director is the one you don’t see,” we sure have seen a lot of Billy Wilder. From Sunset Boulevard to Stalag 17 to Anatomy of a Murder to Some Like It Hot, Wilder’s work helped us through the hit-or-miss 1950s.
And then there’s his classics we didn’t watch—Double Indemnity (1944), The Lost Weekend (1945), Sabrina (1954), The Seven Year Itch (1955). Noir, screwball, character drama, it didn’t matter—Wilder insisted “don’t be boring” and almost never was.1
Wilder and Jack Lemmon teamed up in The Apartment a year after collaborating on Some Like It Hot. They made two more movies together: 1963’s Irma La Douce and 1966’s The Fortune Cookie. We’re going to watch six (!) more Jack Lemmon films, so we’ll have plenty of time to fawn over his oeuvre moving forward.
Shirley MacLaine brought an American take to the gamine archetype, challenging the continental hegemony of the Carons, Sebergs, and A. Hepburns. She was more than just a pretty face and pixie haircut, though, and the “slighted lover” schtick of The Apartment wasn’t the most impressive use of her talents. Previously, she played the female lead in Best Picture winner Around the World in 80 Days (1956) and scored a Best Actress nomination for Some Came Running (1958).2
We’ll only see MacLaine once more—it’ll be in 1979—and we’ll cover the breadth of her career when we get there. In the interim, we’ll spend some time with her Oscar-winning brother, Warren Beatty.
Fred MacMurray3 played the married man who’s schtupping Miss Kubelik in Baxter’s apartment. MacMurray was cast against type (by the 1960s he was starring in Disney fare like The Shaggy Dog and family TV like “My Three Sons”) and received bags of hostile mail from fans enraged by Mr. Sheldrake’s scoundrel behavior.4
The Trivia, Part I
Baxter brags about being an “Arthur Murray graduate,” so for Part I of the trivia, we’re talkin’ early-to-mid 20th century dancers who brought dancing education to the masses. First up: Arthur Murray was a famed ballroom dancer and teacher who opened hundreds of dance studios. These joints still exist. He also starred in the TV show “The Arthur Murray Party,” which was, y’know, also about dancing.
Beyond Murray, you should also know the husband-and-wife dance team of Vernon and Irene Castle. They gained fame for popularizing social dances like the foxtrot and tango5 and were played by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939).
And…well, that’s it for this extremely specific Trivia section on “people who brought dance education to the masses in the early-to-mid 20th century.”
The Trivia, Part II
Margie MacDougall (Hope Holiday) tells Baxter she thinks Fidel Castro is “a no good fink.” Don’t worry, we’re not gonna do a whole “20th century history of Cuba” thing…though if we did, we’d have to start with José Martí and discuss the U.S. occupation of Cuba after the Spanish-American War and the Platt amendment and the establishment of the Republic of Cuba under first president Tomás Estrada Palma and…
No! Focus! Keep it light!
In 1959, Fidel Castro took the reins of power following the Cuban Revolution, where Castro, his brother Raúl, Che Guevara, and the 26th of July Movement forced out Cuban president-slash-dictator Fulgencio Batista. You may know the beats from there, including the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile crisis. You may also know that Fidel’s brother Raúl became the leader of Cuba after Fidel. But do you know who the current First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba (the highest position in Cuba) is? I didn’t: it’s Miguel Díaz-Canel. He became president in 2019 and first secretary in 2021; this Economist article argues Cuba’s economy is in its worst state since the revolution.
Odds and Ends
Baxter’s bosses refer to him as “Little Lord Fauntleroy,” a character from a Frances Hodgson Burnett children’s book about a poor American boy who inherits an earldom (and whose velvet suit inspired a bunch of parents to dress their kids stupid)…The Apartment was the last black and white film to win Best Picture until The Artist (2011)…Ray Walston, who played one of the philandering bosses, also starred as the martian on ‘60s sitcom “My Favorite Martian”…the doctor’s wife thinks Bud is a regular King Farouk; we discussed the last Egyptian kings in a previous Trivia section…the hit musical “Promises, Promises” was based on The Apartment.6
Oh, one last incredibly important trivia thing: On May 21st, 2024, the population of New York City was 8,335,897. If you laid all these people end to end, figuring an average height of five feet six and a half inches, they would reach from Times Square to the outskirts of Bangkok, Thailand. I know facts like this because I write this weird trivia newsletter.
Other Wilders to know: Gene; Laura Ingalls; Douglas. I do want to highlight Douglas Wilder, the first elected Black state governor. To date, there have only been three Black governors elected: Wilder (from Virginia), Deval Patrick (from Louisiana), and Wes Moore (from Maryland). (There were three others elevated from lieutenant governor; two were during Reconstruction, while the other was David Paterson.)
Some Came Running, like From Here to Eternity, was based on a James Jones novel. Along with MacLaine, the film starred Rat Packers Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. MacLaine became tight with the Rat Pack and made a cameo appearance in Ocean’s Eleven (1960).
We’ve already seen MacMurray in Sunset Boulevard and The Caine Mutiny.
Add MacMurray’s name to the list of actors that made you hate them by playing their roles too well, alongside Jack Gleeson (Joffrey, “Game of Thrones”), Joaquin Phoenix (Commodus, Gladiator), and Imelda Staunton (Dolores Umbridge, the Harry Potter movies).
Incidentally, both letters of the NATO phonetic alphabet.
It spawned two major hits for Dionne Warwick: “Promises, Promises” and “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again.”