Movies from the Heart—The Apartment

Just a year after last week’s Some Like it Hot came out, Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond wrote another romantic film, The Apartment [1960]. Now the “sixties”—as we know them—were coming, but in 1960, they weren’t here yet. So all of the wild times in terms of sex and free love had yet to burst upon the scene. I mention this because in 1960 when The Apartment came out, somebody giving a married man a key to his apartment, knowing that man was going to have sex, was a bit shocking to most people. But it was a sort of delicious kind of shocking—a shocking that had people saying ‘can you believe what happens in those big cities?’… because, of course, the film didn’t take place in the heartland of America, in the west or the south—it took place in New York City.

Take a look at the trailer for the film.

Now, in viewing that, it hardly seems like the film I described, does it? Well, that’s very often the nature of trailers. Remember that the trailer is put together by the marketing department, and their entire goal them is to get people to go to the movie. And dwelling on, well, shall we say elements of the movie that the audience might find unsavory, might prevent them from showing up at the theatre.

In reality, a big part of The Apartment is about how far our main character, C.C. Baxter, will go to rise to the top in business. Will he lend his apartment to a big wig, Mr. Sheldrake, for sex? Yep. Will he tacitly, then, agree with the boss that it’s OK to do this? Yep. Does this violate his principles? A big yep. And therein lies the crux of the film.

C.C. has a huge crush on Fran, a woman in his office. So he’s devastated to discover she’s the woman Mr. Sheldrake is meeting in his apartment.

It’s very clear his boss—and his boss’s friends whom he’s also letting use the apartment—have a different set of values than C.C. So one of the questions for him becomes, how long will he let himself be used as a doormat in order to advance up the corporate ladder?

Moral dilemmas—the stuff good characters and plots are made of. If you’re writing a romantic film, try to ensure that your main characters aren’t ALL good or bad. Make sure they’re real people, with foibles, idiosyncrasies, doubts, fears… a script where all the characters are too good—or too bad—is a recipe for an uninteresting film. My husband and I were watching an old American mystery film and he said, “The husband did it. The bad guy always has a mustache in these old films.” And yep—he’s pretty much right!

Next week let’s look at a film that takes us into the life of a guy who can’t move on… literally—Groundhog Day.

Copyright © Diane Lake

29Dec24

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