The Apartment
Short description
C.C. Baxter is a low-level employee at a large New York insurance company who hopes to advance by lending his apartment to his superiors for their extramarital meetings. The arrangement brings him promotions and the resentment of colleagues, but it also leaves him dealing with the messes his bosses leave behind. The situation turns painful when he falls for Fran Kubelik, an elevator operator in the same building, and discovers she is involved with one of the executives using his apartment.
Billy Wilder directed, produced and co-wrote the film with I. A. L. Diamond, the fourteenth of the twenty-two features he directed, following Some Like It Hot and preceding One, Two, Three. Jack Lemmon plays Baxter, Shirley MacLaine plays Fran, and Fred MacMurray plays the personnel director Sheldrake, with Ray Walston, Jack Kruschen and David Lewis among a credited cast of thirty-eight.
Released in June 1960 by United Artists and The Mirisch Company, the film cost about 3 million dollars and took roughly 19 million dollars worldwide, a strong return. It holds an IMDb rating of 8.3 from around 218,000 votes and a TMDB rating of 8.2 from about 2,800 votes. A critics' rating of 9 out of 10 from 107 reviews places it above even the warm audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- Film critics in the socialist countries called this film an indictment of the American system and said that such a thing was only possible in a capitalist city like New York. At a dinner in honor of the film in East Berlin, Wilder stated that this story 'could happen anywhere – in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Rome, Paris, London' and could not happen only in Moscow. The East Germans erupted in applause. When the applause subsided, Wilder continued and said that it could not happen in Moscow because no resident there had their own apartment. This statement was met with complete silence.
- The film’s final, now-classic line was conceived at the last moment, right on the set.
- Billy Wilder and screenwriter I.A.L. Diamond (1920-1988) did not allow for any deviations from the script whatsoever. Shirley MacLaine simply irritated them by constantly departing from it. One scene in the elevator had to be shot five times solely because she kept forgetting to say one word.
- The idea for this film originally came to Billy Wilder (1906-2002) after watching David Lean's (1908-1991) drama 'Brief Encounter' (1945), when he wondered about a man who rents out his apartment for such extramarital affairs. Shirley MacLaine, who played the role of Fran, was given only the first 40 pages of the script so that she would not know the ending in advance. The actress herself thought at the time that the script was not yet finished.
- The film's idea was partially based on a Hollywood scandal when, in 1951, producer Walter Wanger (1894-1968) shot Jennings Lang (1915-1996) over an affair with his wife, actress Joan Bennett (1910-1990). During his affair with Bennett, Lang used the apartment of one of his subordinates. Another plot element was also taken from life: a friend of I.A.L. Diamond once had a falling out with a girlfriend, and then one day returned home to find her had committed suicide in his bed.
- Jack Lemmon later recounted that he learned a lot about filmmaking specifically from Billy Wilder – in particular, the use of nuances that audiences remember long after they’ve forgotten the other details of the film. One such nuance is the apartment key. According to the actor, many years after the film's release, people would approach him saying, “Jack, lend me the keys.”
- To show a multitude of people working in a huge insurance company office, the following trick was devised: adult actors sat closest to the camera at desks, further away were children in adult costumes at specially made small tables, and even further away sat cardboard figures controlled by pulling on threads attached to them. This created the effect of a huge space filled with working people.
- Marilyn Monroe wanted to star in the film, but did not get the role.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
