Another Look at THE APARTMENT

To me, it's perfection.  Absolute perfection.  Billy Wilder's THE APARTMENT aired on a cable channel over the weekend and it was just the break I needed from the news of the day.  A Billy Wilder masterpiece took my off the political squabbles of the day.

I watched THE APARTMENT Saturday morning and fell in love with it all over again.  I even felt tears of joy well up in my eyes at the famous "Shut up and deal" final line.

I gave Saturday's airing of THE APARTMENT my full attention.  I was not live tweeting it.  I was not on social media.  In giving it my full attention, I discovered something new that made me fall in love with Billy Wilder all over again.  I love the subtle yet powerful and accurate way he dealt with race in America.  He avoided the grand sweeping gesture -- like placing the action down South and showing KKK members in dastardly progress.  He showed those above the Mason-Dixon line slights, inequalities and insults that can be slipped into everyday life like an inter-office memo at work.  Look at his first teaming of Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau in 1966's THE FORTUNE COOKIE.  That is very much a Civil Rights era comedy, and a good one, often overlooked when film critics and enthusiasts write about the Wilder canon of classics.  A popular, well-paid, well-dressed and sophisticated NFL star, doing a favor for an injured white cameraman (Lemmon), picks up the injured party's arriving guest at the airport.  She assumes that he's not a dapper buddy doing a favor, but a chauffeur because he's black and driving.

What really stood out to me in my recent viewing of THE APARTMENT was the number of black people he incorporated into his look at corporate culture in New York City.  I loved it. Look at another film that spends a lot of time in offices with a secretarial pool -- for instance, 20th Century Fox's glossy 1959 romantic drama, THE BEST OF EVERYTHING. That's set in the corporate offices of a publishing firm on Park Avenue. You don't see one black clerical worker.

Now look at Billy Wilder's THE APARTMENT, Oscar winner for Best Picture of 1960.  When first we see Jack Lemmon as C.C. Baxter as his desk in those rows of desks on an insurance company office floor that seems half the size of a football field, notice the number of black women in office attire delivering paperwork to desks.  At the big company Christmas party underway on C.C. Baxter's floor, notice the black women and men at the party in business attire. 

Black people work for the company in THE APARTMENT.  Black men are in the elevator, not as the elevator operators, but as shirt-and-tie wearing office employees going to or leaving work.  This is not to say that some stuffy old attitudes towards people of color don't exist within characters.

When Fran Kubelik has her first reunion drink with Mr. Sheldrake in the restaurant, notice that she walks into the restaurant and stops at the piano.  She smiles warmly at the Asian pianist.  He smiles very warmly back to her and plays what we come to know as the theme to THE APARTMENT.  She spots Mr. Sheldrake, the married man with whom she's had a soul-wounding affair, and sits down.  The Asian waiter is very happy to see her again.  "Nice to see you, lady," he says with a sincere smile.  He never looks at Mr. Sheldrake and Sheldrake doesn't look at him.  There is definite warmth and regard exchanged between Fran Kubelik and the two Asian men who work in the restaurant.  She even buys the album that the pianist recorded.  To Sheldrake, those two men are probably like generic domestics in his corporate executive mind.

Near the end of the movie, Sheldrake gets a shoeshine in his private office from a black male.  Sheldrake tips him a quarter or a half-dollar coin.  Sheldrake is highly-paid executive boss.  Did you ever see the 1953 musical, THE BAND WAGON, starring Fred Astaire?  Astaire plays a Hollywood actor who hasn't worked in a few years and has a meeting for a possible Broadway show.  In Times Square, he gets a shoeshine from a black man.  They connect like old buddies and engage in Astaire's first dance number in the film. Notice that the number ends with the faded Hollywood star tipping the shoeshine dude some folding money.

Those touches of Wilder's, his direction and use of actors and his visual subtleties give more texture to a scene.  They tell us more about how the characters relate to the world and how they relate within it.

From a heartbreaking, nearly tragic Christmas Eve, the spirit of Fran Kubelik will resurrect and light up at the end of New Year's Eve. She will start the New Year realizing that she is truly loved -- loved by the company co-worker who has Ella Fitzgerald albums in his record collection -- and who also walked out on Mr. Sheldrake.

I love THE APARTMENT.