The Apartment

Billy Wilder’s collaboration with IAL Diamond is a very dark tale of ambition and lust. For much of it, however, it plays as a light comedy, and the ending appears a happy one. At the centre of the film is Miss Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), an elevator operator in a large New York City office building. Originally from Pittsburgh, she has fled a failed relationship in that industrial city to mend her heart while living with her married sister in the metropolis.

However, at the start of the film she is mending her broken heart again, this time after a liaison with the powerful personnel manager of Consolidated Insurance, Mr Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray). Sheldrake is a player, although Kubelik has worked that out yet.

‘Wait a minute,’ I hear you say, ‘isn’t C.C. “Buddy-boy” Baxter (Jack Lemmon) at the centre of the film?’ I beg to differ. The film becomes a contest for the heart of Miss Kubelik between the Nice Guy, Baxter, and the Alpha Man, Sheldrake. Although Baxter is the narrator, and the most common denominator of most scenes, he has little power in the story. His rise in Consolidated Insurance is the gift of Mr Sheldrake. As much as he wishes to influence the passion of Miss Kubelik, she controls his relationship with her. Initially, she puts him in the ‘friend-zone’, briefly considers moving him out and then shows little gratitude for what he does for her at critical moment. Baxter may be useful to people, but he is effectively a non-player character (NPC) in social terms.

The apartment of the title is Baxter’s home, and creates his usefulness to Sheldrake. When the film opens, Baxter is allowing four middle managers to use it for trysts with their girlfriends. In return, Baxter gets glowing recommendations that eventually reach Sheldrake’s desk. Sheldrake learns of just how Baxter is useful, and he opts at this point to fan the dying embers of love in Miss Kubelik’s heart because he can take her to Baxter’s.

In addition to the cynical interplay between Kubelik, Baxter and Sheldrake, Wilder’s film offers some incisive depictions of the Era of the Great Compression (1945-73). The WASP dominance was showing signs of waning, as names like Dobisch (Ray Walston) and to a lesser extent Eichelberger (David White) among the four middle managers suggests. Lesser jobs were filled by people with immigrant names like Kubelik and Matuschka, who operate elevators and drive taxicabs. The vast Consolidated Insurance building contains over 30,000 workers, as many as a small town. Nowadays, all those adding machines would be replaced by fewer workers using computers, and possibly soon by even fewer workers using AI services. Rent on a one-bedroom apartment on Manhattan’s upper West Side was $85 a month, equivalent to slightly less than one-week’s pay for Baxter’s original job. A doctor will live next door and make house calls. There’s no war on Christmas. In that regard, the film is a useful snapshot of a bygone era, but one that younger people today might view as a Paradise.

In the end, Baxter loses his job but gets the girl. Sheldrake’s family life is in ruins, and he’s lost Kubelik to Baxter, but he’s still a big shot in Consolidated Insurance. Kubelik’s last line, ‘Shut up and deal’ suggests Baxter’s hold on her is not all that secure. He has enabled her to break the cycle of emotional dependency on the Alpha Man that had trapped her, but she does not accept that her future is one with Baxter. Despite all the apparent hopefulness of the scene, poor Baxter remains a useful NPC even in his own romance story. Everything in the future is contingent, and we can pretend that Baxter becomes a leading man soon; but this story has reached its natural end.

P.S. – Does Oscar Madison (Walter Matthau) strain spaghetti with a tennis racket in THE ODD COUPLE? I have a feeble memory that he does, but it would certainly be a nice call-back to what some critics consider Lemmon’s finest role.

© 2026 Paul Brewer