United Artists released The Apartment on September 16, 1960. Billy Wilder directed the film starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, and Fred MacMurray.
‘The Apartment’ Movie Summary
C.C. Baxter is looking to climb the corporate ladder in a giant Manhattan insurance firm, and he’s managed to find a fool-proof way to do it. He’s going to lend the key of his conveniently-located bachelor apartment to his womanizing bosses for their off-hours affairs. His plan is ingenious, and it takes off to the point his little scheme catches the attention of his company’s philandering big boss, Jeff D. Sheldrake. Now, with his career on the fast track, Baxter finds there’s a big downside to the plan, and life becomes hard to manage; including his own affairs of the heart.
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United Artists released The Apartment on September 16, 1960. Billy Wilder directed the film starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, and Fred MacMurray.
Why did you change the music? I prefer the old one.
Copyright reasons.
That’s too bad. Glad you’re going bad to the twice a month format. What’s the other film for January? Office Space is an interesting pick.
Shane is coming back on January 15th to review Driving Miss Daisy.
Going back to The Apartment, I think it’s one of your best podcasts of the year. Great points by Matt on how it wasn’t a Hollywood ending since the bad guys never got their comeupence. Makes me like the film even more, must have been pretty daring for the time to do that. I can’t picture a rom com of the 80s to today with a big name director and big stars attached trying that, it’s an automatic in comedies today for antagonists to be forced to eat crow(thought of one of your recent podcasts – Working Girl)
And Lori saying she loves Wilder but not loving this is pretty shocking to me, it’s arguably his most acclaimed film! If you thought this was too cynical, you should probably avoid Ace In the Hole, wilder reaches new levels of cynicism there. Also you should check out one of the oscar noms that year, Elmer Gantry, great flick and very cynical as well:) Chris, any eta on Sunset Blvd? I can’t wait for that. Also have you seen Ace in the Hole?
Patrick, since you’ve mentioned criterion classics, may I make a recommendation? I know you love Kurosawa, would like to see you review a Ken Mizoguchi film, he’s a titan in Japanese cinema. 2 of his most famous films are criterion – Sansho the Bailiff and Ugetsu.
I agree with you said about Lemmon, he’s one of the greats. Equally comfortable with comedy and drama. You mentioned the lost weekend, I think he made a film about alcoholism that’s even better -Days of Wine and Roses. On my top 100 for sure.
I absolutely agree with you about Days of Wine and Roses. When I saw that in my 20’s I primarily thought of Lemmon as a comedic actor (and I don’t know why since I had seen Missing and the China Syndrome in the theaters when I was a kid), but that film and his performance in that film really changed my perception of him as an actor.
I agree about Days, it was an insightful film especially for the times. Also, re the Apartment, this was a huge influence for Matthew Weiner in developing Mad Men.
We (Bobby, Shane, and I) are starting a new podcast in 2019 where we review the Criterion discs for some films. I have added those both to my lists of films to get. Unfortunately, we each wanted to take advantage of sales towards the end of the year to get the Criterions that we wanted to review, so we picked all of the films for 2019 in advance so that we each had a copy. I have wanted to see Sansho the Baliff for awhile so I will commit to picking that in early 2020. Thanks for the recommendations!! Keep them coming. I am finding in my old age that I really enjoy Japanese cinema and that seems to be a large part of Criterion purchases, much to Bobby’s chagrin.
Yes, going forward, we will not add any copyrighted material, and I will be going back to the old episodes and removing it there too.