This time of year has people watching favorite holiday movies, from nostalgic standards starring Jimmy Stewart and Bing Crosby to the ever-expanding offerings on the Hallmark Channel. As 2020 ends, a less conventional but surprisingly timely selection is the 1960 film “The Apartment.”
Set in a corporate culture in which employees are advanced by favoritism and motivated by revenge, it’s a story that includes a young woman trying to commit suicide on Christmas Eve. Yet, despite the movie’s dark elements, it’s witty, romantic, even sentimental, and ultimately optimistic.
In today’s socially-distanced world, it’s jarring to see Jack Lemmon squeezing into a packed elevator and working in a crowded Manhattan office building while hacking, sneezing and running a temperature because of a bad cold. But after 60 years, the film is more contemporary than ever: it’s about powerful men who use their positions to manipulate others for their own sexual pleasure.
For the worst offender, director Billy Wilder cast the wholesome-looking Disney star Fred McMurray, effectively dramatizing the duplicitous nature sometimes hiding behind a charming manner and warm smile.
The premise of the story, written by Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, is a kind of inversion of Saint Luke’s infancy narrative. Instead of a humble dwelling — a stable — being the place where a loving couple in need find temporary shelter, a lowly employee’s modest apartment is the place where business executives, on a rotating nights, bring their mistresses. As a reward for letting his home be used as a cheap motel while he aimlessly kills time, C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) receives promotions.
Baxter is ambitious, but he’s also a lonely bachelor who aches for the affection of the winsome elevator operator Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine). What he doesn’t realize, but learns, is that Kubelik is the woman Jeff Sheldrake (McMurray) has been taking to his apartment for extramarital trysts.
On Christmas Eve, after being treated particularly shabbily, Kubelik stays in Baxter’s apartment and takes an overdose of sleeping pills. When Baxter returns and discovers her barely alive, he desperately seeks the help of his neighbor, a Jewish doctor. To protect Sheldrake, Baxter pretends that his own callous womanizing was the cause of Kubelik’s desperate act. The doctor does not approve. “Be a mensch,” he tells Baxter.
“What’s a mensch?” Baxter, who does not know Yiddish, asks.
“A human being!” the doctor responds in exasperation.
The moral force of the doctor’s simple words are all the more clear in a movie in which people use the religious holiday as an excuse for self-indulgence: an uninhibited office party, a bourbon-swilling department store Santa, the hypocritical Sheldrake wearing a new bathrobe on Christmas morning. In contrast, Baxter’s apartment includes both a small Christmas tree and a print of the painting “I and the Village” by Marc Chagall, a Jewish artist who used both Jewish and Christian elements in his work. (Chagall’s “The White Crucifixion,” a painting that suggests a connection between Christ’s persecutors with the Nazis, is Pope Francis’ favorite painting.)
Billy Wilder, one of Hollywood’s most acclaimed directors — with critical and popular hits such as “Some Like It Hot,” “Sunset Boulevard” and “Stalag 17” — came to the United States without knowing a word of English to “escape the ovens.” His mother, grandmother and stepfather were killed by the Nazis. He knew how easily a culture can be corrupted and lose its sense of humanity.
Near the end of “The Apartment,” Baxter eventually decides to — as he tells Sheldrake — “be a mensch.” He has no reason to believe Kubelik will ever end her illicit affair and love him. Nonetheless, he ends his arrangement with Sheldrake and abruptly quits his job, willingly leaving behind his new private office on the 27th floor.
But Kubelik — after learning that she is the object of someone’s unconditional love, that someone has made such an unasked-for sacrifice out of concern for her — has her own conversion. She leaves Sheldrake in a rowdy bar on New Year’s Eve to spend the holiday alone with Baxter in his apartment. The movie ends not with a passionate Hollywood embrace and kiss, but with them sitting down to finish a game of gin rummy they had started when she was recovering from her overdose.
In the last scene Kubelik smiles and slips off her coat. As Baxter deals the cards, he can’t take his eyes off of her. They are not Mary and Joseph, but it’s a tender and hopeful moment in a movie that depicts a fallen world in need of redemption.
Carl Peters is the managing editor of the Catholic Star Herald.
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