The Best Picture Oscar winner of 1960 is a deft juggling of comic and dramatic elements
MacMurray and MacLaine
It was Cary Grant who was to play the Fred MacMurray part, and we longtime Apartment-dwellers are still thanking our lucky stars that that particular star could not commit. While it certainly would have made MacLaine's despair over their complicated union more believable, it would have made her ultimate turn for Lemmon an incredulity that would have seriously unbalanced the picture, regardless of how much indignity Grant would have put her through.
As is, she is in perfect position to make the classic romantic comedy transition at the end, escaping the darkness of the Chinese restaurant where she is celebrating the inauguration of 1960 with MacMurray, to find herself - in one of the most uplifting tracking shots of all time - back at the apartment, engaging in light banter with Lemmon.
Drama and Comedy
It's the last example in the film of the well-placed mechanism it uses throughout: the deft altercation of drama and comedy. There's Lemmon charming MacLaine at an office party while she struggles with fresh news of MacMurray's insincerity...the crosscutting of the camel's back confrontation between MacMurray and MacLaine at the apartment, while Lemmon dances deadpan with a barroom floozie...and, most famously, the dire dash Lemmon must make between his tough-talking pick-up and the sleeping pill-poisoned MacLaine.
If Ernst Lubitsch, the director-producer who was Wilder's mentor, is all about the happy hunt for sex, Wilder, his protégée, is all about its complicated aftermath. Previous examples of his "afterglow as major headache" include <i>Sunset Boulevard</i> (with William Holden as the resentful kept man,) <i>Sabrina</i> (the complicated Holden-Audrey Hepburn-Humphrey Bogart traingle,) and <i>Some Like It Hot</i> (remember how messy it gets between Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe after their episode on the yacht?)
The Promise of Happiness
If this played so surprisingly well in America for so many years, climaxing with The Apartment, it's because in the end, the Austrian-born Wilder would always emerge from under this dark, European cloud to give American audiences what they adamantly demanded: the promise of happiness.
Those behind this new re-issue of The Apartment, with its brightly colored cover work, are doing same.
Fine. Like Baxter calling the lending of his apartment an act of kindness, I'll call it the perfect gesture, and not an act of immorality.
The 2 disc DVD re-issue of Billy Wilder's The Apartment, which includes a featurette and those inevitable DVD staples, the "making of" docummentary and the audio commentary, is widely available.
