The Apartment

by Joey Mandeville

It’s hard to find comedies like The Apartment anymore. While today what passes for comedy often offers up little more than sight gags and gross-out humor, The Apartment builds its laughs through genuine emotion and dilemma. That kind of comedy will always be funnier and more meaningful, because the story is involving and the laughs are real.

The story being told is of perennial nice-guy C.C. ‘Bud’ Baxter (Jack Lemmon), whose generosity at work leads him to loan out his apartment to bosses who are less than faithful to their wives. That is, until his boss J.D. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray) decides to use said apartment to start courting Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), Baxter’s secret office crush. This charming story, told in just over two hours, moves forward at a pleasant and engaging pace as we chart both characters’ eventual redemption.

One of the movie’s greatest assets is the combination of Lemmon’s naïve and bumbling Baxter with MacLaine’s cynical and impassioned Fran. This refreshing contrast switches the traditional gender roles of the day. Fran often seems so much older than Baxter, and her character is no worse for any lack of fidelity she displays. Often she sees truths in the world that Baxter could not fathom. “Some people take, and some people get took” she pessimistically states after being abandoned again by Sheldrake in the apartment.

Baxter’s frank and endearing innocence combats this outlook. Consider when, in reference to his love for Fran, he compares his life to that of Robinson Crusoe, “shipwrecked among 8 million people. And then one day I saw a footprint in the sand and there you were.”

The Apartment continues to be regarded as one of the greatest comedies, and indeed one of the greatest movies, of all time. The story is engaging, the characters fascinating, but describing them paints part of a picture that only seeing this classic movie can complete.

The Apartment is playing at the Forum this Wednesday, Feb. 13.