Christmas classic

Spectator, The, Dec 16-Dec 23, 2000 by Steyn, Mark

The Apartment (PG, selected cinemas)

Traditionally at this time of year your humble critic recommends some seasonal selections available on video or obscure cable channels at three in the morning. But this Yuletide there's a Christmas classic actually playing at your local cinema - or, if not your local one, at a cinema within easy driving distance (90 minutes in second gear in contraflow). I speak of Billy Wilder's great work The Apartment (1960), which scraped into the American Film Institute's all-time Hot 100 at Number 93, but is, to my mind, vastly superior to his more celebrated Some Like It Hot and Sunset Boulevard.

The Apartment is a sad but true urban Christmas fable: there's no snow, just flu all month long; the office-party booze makes everyone mean and sour; the only sighting of le Pere Noel is an aggressive off-duty department-store Santa chugging it down at a midtown bar; and the Christmas Eve climax is an attempted suicide. I hasten to add I'm not one of those seasonal cynics, like so many of the cheerless souls in the British media: I remember some years back driving out of London on the M40 on Christmas Eve and tuning the dial in search of a `Winter Wonderland' or `Santa Claus Is Coming To Town'. No such luck. Every disc-jockey at Thames Valley Supergold, EastMid FM, Clwyd Sound et al was picking out his all-time worst Xmas records -- or, as the hosts amusingly called them, `Christmas turkeys'. `Ho, ho, bloody ho,' as the Daily Telegraph rock critic began his Xmas round-up two years ago.

But that's what I love about The Apartment: its Wilderian cynicism is redeemed by one of the sweetest Christmas Day scenes in any movie. In his review of Rodgers and Hart's amoral Pal Joey, Brooks Atkinson wrote: `How can you draw sweet water from a foul well?' Well, The Apartment pulls it off, wonderfully. Wilder got the idea after seeing Brief Encounter and finding himself wondering about the fellow who lends his flat to Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard for their trysts. `The interesting character is the friend,' Wilder said, `who returns to his home and finds the bed still warm, he who has no mistress.' So Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond came up with C.C. Baxter, a lowly cog in the corporate machine who advances to the heights of the 27th floor and a key to the executive washroom by loaning his apartment to various adulterous superiors.

Distracted by the traffic in the stairway, the clink of cocktail glasses, and the makeout music, Baxter's neighbours assume he's the swingingest cat in town. In fact, he's a lonely schlub freezing to death on a bench in Central Park waiting for that night's senior exec and whichever gal from the typing pool he's picked out to exhaust themselves. Baxter has no moral qualms about facilitating adultery. He assumes it's what a go-getting guy has to do to get going. His misgivings arise only when he discovers that his boss, Mr Sheldrake, has turned his attention to Fran Kubelik. Miss Kubelik is an elevator operator and the girl Baxter loves, though he hasn't told her yet, as their relationship to date has consisted of a few pleasantries exchanged as he rides her elevator up to the office each morning.

Fran is Shirley MacLaine at her early best, full of round-faced vulnerability and unable to accept that her boss's interest is strictly carnal. As Sheldrake, Fred MacMurray is the apotheosis of Fifties corporate man, smooth, assured and ruthless as he exercises his droit du senior exec. As Baxter, Jack Lemmon's likeable nebbish shtick is captured in embryo, before it got out of control and degenerated into a collection of exhibitionist mannerisms. But Wilder put together one of the most perfectly cast ensembles in film history and it goes way beyond the leads: there's Edie Adams as Sheldrake's secretary, sitting in the outer office and watching the `new models pass by', and David White as his fellow corporate swordsman Kirkeby.

Wilder and Diamond's script catches the argot of the day beautifully, not least in Kirkeby's inability to get through a sentence without using the suffix '-wise' - situation-wise, business-wise, etc. Andre Previn, Betty Comden and Adolph Green wrote a whole song on the subject a couple of years earlier in the film It's Always Fair Weather (`Audio-video-wise, video-audio wise, wise-wise...'). But The Apartment makes it a kind of corporate code - the Masonic handshake of the 27th floor that the ambitious Baxter lapses into almost subconsciously. When Kirkeby thinks CC has actually snared the elevator operator, he congratulates him: `So you hit the jackpot, eh, kid? I mean, Kubelikwise?'

But, Kubelik-wise, the jackpot is a long way off, and how loser boy gets there is forlorn and funny all at the same time. The Apartment is a comedy but it catches the desperation of inconsequential people passed over by the holiday season. And so it is that Christmas-wise CC gets to spend the day with the recuperating Fran, who's abandoned at his apartment after Sheldrake goes home for the holidays with the wife and kids. In Fran and CC's bedsit Christmas, there are no chestnuts roasting, but they do play gin rummy. Baxter's face is never happier than when he's straining spaghetti through his tennis racket and never more loving than when he tucks in his sleeping elevator gal. It may not be much of a Christmas, but it beats the previous year when he went to the zoo and had Christmas dinner at the automat.