The Apartment Review

Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond took the borrowed flat from Brief Encounter and a real Hollywood scandal and made the most exact comedy of office politics on film. Alexandre Trauner's forced-perspective set, rows of identical desks shrinking toward child extras at the back, makes the insurance company look infinite, and Jack Lemmon's C. C. Baxter is its perfect product: eager, sniffling, juggling a calendar of other men's affairs in the hope of a key to the executive washroom.

The performances make the cynicism bearable. Lemmon's improvised business, a nasal spray, spaghetti strained through a tennis racket, becomes a portrait of loneliness. Shirley MacLaine's Fran Kubelik, the elevator operator with the cracked compact mirror, is funny and wounded at once, and Fred MacMurray's Sheldrake is so plausibly smooth that women berated him in the street. The Christmas Eve sequence, from office party to overdose, is where Wilder's comedy turns serious without changing gear.

It won five Oscars, including picture, director and screenplay, and was the last black-and-white best picture until Schindler's List. The Saturday Review called it a dirty fairy tale, a charge that now reads as tribute to how frankly it treats sex as currency. The ending, built on a card game, is among the most quietly perfect in American film.