Issue Date: March 23, 2008
The Apartment
The creator of TV's "Mad Men" takes on Billy Wilder's satire of corporate ambition.
The Plot
Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine in "The Apartment" collector's edition, out on DVD
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Ambitious junior executive C.C. "Bud" Baxter (Jack Lemmon) is so eager to impress his bosses that he lends them his apartment for their after-work affairs. Things are fine until Bud discovers that the most important of the bosses, Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), is using the apartment to meet Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), the girl of Bud's dreams.
Our Insider
Matthew Weiner is creator and executive producer of "Mad Men," the Golden Globe-winning series focused on the lives and loves of the men and women who work in an advertising agency on Madison Avenue in 1960, the same period in which "The Apartment" is set. Weiner previously wrote for "The Sopranos" and won two Emmys for his work on the show.
OVERVIEW "Billy Wilder [the film's Oscar-winning writer-director] is an amazing storyteller. He's so confident in the way he lays everything out -- nothing happens that you would call a plot development until we're almost halfway through the film. But he draws you in with little touches -- ordinary scenes of taking out trash or contemporary references to Castro and Cape Canaveral -- and these suck an audience in."
RAT RACE "The film paints an unattractive view of corporate life. Bud works in a huge, sterile office where there are hundreds of desks, and all he wants is to move up to the executive floor. Bud is still young and ambitious, but the only thing the men he admires like about their jobs is chasing girls."
LOVE IS ALL YOU NEED "This a movie that takes love very seriously. Wilder goes to great lengths to show us that Bud is very much alone and that even though he has strong feelings for Fran, he can't make a move. The last woman he has a relationship with, Bud tells us, was his best friend's wife, and when he meets a woman in a bar, she's the one making the first move. This is not a man who casts a wide net. Bud thinks that he wants to climb the ladder at work, but what he really wants is a person in his life."
THE SUBJECT IS OBJECTS "Think of the film's most iconic scenes: Bud recognizing that the compact with the cracked mirror belongs to Fran; Bud straining spaghetti through a tennis racket; Bud returning the key to the executive washroom. When you can let objects convey ideas, that's storytelling. It's not easy to do, but when you're successful, the viewer has an emotional experience instead of an intellectual one."
-- Jamie Malanowski
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