The Apartment

Our Premium Pick series affords VIFF+ Premium members the opportunity to share a movie of their choice with their friends and our audience. This month’s film was requested by both Allessandro de Feo and Marc Staehling.

Billy Wilder’s 1960 Best Picture winner is one of those movie landmarks where you can see America growing up and smelling the coffee. It’s a bitter, pungent film — a “comedy” in name only — about “the takers and the ones who get took”. Jack Lemmon is CC Baxter, an insurance clerk at Consolidated Life. His bachelor pad has a revolving door — only he’s never in it, and the executives taking advantage of his hospitality are married men who dangle a promotion in front of Baxter just as surely as they promise the good life to the secretaries they bring there. In her career best role, Shirley MacLaine is Fran Kubelik, the elevator girl who hits rock bottom on Christmas Eve. Razor-sharp writing; dark, high contrast visuals; and indelible performances… this classic still holds true.

There is a melancholy gulf over the holidays between those who have someplace to go, and those who do not. The Apartment is so affecting partly because of that buried reason.

Roger Ebert

This comedy tells truths about American business and sexual mores as uncomfortable now as they were in 1960.

Kim Newman, Empire