The Apartment starring Jack Lemmon

Essential Actor / Actresses Here

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Romance at its most antiromantic--that is the Billy Wilder stamp of genius, and this Best Picture Academy Award winner from 1960 is no exception. Set in a decidedly unsavory world of corporate climbing and philandering, the great filmmaker's trenchant, witty satire-melodrama takes the office politics of a corporation and plays them out in the apartment of lonely clerk C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon). By lending out his digs to the higher-ups for nightly extramarital flings with their secretaries, Baxter has managed to ascend the business ladder faster than even he imagined. The story turns even uglier, though, when Baxter's crush on the building's melancholy elevator operator (Shirley MacLaine) runs up against her long-standing affair with the big boss (a superbly smarmy Fred MacMurray). The situation comes to a head when she tries to commit suicide in Baxter's apartment. Not the happiest or cleanest of scenarios, and one that earned the famously caustic and cynically humored Wilder his share of outraged responses, but looking at it now, it is a funny, startlingly clear-eyed vision of urban emptiness and is unfailingly understanding of the crazy decisions our hearts sometimes make. Lemmon and MacLaine are ideally matched, and while everyone cites Wilder's Some Like It Hot closing line "Nobody's perfect" as his best, MacLaine's no-nonsense final words--"Shut up and deal"--are every bit as memorable. Wilder won three Oscars for The Apartment, for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay (cowritten with longtime collaborator I.A.L. Diamond).
Synopsis
An ambitious young insurance clerk tries to get ahead by lending his apartment key to several of the company's philandering executives. But when he falls in love with the building's elevator operator, he soon realizes that she's the woman his married boss has been taking to the apartment for romantic trysts. Spurred on by the exhortations of the philosophising doctor who lives next door to him, the troubled young man eventually re-examines his priorities and decides to be true to himself and drop out of the rat race. In the process, he also wins the girl.

Video Description
To further his career an office clerk lets his boss use his apartment for hanky panky. Complications arise when the clerk falls for his boss' girlfriend. Academy Award Nominations: 10, including Best Actor--Jack Lemmon, Best Actress--Shirley MacLaine. Academy Awards: 5, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay.

 

 

 

 

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