#alexander trauner

[lyslily]

Jacques Prévert Photo : Alexander Trauner

[moviedromer]

The Apartment (1960)

Never shown on Moviedrome

I love The Apartment. I absolutely adore it, but now, after a score of times seeing it, watching it over Chinese food, slo-moing MacLaine at the end as she runs along West 67th Street, I'm beginning to admire it less. I express my qualms not to wipe the smile off your face as you begin to read about a film I presume you like, but to register my shock at the discovery of my misgivings of its greatness. The Apartment has given me more pleasure, more things to talk about, more phrases to use as I speak to people, than any other film (there's a sign on my door which says `MENSCHES ONLY, PLEASE'). Now, I wonder if I allowed it to get too close to me. It gets very close to people indeed. Hum the theme song of The Apartment and you feel the stupendous loneliness of being in New York. Played faster and with more brass and it becomes Fran's dream song as she runs at the end. Fran and Mr Sheldrake fell in love to the same tune; the pianist at the Chinese restaurant plays it when they arrive; Fran buys it for Sheldrake at Christmas. It is the song of their love as much as 'As Time Goes By' in Casablanca. The Apartment gets close to people because it is great at the loneliness of Lemmon. Wilder and LaShelle often surround their lead actor with acres of that 2.35:1 space. The French critic Jerome Jacob said of The Apartment: 'In the era of Boeing, everyone has forgotten Lindbergh, everybody lives in the prison of the human face.' This, for me, is not the type of loneliness which The Apartment portrays. It's more like the loneliness in David Lean's Summer Madness: open, humane, heart-bursting. Jacob's idea is too abstract, too Kafkaesque. Baxter's loneliness isn't due to being imprisoned in some way. It is expressed when he goes to the park bench and the leaves fall, when he pretends to have a hot date in the lobby, but walks past her, when he stands alone outside The Music Man, when he packs alone on New Year's Eve and the camera (in one of Wilder's few non-eyelevel shots in the film) goes high, when he eats a TV dinner alone. His Picassos and Rousseaus on the wall show he has an interior life. He is a mensch, but isn't getting the chance to show it. Watch The Apartment drunk and you don't fall asleep. Why is that? I think it's because it doesn't stop-start. It flows like a river, widening and deepening. No sub-plot peters out. And exactly because it flows, because it's a miracle of classical storytelling, it never becomes abstract. French critics have talked of its critique of conformism, its attack on consumer society. I can see what they're saying, but in doing so they're misjudging the feel of the film. Maybe if the dialogue didn't crackle, if MacLaine wasn't so beautiful, if the flow of feeling and hope and warmth wasn't so constant, I could see something abstract there. But I can't. And I don't think Wilder could. He, like so many emigrés, fell in love with those countries which didn't fall in love with theories. His whole cinema is about retreating from theory, from ideology, about the unfashionable observation that all human beings are the same, into humour, fate, `so-what'ness, like the last lines of his films. Volker Schlöndorff says that this is what makes Wilder great. Wilder himself said that The Apartment could have been set in Hong Kong or Paris, Berlin or Rome. His targets aren't specifically America or New York, but people and those tendencies in people to take the easiest route through life, to half-live and half-think. More and more, as time goes by, The Apartment seems to float free from the specifics of the dawn of the sixties, when it was released. Although some critics savaged it for seeming to herald a new contemporary immorality, it now seems to be from a 'time before' that new morality. Stand it in line with The Graduate, etc., and it sticks out a mile. Like other poets of the had been or never was — Orson Welles, John Ford, Pasolini — Wilder's humanism is timeless. The great, timeless, moving humanism of the picture, however, doesn't make it a masterpiece and the reason I think it doesn't is in your hands at this moment. The Apartment is too much screenplay, too much soundtrack, not enough image track. It isn't a very visual film. When you watch it on a cinema screen, it is disappointing, it is almost too big. The feelings don't match the image. There are of course some purely visual moments. Trauner's 19th floor office building set does everything Wilder wanted it to do, but it isn't Wilder's image, it's King Vidor's. The contrast between Baxter's apartment and Sheldrake's home is better, subtler, more relevant for the film. Page 101 of the screenplay calls Sheldrake's house 'split-level American', but there's far more in the imagery than this. The house is brightly lit, Wyleresque, WASPy, bourgeois, fifties, full of fake permanence and pretend content. Baxter's phone conversation with Sheldrake after Fran's suicide attempt allows Wilder to cut between the two homes. Unlike in Wyler, it's rare to come across stable families in Wilder and his portrait of the Sheldrakes — which includes them smiling on a Christmas card — is subtly visual. Another visual moment which isn't in the script occurs when Baxter goes to Sheldrake's office the day after Karl Matuschka has punched him in the face. Baxter is wearing dark glasses to hide his black eye. When he says the word 'yeah' (top of p. 149), Wilder shoots from the side so that we can see his eyes in shadow, behind his glasses. There's no explicit dramatic point being made here, but the shot has an unusual tone and is ambiguously intimate. Of course the story of The Apartment has a visual thing — Fran's cracked mirror — as a key element, and Wilder has said several times that he is proud that he was able to photograph Lemmon in the thing that makes him realize that Fran is having an affair with Sheldrake, thus bringing the love and careerism in his life into direct conflict, forcing him to choose. This is, indeed, narratively rich and satisfying, but it falls short of making meaning in purely visual terms. It is reducible to logic and words. It's writable in a screenplay. Most of Wilder's visual ideas are equally reducible in The Apartment, and that is why, I think, it doesn't feel like a masterpiece. It explains itself too completely. It doesn't feel like it loves cinema, except, of course, for Fran running. If you imagine it in visual terms, the film is full of verticality, about Baxter climbing up the career ladder, Fran going up and down in the lift. And yet there's no sense of height in it. Wilder uses one of the widest, most horizontal of screen ratios, Panavision. This could have made for interesting tensions, but it doesn't. My first ten or so viewings of The Apartment were on a TV screen and they've made me come to a conclusion I thought I'd never make about any film: I think it's better on TV. The film's verbal rather than visual nature, its intimacies, performances, warmth make it one of the best things you can do with your box in the corner of the room. The work of directors such as Wilder has, through repeated TV screenings of their best-known films in the last three decades, gained in critical reputation. Other, more visual, less intimate, more abstract American film-makers such as Nicholas Ray or Budd Boetticher, have been served less well by television. I think that a film masterpiece must have images which in some way defy description. It must believe in the primacy of photography, it must leave a shape in my head. The Apartment doesn't do this, but it does so many other stupendous things. It is the best non-masterpiece of American cinema.

- Excerpt from Mark Cousins' introduction to Billy Wilder/I.A.L Diamond's The Apartment screenplay. (© Mark Cousins, 1998)

As I did after the Alex Cox years, I’m going to watch three films which were never shown on Moviedrome as a kind of tribute to Mark Cousins. This is the first of the three...

Brief thoughts

I decided to choose three films from Cousins' Top 10 favourite films from the BFI 2012 poll. This, for me, was the most obvious choice as it's a personal favourite of mine, too. I spent days trying to find something by Cousins on the film until I remembered the introduction to the screenplay which I've had since the late-'90s. Doh! It's a brilliant intro and the screenplay is obviously not too shabby, so it's well worth seeking out to read in full. I was a little surprised by the criticism at first but the more I think about it the more I agree. Wilder made so many masterpieces. Two of which were shown on Moviedrome (Sunset Boulevard and Ace in the Hole), but many more which could have been but sadly weren't: this, Double Indemnity, Lost Weekend, etc. One later Wilder film I'm particularly fond of but which gets a bad rap is The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes; a wonderful film and I think a very good candidate for Moviedrome. In the series introduction to the 1997/98 season, Cousins says that a Wilder film will be included but it never was. I wonder which one was intended and if an intro was filmed.

The greatest thing about The Apartment, beyond the script, is Jack Lemmon's performance. The physical precision and dexterity of his movement. It is extremely visual, of course. And the sheer unrestrained happiness in that run by Shirley MacLaine at the end. It's perfect. I may watch it again, actually...

Alfred Hitchcock letter to Wilder, praising The Apartment Conversations with Billy Wilder & I.A.L. Diamond