‘The Apartment’ is a caustic satire about office politics and the ways in which lives and livelihoods can be treated as commodities. Jack Lemmon is company man C.C. Baxter who works his way up the corporate ladder after renting out his apartment of an evening to his colleagues for their extra-marital trysts. Yet we never imagine that he is doing this as a way of career advancement because he is simply unable to say no to the disingenuous colleagues around him. He spends more of his time arranging the schedules for them to loan out his apartment than he does actually doing his insurance job, and the mendacity of his colleagues is summed up in one scene when one of the women asks the man who is taking her on a date to Baxter’s bachelor pad if he brings other dames there – ‘Of course not’, he haughtily replies, ‘I’m a happily married man.’

Baxter is a naïve figure in this environment who becomes a ‘mensch’ (a term used by the next door neighbour, a doctor who plays a crucial role in one of the scenes when one of the women attempts suicide after being let down, again, by her boss) when he realizes that his integrity and the welfare of the women who are being used in his apartment is not a price he is willing to pay so that he can have his own executive office on the top floor adjoining that of his boss Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray).

‘American Beauty’ addressed many of these same questions forty years later, as did Lemmon’s extraordinary performance in 1992’s ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ where we perhaps see what might have happened to Baxter if he had sold out long ago. Baxter spends his evenings wandering alone through the streets of New York, or sitting on a park bench, while waiting for his apartment to become available to him once again, and it only dawns on him that he is effectively an accomplice to vice and the degradation of the women (and their wives) who are taken there when Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), an elevator girl in the firm, on whom he has a crush, tries to take her life after Mr. Sheldrake takes her to Baxter’s apartment with promises of leaving his wife, only to renege on them.

Fran is as gullible as Baxter, except that there is also a world-weary sense on her part that she has been here many times before. She knows that Sheldrake is slippery, yet she really wants to believe his protestations that he will leave his wife for her. Of course he never does, and even after her suicide attempt, following which Baxter offers convalescence and restores her to health, Fran is still willing to give Sheldrake one more chance. The crucial part of ‘The Apartment’ is set between Christmas and New Year 1959 and it belongs in the canon of great Christmas movies with the tropes of magical transformation over the festive season, here exemplified by the way in which Baxter performs the role of guardian angel.

He protects Miss Kubelik and wards off evil forces in the form of the soulless colleagues who still want to bring dates back to his apartment and Sheldrake himself whom Baxter first protects and then, finally, stands up to when he realizes that Kubelik deserves better. Baxter sacrifices his career for her as well as his love for Fran herself, until the final scene which is as majestic, sweeping and romantic as any great cinematic love story, with a final line of dialogue that is the equal to the ’Nobody’s perfect’ denouement of ‘Some Like It Hot’, also starring Lemmon and directed by Billy Wilder.