#80 ‘The Apartment’
Keyholes, Capitalism, and the Cost of Being a Good Man in a Bad System
The Apartment (1960) is Billy Wilder’s velvet-wrapped gut punch: a romantic comedy that slips a suicide attempt between the meet-cute and the New Year’s kiss, and somehow pulls it off. It’s tender, biting, and devastatingly modern. But let’s not pretend it’s just a love story. It’s a capitalist horror film in sheep’s clothing—where ambition runs on exploitation, women are currency, and the only way to survive is to hand over your dignity along with your apartment key.
Jack Lemmon plays C.C. Baxter, a company man in the most literal sense: a lonely insurance clerk who loans out his apartment to executives for their extramarital affairs in exchange for career advancement. He’s sweet, yes. Likable, sure. But also complicit. He lets men cheat, lie, and discard women in his own bed just so he can maybe sit closer to the elevator in a beige office building filled with drones. It’s not just middle management—it’s moral erosion by paperwork.
Enter Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), the elevator operator with a sad smile and a sharp tongue, who’s having an affair with one of those executives—Baxter’s boss, no less. She’s radiant and resigned, funny and fragile. And when she overdoses on sleeping pills in Baxter’s apartment, the film stops being a comedy and becomes something else entirely: a reckoning.
Fran is not your typical ingénue. She’s not quirky, not cloying, not waiting to be rescued. She’s exhausted. And for good reason: she’s smart enough to know what she’s worth to men in power, and broken enough to keep accepting it. The film doesn’t punish her for this—but it does frame her recovery as something that can only happen through a nicer man’s affection. Baxter may not be a predator, but he’s still part of the system that chewed her up.
Wilder directs with elegance and acid. The tone flips between tragic and comic with precision. And Lemmon is extraordinary—neurotic, tender, increasingly aware of the cost of being “nice” in a world where kindness is treated like a currency to be manipulated. But the film’s real brilliance lies in how it weaponizes charm against itself. Every joke lands, but each one cuts deeper. You laugh, then wince, then realize the punchline is your own complicity.
Yes, the ending is hopeful. Fran leaves the boss. Baxter quits his job. But it’s a small revolution. Two people opt out of a corrupt system, but the building is still there. The men are still laughing. And the women? They’re still being passed around on punch cards.
4 out of 5 used towels
(One for MacLaine’s luminous sorrow. One for Lemmon’s tragic sweetness. One for Wilder’s perfect tonal alchemy. One for daring to show that love isn’t enough to fix the world—but it might be enough to fix two broken people inside it. The missing star? Still waiting in the hallway, holding a key that opens doors but never offers safety.)
