This a welcome re-release of the 1960 classic – a tendresse with complications
Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960) is a big-city satire with a romantic heart of gold: it's a welcome re-release, and for those who love the style of Mad Men, or Richard Yates's 1961 novel Revolutionary Road (and Sam Mendes's fine screen adaptation) it's a must. Jack Lemmon plays CC Baxter, a nerdy, naive, good-natured salaryman in a Manhattan insurance office. He's been bullied into letting sleazy married executives use his bachelor apartment after work to entertain their girlfriends; the chief offender is conceited personnel chief Mr Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray). Baxter is shyly falling in love with a pretty and smart elevator operator, Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), who is sporting a post-heartbreak gamine haircut. It's a tendresse with complications. Famously, the film was inspired by the "borrowed flat" scene from Brief Encounter, with all its resentment and self-loathing: the passionate orchestral surge that accompanies Fran's decision to overdose on sleeping pills is almost certainly channelling the Rachmaninov from David Lean's film.Wilder perhaps allowed his tense relationship with Marilyn Monroe from Some Like It Hot to colour an ungallant joke about her here. But it's still luminous, 52 years on.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/jun/14/apartment-review
No comments:
Post a Comment