Movies

One of the finest examples of smart, satiric comedy-drama ever created for the screen. Jack Lemmon (in amazing comic form) plays a working stiff in Corporate America--via New York City--whose bachelor apartment inadvertently becomes a love-nest for amorous, married executives. The film is extremely modern for 1960 and features a non-stop barrage of funny, clever talk. Lemmon is a mad genius at frenzied (yet sympathetic) characterization, and "The Apartment" catches him at his professional peak in the movies. Working alongside huggable neurotic Shirley MacLaine (also at her peak) and shady Fred MacMurray (parlaying his slimeball role with curt persuasion), Lemmon creates a new kind of acting: screwball realism. **** from ****

Written by the great filmmaker Billy Wilder, this is a serious, sardonic comedy for people who've known what's its like to feel the pressure of compromising your principles or your self- respect for the sake of getting ahead in life. And there are very few over the age of consent who haven't had to at one time or another. This isn't the laugh out loud comedy of Jim Carrey or the Farrelly brothers, but a subtle, nuanced comedy about two people who have both been jaded in love and yet continue to hope again and again that it will someday work out for them -- mainly because despite the unlikeable things they do, they are both basically decent, nice people. Flawed and even weak at times, but good people. This is a movie that doesn't just make it you laugh, it makes you think. A rare find indeed.

As he handed Billy Wilder the Academy Award for Best Picture (the last to go to a black & white movie until 'Schindler's List') Moss Hart wryly remarked to him "Better quit now, Billy. It's not going to get any better than this!".Appropriately paired on BBC2 this afternoon (although in the wrong order) with 'Brief Encounter', which contained the scene with Valentine Dyall that inspired it; when I first saw 'The Apartment' half a century ago at the age of 13 even then I found it as melancholy as it was funny.It was a sign of the times that Best Picture went to such a gown-up film; and ironically Hope Holiday (now 91), who played Margie MacDougall, has just revealed that soon after making this was sexually harassed by Jerry Lewis.