Welcome to the inaugural review of my cinematic journey through time! In case you missed the introduction post from a couple of days ago, this is the start of me expanding my movie range. I love the art of film, but I haven’t seen nearly enough of the staples to call myself a true fanatic. So, throughout the next year, that’s going to change as I watch one movie a week from The New York Times Book of Movies.
Here’s a little excerpt from that post that further explains what this is all about:
Over the next year, I’ll watch one film a week—52 in total—each one randomly selected from the book and loosely organized by the alphabet (one to three films per letter). Every Friday, I’ll post a review right here on the site, diving into the history of the film along with my overall thoughts.
Sound good?
I thought so.
Let’s do this thing, starting with The Apartment.
“Shut up and deal.”
Throughout this cinematic journey through 52 movies in 52 weeks, I feel like I’ll be uttering the phrase “they don’t make ‘em like they used to” quite often. I’d say that’s certainly true when it comes to The Apartment.
Billy Wilder’s 1960 masterpiece has been heralded as one of the best films of all time for decades. It was a smashing success at the time—it was the eighth-highest-grossing film of the year, making $24.6 million ($268,074,344.59 in 2025) on a $3 million budget—and has only garnered more attention and acclaim as time has passed. When people talk about the great movies of the 20th century, The Apartment should, and usually does, come up.
Dramatic comedies—which I guess is what you could call this film, although the movie’s star, Jack Lemmon, would probably disagree with that assessment—just don’t sell at the box office anymore. It takes major spectacle to draw in audiences nowadays. And while there’s nothing inherently wrong with those types of movies, it’s kind of fun watching something so small in scale that was so renowned in its day. That would be a rare phenomenon in 2025, but in 1960, that was just par for the course.
If you’ve somehow never heard of this film and have been left in the dark regarding its reputation, here are some of the many accolades it received at the 1961 Academy Awards:
Best Motion Picture (Won)
Best Director — Billy Wilder (Won)
Best Actor — Jack Lemmon (Nominated)
Best Actress — Shirley MacLaine (Nominated)
Best Supporting Actor — Jack Kruschen (Nominated)
Best Story and Screenplay — Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond (Won)
Best Art Direction — Alexandre Trauner and Edward G. Boyle (Won)
Best Cinematography — Joseph LaShelle (Nominated)
Best Film Editing — Daniel Mandell (Won)
Best Sound — Gordon E. Sawyer (Nominated)
Believe me now?
I honestly can’t believe I hadn’t seen it until now. And now that I have, I can say for certain that it’s a movie I’ll want to show to everybody and anybody who hasn’t gotten the chance to lay eyes on it yet. I’ve been converted to The Apartment way.
The Apartment is centered around C.C. Baxter, played by Jack Lemmon, an insurance clerk in New York City. His main goal is to climb the corporate ladder, which he does by lending out his apartment to company executives for use with their mistresses. It’s a fairly wild premise, especially for 1960, and it’s a film that couldn’t have been made prior to the waning influence of the Hays Code in the late 1950s. But where some writers and directors would falter with such an odd concept, Wilder thrives.
Wilder co-wrote and directed The Apartment right on the heels of 1959’s Some Like It Hot, a comedy starring Lemmon, Tony Curtis, and Marilyn Monroe. That film too had a crazy story—after two musicians witness a mob hit, they disguise themselves as women and join an all-female band in hopes of escaping the mafia. It’s a really good and wild time, and it’s insane that Wilder was able to follow that success so quickly with another masterpiece.
Lemmon, the star of both movies, had this to say about what he thought when Wilder approached him with the script for The Apartment:
I couldn’t believe that Billy had done Some Like It Hot and then just when that’s through he hands me The Apartment and says, ‘This is our next one.’ And I read it, and it was one of the best scripts I’ve ever read.
— Jack Lemmon
He’s not wrong. The screenplay is, to put it plainly, exquisite.
Most films live and die by the script, and without a stellar one, The Apartment probably falls flat. The witty and quick dialogue, paired with some of the best “show, don’t tell” storytelling I’ve ever seen, makes the writing and directing pop like no other. Every character is unique—and yes, that may sound obvious—but Wilder and Diamond really do something extraordinary with them. Everyone speaks in a distinct voice, and characters bounce off each other in different ways depending on the context of the scene.
For more on the excellence of the screenplay, check out this fantastic video on YouTube:
The fantastic writing enables the actors—Lemmon and MacLaine chief among them—to just do their thing. Those two are especially charismatic, and the most genuine compliment I can pay their performances is that they feel like regular people. That was imperative. We, as the audience, need to empathize with the main characters—and we do. That might sound crazy given the wacky premise, but it somehow works.
Because, despite the crazy theatrics that transpire over the two-hour runtime, The Apartment is just a simple story about finding yourself. Lemmon’s character begins the film with no backbone, using the easy path to achieve his goals. Sure, he’s seemingly succeeding in everything he sets out to do—he’s getting promoted and everybody likes him. But at the same time, he’s a pushover who’s lonely and unsure of himself. And what makes everything so satisfying is that he learns all the right lessons, corrects his behavior, and winds up on top—ethically, at least—when everything is said and done.
If there’s one word I’d use to describe the movie, it’d be satisfying. There’s a ton of setup in the film, and once the credits rolled, the satisfaction I felt was extraordinary. Everything is planted with a purpose. Nothing feels out of place. It’s frankly quite beautiful.
One more thing: I’m a big fan of a good forced perspective trick, and dang, there’s an excellent one in this film. Cinematographer Joseph LaShelle might not have won the Oscar for his work on The Apartment, but he should’ve just for the wonderful illusion he pulled off.
While it may look like a massive office set, it’s actually not. As the desks (and humans) recede into the background, they gradually get smaller, making the room feel much larger than it really is. That just scratches an itch in my brain. Oh, what fun!
Honestly, there’s not much more to say. While it’s not perfect—the pacing is a bit of an issue for me, but I imagine that’s just a me problem due to my youth or something like that—The Apartment succeeds in pretty much everything it sets out to accomplish. From the fantastic writing to the charismatic actors, Billy Wilder’s 1960 magnum opus continues to permeate the culture to this day. Go watch it—I promise it’ll be worth your time. And hey, if you find it to be a drag, then you can take that up with my personal assistant, Toby1.
Final Rating: 4.5/52
It’s time for the Letterboxd Minute™! Here are some of my favorite reviews from Letterboxd, the best social media app on the planet:
Andrew (5/5): “If I write four words half as good as the four final words here, I’ll die happy.”
Jerry (4/5): “Jack Lemmon straining his spaghetti through a tennis racket might just be the best thing I have ever seen, movie-wise.”
alewatchsfilms (4/5): “Can’t believe Billy Wilder invented Airbnb.”
wersku (5/5): “The most relatable moment in the movie is when Jack Lemmon tries to eat his food, but there’s nothing on TV that feels worth watching while he eats.”
zoë rose bryant (5/5): “I’ve seen this plenty of times, but the moment when Fran gives Bud her mirror still never fails to make my jaw DROP.”
Ben (5/5): “Jack Lemmon is underrated. Billy Wilder and his six Academy Awards are underrated. Shirley MacLaine is the most underrated.”
At the end of each of these reviews, I’ll update my rankings of the 52 movies I’ll be watching throughout the next year. As there’s only been one film witnessed so far, this ranking is pretty easy:
1. The Apartment (1960)
We’ll see how long it remains at the top of this list.
Toby is a cat. His English is still a work in progress—he’s yet to correctly identify several different commands despite being over seven years old.
My final ratings are what I gave the movie on Letterboxd. Since the platform doesn’t let you do decimal ratings higher than 0.5, then that’s where my rating is capped. If I could, I’d probably give it around a 4.7/5, but that’s just the nature of life.