Billy Wilder
L'appartamento

C.C. Baxter is a modest employee in a large insurance company and rents a small but comfortable apartment, perfect for a bachelor.

One day, one of his superiors asks to borrow the apartment for an evening, for a secret extramarital escapade, perhaps with a modest employee like himself from this large company.

Soon the word spreads among the bosses and sub-bosses about this discreet and secret alcove, and poor Baxter, who really can't say no to his superiors, finds himself caught in a kind of moral-work blackmail (want to advance in your career, Baxter? Want me to recommend you to HR for a promotion?). He ends up spending his evenings out in the cold, in the snow, or even at the office, doing unsolicited, unpaid overtime.

Then something happens.

The "something" in Billy Wilder's films are the "necessary" plot twists that in a screenplay of this type, we are in the comedy-drama genre, give an unpredictable development. They are like the ignition fluid that lights the barbecue, the salt in the pasta, the paprika on the Spanish grilled shrimp, and so on.

Billy Wilder's screenplays, Billy Wilder's films, seem to be real musical scores of a classical music piece. A crescendo of elements, instruments, bass drum beats (the gongs of plot twists), and the insertion of instruments perfectly in harmony with the previous ones (details, ideas).

Impressive, above all, is how everything fits perfectly in time and manner, in a "circular" pattern completed in the classic closing of the circle, a perfect circle, the good Giotto wouldn't have anything to object to.

If it's not yet clear, Billy Wilder's films, in their development and execution, remain among the greatest examples of all time of how cinema is written. For this film, he collaborates with screenwriter I.A.L. Diamond, who also worked as a screenwriter on the preceding film, again with Jack Lemmon, who will be mentioned later.

Oh yes, what you’ve written you then have to put into practice, but as Henri George Clouzot (among the greatest and "cursed" French directors of the time) said in an interview, once you’ve written the film, you then "just" have to shoot it. And how Billy Wilder shot, guys, what technique, what control, what game vision, what a show, amishi! José Altafini would say. But Wilder was an exception. Sometimes it was his habit to start shooting when the script was maybe only half complete, in order to model and shape it on the characters during filming. A risky technique, a tightrope walker without a net, but it measured Wilder's creative genius, stuff that even he didn’t know how his film would end!

Now imagine that the performers are superstars. C.C. Baxter is Jack Lemmon, 35 years old at the time, fresh from the famous "Some Like It Hot," a wild (and sensational) comedy featuring Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe.

Lemmon delivers an applaud-worthy performance. Lemmon and his quirks, his expressions, how he acts mostly with his face (he's from the old school, Lemmon is part of the new wave acting with sound but has greatly learned the lesson of his great predecessors, the silent movie actors who acted with their eyes, with grimaces, with their bodies, other "monsters"). In any case, he perfectly embodies the figure of the average American clerk, a bachelor around 35, servile and efficient enough, or perhaps even more so. The cliché of the average man without any particular ambitions or aspirations. Love will be what transforms him and drags him into a muddy and treacherous vortex; he will finally get his hands dirty, finally try to take control of his life.

There is Shirley MacLaine, a predestined talent, who at 20 made her debut in "The Trouble with Harry" by Alfred Hitchcock and three years later "The Apartment" will consecrate her talent by playing "Irma" (the sweet). Shirley is Miss Kubelik, an elevator operator (she was a whiz as a typist but made too many spelling mistakes and so they relegated her to running the elevators) in the enormous skyscraper headquarters of the multinational. "Did you cut your hair, Miss Kubelik? You look good with short hair!" "Really, Mr. Baxter? Thank you, you're very kind, you're the only one who takes off his hat when entering the elevator."

There's the boss of all bosses, Mr. Sheldrake, played by Fred McMurray, an old fox of American cinema of the time, found in "Double Indemnity," also by Wilder in '44. Sheldrake is a handsome man, tall, powerful, self-assured, everything is due to him, even Baxter's apartment if necessary.

Wilder lifts the carpet, after all, there was a strange bulge (of dust) under the carpet. He doesn't just lift it but slams it in your face energetically, and the dust gets into your nose. The critique of the (emergent) American society with the advent of the '60s is served. Nothing new under the sun: deceptions, blackmail, and subterfuges, abuse of power, well-known things, practices always exercised by oppressors against the oppressed, half of an American dream, an nightmare in the other, a 360-degree moon, and to see the "dark side," you have to go around, Billy will accompany you.