Last night I was visiting the local Alamo Drafthouse and saw that they will be screening The Apartment (Billy Wilder, 1960). Featured cocktails include Between the Sheets (rum, cointreau, brandy, lemon) and The Maiden’s Prayer (gin, rum, cointreau, and of course, lemon, gotta have the lemon). TCM also screens The Apartment this Friday and it’s an apt choice for December given the pivotal scenes in the movie that hinge on the holidays. Wilder and his long-standing screenwriting partner I.A.L. Diamond won an Oscar for The Apartment, and casual conversation amidst my group touched on other favorites by the duo, such as the obvious choice, released the year before The Apartment, Some Like It Hot (1959), then jumping out a decade later to The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970).
As I talked with my friends about Wilder I found myself pondering aloud whether this man had ever made a dud. I was uncritical and gushing because too many personal favorites crowded my memory for any kind of objective stance. My top five would have to be Double Indemnity (1944), A Foreign Affair (1948), Sunset Blvd. (1950), Ace in the Hole (1951), and, yes, The Apartment. But given how prolific Wilder’s career was, I still have a large gap in my education. To counter-point my own fawning I need only recall that some of the things I like most about Wilder, such as his morbid black humor and clear-eyed view of our misanthropic nature, are exactly what turn some people off about the guy.
All of Wilder’s films decline in retrospect because of visual and structural deficiencies. Only Laughton’s owlish performance makes Witness for the Prosecution look like the tour de force it was intended to be, and only Jack Lemmon keeps The Apartment from collapsing into the cellar of morbid psychology. Wilder serves full credit for these performances, and for many of the other felicities that redeem his films from the superficial nastiness of his personality. He has failed only to the extent that he has been proved inadequate for the more serious demands of middle-class tragedy (Double Indemnity), and social allegory (Ace in the Hole). A director who can crack jokes about suicide attempts (Sabrina and The Apartment) and thoughtlessly brutalize charming actresses like Jean Arther (Foreign Affair) and Audrey Hepburn (Sabrina) is hardly likely to make a coherent film on the human condition. (Excerpt from American Movie Critics; An Anthology From the Silents Until Now. Edited by Phillip Lopate, 2006)
What to add? A digression on Stanley Kubrick and Shelly Duvall? Some other time, maybe. For now let’s agree that movies can offer up a reflection of our humanity and inhumanity. If the mirror happens to be broken, perhaps it’s for a reason.
