Billy Wilder's office-romance Best Picture winner. Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, and a Manhattan apartment whose key is the entire structural problem.
New York City, late 1959. C.C. 'Bud' Baxter is a 29-year-old insurance-company employee who has worked out a small career-advancement scheme: he loans his Manhattan apartment to four senior executives for their extramarital affairs in exchange for their support of his promotion prospects. The arrangement requires Baxter to spend several evenings a week walking the streets or sitting in Central Park.
Baxter's plans accelerate when Jeff Sheldrake, the company's personnel director, asks to use the apartment. Sheldrake's mistress turns out to be Fran Kubelik, the elevator operator Baxter has been quietly in love with. The film tracks the three principals across roughly three weeks. The Christmas Eve sequence — Fran's near-suicide overdose in Baxter's apartment — is the film's structural turn from comedy into something more emotionally serious. The final New Year's Eve sequence, in which Baxter finally chooses Fran over the corporate arrangement, closes the film with the most-famous final line in Wilder's catalogue: 'Shut up and deal.'
The Apartment won Best Picture at the 1961 Academy Awards. The film is, on its surface, an office comedy — light, witty, structured around verbal repartee and physical-comedy set pieces. The substance is significantly darker. Baxter is genuinely lonely; Fran is genuinely suicidal; Sheldrake is genuinely callous. The film's specific gift is its willingness to deliver romantic comedy and serious dramatic content within the same scenes.
Wilder was, by 1960, perhaps the most-respected working American director. He had directed Sunset Boulevard (1950), Some Like It Hot (1959), and several other major films across the previous decade. The Apartment is in some sense the structural culmination of his approach — a film that uses comedic surface to deliver more-difficult content than the surface initially suggests.
Jack Lemmon's Bud Baxter is one of the canonical American corporate-conformist leads. The character is genuinely sympathetic — Lemmon's specific physical comportment and verbal register make Baxter's compromises read as recognisable rather than as villainous — and also genuinely complicit. The film does not let Baxter off the hook for the arrangement he has constructed. The audience must hold his sympathy and his complicity together across the runtime.
Lemmon would extend the type across his subsequent career. The Apartment's Baxter is, in some sense, the foundational template for the corporate-cog American protagonist that subsequent decades would extend through The Graduate (1967), Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), Office Space (1999), and the broader workplace-comedy tradition. Almost every subsequent middle-management American film protagonist is, in some structural sense, downstream of Bud Baxter.
The film's central tonal shift occurs in the Christmas Eve sequence. Fran, devastated by Sheldrake giving her a $100 bill instead of a Christmas present, takes an overdose of sleeping pills in Baxter's apartment. Baxter discovers her on returning home. The next forty minutes of screen time are largely the recovery — Baxter caring for Fran across the night and into Christmas Day, the two of them slowly developing the connection the rest of the film will resolve into.
The choice to introduce a near-suicide into a film that has, for an hour, been operating as office comedy was, in 1960, structurally unusual. The film does not soften the sequence. Fran is genuinely in serious physical danger; the medical-recovery scenes are unfunny; the dramatic substance shifts permanently. The film's defenders argue this is what makes the romantic-comedy resolution at the end actually land — the audience has seen what is at stake.