C.C. Baxter is a mid-level insurance clerk who has figured out the fastest route up the corporate ladder: lending his apartment key to the executives who need somewhere private to conduct their affairs.
Billy Wilder sets that premise inside a New York winter and lets the loneliness show through the arrangement almost immediately. The complication arrives when the elevator operator he has quietly liked for months, Fran Kubelik, turns out to be involved with Jeff Sheldrake, the personnel director holding Baxter's promotion.
Wilder and his writing partner I.A.L. Diamond built the film around a single unanswered question from David Lean's 1945 romance Brief Encounter: who is the friend whose flat the two lovers keep borrowing, and what does it cost him. Wilder held onto that idea for roughly fifteen years, because a studio comedy centered on enabling adultery had no chance of clearing the Production Code through the 1940s and much of the 1950s. By 1959, he and Diamond finally wrote the script directly for Jack Lemmon, whom Wilder had just directed in Some Like It Hot.
What makes the film hold up is how deliberately it refuses to pick a lane between satire and heartbreak. Joseph LaShelle's black-and-white widescreen photography turns Baxter's office into a vast grid of identical desks, a visual joke about corporate anonymity that Wilder quietly reverses into isolation. Lemmon plays the early scenes for physical comedy, then lets the same mannerisms curdle into something sadder without changing register. Shirley MacLaine matches him by keeping Fran guarded and funny rather than tragic.
The Apartment swept the 33rd Academy Awards, winning Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay among its five wins from ten nominations, and remains the last black-and-white film to win Best Picture until Schindler's List more than three decades later. It's available to stream with a Prime Video or Criterion Channel subscription, and free with ads on Tubi.
