The Apartment (1960) on Netflix
Approved19602h 5mComedyDramaRomance
C.C. Baxter, a lonely New York insurance clerk, lends his apartment to executives for their affairs, hoping for a promotion. Personnel director Jeff Sheldrake asks to use the apartment as well.
- Netflix4.4/5
- IMDb8.3/10223,149 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes94%
Trailer
Plot summary
C.C. Baxter is a lonely clerk in a Manhattan insurance office, one of many employees at Consolidated Life. Four of its managers take turns using his apartment on the Upper West Side for their affairs, and he keeps the schedule; the noise and the women convince his neighbors he is a playboy. Their glowing reviews bring him to the attention of Jeff Sheldrake, the personnel director, who asks him how he became so popular. Baxter tells him about the arrangement. Sheldrake offers a promotion if he can have the apartment himself, starting that night, and gives Baxter two theater tickets. Baxter invites Fran Kubelik, the elevator operator he admires, but she meets a former flame for dinner first.
Cast
Show all 20 cast
- Joe Palmaas Office Maintenance Man (uncredited)
- Benny Burtas Charlie (uncredited)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Apartment (1960)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Part of the plot was inspired by a real Hollywood scandal in which producer Walter Wanger shot agent Jennings Lang for having an affair with Wanger's wife, actress Joan Bennett, an affair Lang had conducted using a low-level employee's apartment.
- Art director Alexandre Trauner created the vast insurance-company office with forced perspective: the set appeared to be a very long room full of desks and workers, but successively smaller people and desks were used, ending up with children.
- MacMurray, having generally played guileless characters, related that after the film's release women accosted him in the street and berated him for making a “dirty filthy movie”, and one of them hit him with her purse.
- Jack Lemmon's punch scene made the final cut only because he failed to fake the blow and was accidentally knocked down for real, and director Billy Wilder kept the take rather than reshoot it.
- Since The Apartment's release, only two black-and-white films have won the Academy Award for Best Picture: Schindler's List in 1993 and The Artist in 2011.
- Billy Wilder had originally planned to cast Paul Douglas as Sheldrake, but after Douglas died unexpectedly the part went instead to Fred MacMurray.
