Some Like It Wilder

by Gene D. Phillips

  Principal photography started November 17, 1959, with location work in New York City. Wilder and Trauner picked a brownstone at 51 West Sixty-seventh Street to shoot exteriors of the apartment building where Bud lives. It is a typical neighborhood in Manhattan where the sidewalks are lined with garbage cans. Bud is reduced to sitting on a long bench in Central Park while an executive is partying with his secretary in Bud’s flat. He occupies a bench in a row of benches that recede into the distance. The gloom that envelops Bud “is all the more forlorn for being stretched across the wide screen frame.”29 Moreover, throughout the film, the wide screen depicts the empty space that surrounds the characters, implying their isolation from one another. Seldom has the wide-screen format been used to better advantage than by Wilder and cinematographer Joseph LaShelle in this picture.

  Since The Apartment takes place during the Christmas season, the bitterly cold New York weather during location shooting was appropriate for the movie, but it was tough on cast and crew. Wilder had planned to shoot several exterior shots in front of Bud’s apartment building, “but it was so cold that we were always running to the nearest bar to warm ourselves” with a shot of whiskey, says Trauner in his autobiography; “we weren’t making progress.”30

  “I much prefer shooting in the studio, where I am in control,” Wilder declared. “I don’t have to fight the weather, which is changing all the time.” He would begin filming a scene on a bleak, rainy morning; “by midday the sun would come out.” This made continuity difficult in the exterior scenes.31 He finally decided to film the rest of the exteriors on a soundstage at the Goldwyn Studios, where Trauner duplicated the facades of three of the brownstones that had been used for exteriors during location shooting in New York. The film unit finished up in New York City just before Thanksgiving, and principal photography resumed at Goldwyn on November 30, 1959.

  Lemmon found Wilder simpatico during the shoot at the studio, which extended into February 1960. The great thing about Wilder, he explained, was that “he doesn’t impose himself on the actor before he sees what he will bring to the part.” Wilder always listened to Lemmon’s suggestions. Lemmon would pop into Wilder’s office any time he got a brainstorm for Wilder to consider. “Don’t tell me,” Wilder would say; “show me.”32 Very often Wilder would accept Lemmon’s suggestion. But not always.

  Wilder remembered that one morning Lemmon wandered into his office just before the day’s shooting was to begin. He told Wilder that he had gotten an idea the night before, when he was running his line with his wife-to-be, actress Felicia Farr, who fed him his cues. Lemmon elaborated his idea to Wilder, who shook his head no. Lemmon promptly replied that he did not like it either. In comparing notes with Wilder, Lemmon realized that his great notion was not all that great. “Jack is not an argumentative actor,” Wilder told me. “We understand each other, and it is a pleasure to work with him.”

  Like Lemmon, MacLaine testifies that Wilder listened to her suggestions and discussed them with her until they came to some kind of agreement. Still, Lemmon recalls that she and Wilder had a serious misunderstanding on the very first day of shooting. MacLaine was not accustomed to saying her lines word for word but might nonchalantly skip a few words or alter a phrase. Other directors had not minded, but Wilder set her straight right from the get-go. “A script should be played the way it is written,” he explained, “like a musical score. Every sentence has a point.”33

  Wilder decided to teach MacLaine a lesson while shooting a scene in which Fran, as an elevator operator, greets each of the executives and employees as they get on. MacLaine had two pages of dialogue, and Wilder wanted to film it in a single take. She thought she had finally nailed the scene on the fourth take. After conferring with Diamond, who, as usual, was present on the set, script in hand, Wilder informed MacLaine that she would have to do yet another take. “Those were not the exact words,” he said. MacLaine had omitted a single phrase! When she did the fifth take perfectly, Wilder gave her a big kiss. He commented afterward that, once she understood that he meant business, “she got serious and worked as hard as anybody.”34

  For her part, MacLaine reflected that she came to realize that Wilder always had a complete blueprint for the movie in his mind before he started filming, “so he knows what he wants.” She confessed that she never had gone to an acting school, “but I learned more from him than from anybody else in Hollywood.”35 Richard Gehman told Wilder that many stars vowed that they would “work with Billy for nothing.” Always one to sidestep a patronizing compliment, Wilder retorted, “I wish they would tell that to their agents!”36

  Wilder encountered some difficulties with LaShelle during the shoot. LaShelle recalled discussing with Wilder the scene in which Fran attempts suicide. Wilder called for an extremely low camera angle when Dr. Dreyfuss is endeavoring to revive Fran, with the camera close to the floor, shooting upward at them. LaShelle balked at this camera setup, thinking it would look pretentious. So he simply stated, “No, I don’t think so.” Wilder peered at him over his glasses “like an owl” and responded, “Nobody ever says ‘No’ to me.” LaShelle stood his ground, repeating, “No!” Finally Wilder grinned and said, “Oh hell, do it the way you want.”37 LaShelle commented later that Wilder was decidedly irritated by anyone who did not follow his directions, “so you have to be damn sure you are right when you disagree with him.” He called Wilder the most brilliant director he had ever known. “But,” he added, “Billy is not infallible.”38 Wilder dismissed the incident by saying that LaShelle was getting grouchy because he was an elderly man. As a matter of fact, Wilder and LaShelle were both in their mid-fifties at the time. LaShelle went on to shoot three more Wilder pictures in a row, through The Fortune Cookie.

  The shooting period wrapped on February 12, 1960, and Wilder moved on to postproduction. The film’s composer, Adolph Deutsch, possessed an extensive background in classical music, which is evident in his meticulous orchestrations. Yet his score for The Apartment also invokes popular music, from jazz to lounge pop. His incidental music is not merely a backdrop for the action; his tunes are vividly in the foreground at times. He supplied a haunting blues number for solo saxophone that permeates the sequence in which Bud is shown in his lonely bachelor pad, cleaning up after one of his bosses’ after-hours frolics and then fixing himself a frozen TV dinner.

  Jack Lemmon, whose hobby was playing jazz on the piano, was impressed by Wilder’s uncanny knowledge of the popular music of the past. Wilder wanted Deutsch to employ a favorite old song of his with a haunting melody as the title tune for the movie’s opening credits. Wilder could hum the tune but could not remember its title. The staff of the music department at UA finally located the number: Charles Williams’s “Jealous Lover.” Williams was known for his miniconcerto “The Dream of Olwen,” which he composed for the British film Where I Live (1947). He wrote “Jealous Lover” in 1949 as a pop tune. Wilder arranged to have the song retitled “Theme from The Apartment.” It became a hit single for the duo piano team of Ferrante and Teicher. “Now it’s a standard,” said Lemmon.39

  While overseeing the assembly of the footage by editor Daniel Mandell and supervising editor Doane Harrison, Wilder was observant but calm, “like the captain of a well-trained ship who no longer needs to give a lot of orders.”40 After all, both Mandell and Harrison were veterans of previous Wilder pictures. Wilder customarily allowed Mandell to do the first cut of a given scene before he looked at it, because often an editor would come up with some nifty touches on his own. Then Wilder would suggest ways to reduce any excess footage and make other adjustments. Other directors might wind up with as much as two hours of surplus footage after a picture was edited. By contrast, Wilder declared that he had “three feet of unused footage” at the end of postproduction on The Apartment.41 When Wilder screened the picture for the Mirisch Company and for UA, both groups were entirely satisfied with the job he had done.

  The Apartment concerns a loser, an accountant with a night school diplo
ma who is always a half step behind the parade. The main plot of the picture gets under way when C. C. “Bud” Baxter decides that if his virtues as an employee of Consolidated Life are not enough to get him promoted, the vices of his philandering employers are. That is to say, Bud gains advancement in the firm by loaning his apartment to his superiors for their after-hours frolics with their secretaries.

  In this, his first film after Some Like It Hot, Wilder manages a sly side-swipe at Marilyn Monroe by having Mr. Dobisch (Ray Walston), a middle manager at Consolidated Life, bring a Monroe look-alike (Joyce Jameson) to Bud’s apartment for a tryst. Wilder asked Jameson to wear one of Monroe’s gowns from Some Like It Hot, but the actress complained that the plunging neckline was too revealing. Wilder allowed her to wear the gown backward.

  Mr. Kirkeby (David Lewis) brings Sylvia, a switchboard operator (Joan Shawlee from Some Like It Hot), to Bud’s flat. As he and Sylvia are leaving, Kirkeby, who calls Bud “Buddy Boy,” mutters to him that a promotion is in the offing for him. Bud in due course is promoted from the nineteenth-floor office pool to a wood-paneled private office on the twenty-seventh floor; he is now a junior executive. When Bud is handed his personal key to the executive washroom, Wilder implies that his rise as an organization man is a rogue’s progress toward “the room at the top, the executive washroom.”42

  Bud attends the Christmas office party proudly wearing his new bowler hat, another status symbol. The screenplay describes the event as “a swinging party. Some of the employees are drinking liquor out of a paper cup” and getting smashed while singing “Jingle Bells.”43

  Earlier, Sheldrake told Bud that his current mistress had hurled her compact at him, cracking its mirror, when he broke the news to her that he had no intention of divorcing his wife to marry her. Bud, who is already picking up the “executive lingo,” says to Sheldrake, “That’s how it crumbles, cookie-wise.” During the Christmas party Fran takes out her compact, and Bud notices the cracked mirror. “Makes me look the way I feel,” she murmurs. Wilder explained, “As Bud looks into the broken makeup mirror, he knows that Fran is the girl that Sheldrake has been bringing to his apartment. We photographed the pained look of recognition on Bud’s face in the cracked mirror.”44 The shattered glass symbolizes that Bud’s illusions about Fran have likewise been fractured. Wilder pointed out that one shot saved ten pages of dialogue.45

  Later in the film, Fran characterizes Sheldrake as “a taker” and herself as one “who gets took.” Sheldrake says he has not bought her a Christmas present on Christmas Eve. “He then puts a hundred-dollar bill in her purse,” comments Bruce Block, “just the way a John would pay off a hooker.”46 Then he picks up the gifts, all wrapped in Christmas paper, to take home to his wife and kids.

  In a fit of depression, Fran stays behind in Bud’s apartment after her rendezvous there with Sheldrake on Christmas Eve. Fran, who is not aware that the apartment is Bud’s, then overdoses on the sleeping pills she finds in the medicine cabinet. Wilder undermines the joy of the holiday season by having Fran’s suicide attempt, “provoked by both her despair and her sense of degradation, take place on Christmas Eve.”47 Bud arrives home to find Fran lying unconscious on his bed. He frantically summons Dr. Dreyfuss (Jack Kruschen) from next door to help him revive her.

  Axel Madsen calls the suicide sequence “unsavory, because of the doctor’s brutal treatment of the heroine after her suicide attempt.”48 Wilder personally disliked Madsen’s book because Madsen suggested more than once that he was a misanthrope. “According to Madsen,” Wilder stated, “the best example that I am a sadist is my having Shirley MacLaine slapped around by the doctor.” Elsewhere he declared, “I had three doctors on the set whom I’d asked what you would do with a patient who had taken a dozen sleeping pills. They told me that, in order to keep her awake, to slap her, make her drink coffee, and walk without stopping.” As a matter of fact, “the doctors all agreed that Jack Kruschen should have slapped her harder,” but Wilder refused to reshoot the scene.49

  At all events, Bud stays home from work to nurse Fran on the day after Christmas. When both fail to show up for work, Kirkeby smirks, “They must have had a lost weekend!” Dreyfuss wrongly assumes that Fran is Bud’s girl and that her attempt at suicide was the result of a lovers’ quarrel. The doctor’s first inclination is to “kick Bud’s keister clear around the block.” He thinks better of that, however, and decides to have a fatherly chat with him. He asks Bud pointedly whether he is satisfied to remain a self-centered cad, or would he prefer to be a mensch, a decent human being. Getting back his integrity, Dreyfuss points out, will help Bud progress toward maturity. “Grow up!” he snaps at Bud.

  The worm finally turns when Bud resolves not to allow Sheldrake or any other company official to use his apartment in this manner anymore. The next time Sheldrake demands the apartment key, Bud hands over to him not the key to his apartment but the key to the executive washroom. By relinquishing his status symbol, Bud shows that he is well aware that his defiance of Sheldrake will cost him his job. But Bud regains his self-esteem. He tells Sheldrake, “I’ve decided to become a mensch, on doctor’s orders!” Sheldrake, of course, is the real villain of the piece, since he callously exploits Bud and then summarily fires him when Bud declines to be manipulated anymore.

  Fran has a date with Sheldrake on New Year’s Eve. He reveals that his wife has discovered his infidelities and is divorcing him. So he at long last pops the question to Fran! But Fran leaves him in the lurch when she learns from him that Bud has renounced his plushy job for her. Douglas Brode comments, “Fran gets over her feelings for her cool but contemptible boss” and falls in love instead with Bud, “a schlemiel who strains spaghetti through a tennis racket.”50 Fran ecstatically hurries down Sixty-seventh Street on her way to Bud’s apartment, her hair blowing in the wind, a glowing smile on her face. Schlöndorff admires “this wonderful tracking shot of MacLaine running to rescue Lemmon from despair.”51 Wilder admitted that, because Trauner had built the facades of only three apartment buildings on the New York street set at the studio, MacLaine had to run past these same three buildings repeatedly to suggest that Fran was rushing down the entire length of the street.

  Bud had earlier mentioned to Fran that he once made a bungled attempt at suicide when a love affair went sour. Hence, when Fran hears a shot ring out just as she reaches the door of Bud’s bachelor flat, she fears that he has made good this suicide attempt. Fran pounds on his door, and he greets her with a foaming bottle of champagne that he has just uncorked, a present from Dr. Dreyfuss. The movie ends with Bud and Fran sitting together on the couch, contentedly playing gin rummy, as they see the new year in together. Bud rhapsodizes, “I absolutely adore you, Miss Kubelik.” Fran “checks his effusiveness with mock flippancy,” saying laconically, “Shut up and deal.”52 James Schamus notes that “MacLaine, cutting the cards, delivers the movie’s final line in both wry acceptance of Bud’s babbling protestations of love and as sage advice to the rest of us enduring the mandatory festivities of the holiday season.”53 Wilder was careful to avoid any sentimentality in the ending. “Shut up and deal” would become almost as celebrated a closing line as “Nobody’s perfect!” For Bud and Fran, the game of life goes on, and they will play it together.

  As mentioned before, some critics have maintained that Wilder copped out at the end of some of his films by tacking on a happy ending that was not called for. Thus some reviewers dismissed the conclusion of The Apartment as a conveniently romantic ending in which boy gets girl. Once again, this criticism is not valid; the ending of The Apartment is not as happy as it might appear to be. It is true that Bud and Fran have established a solid relationship at the fade-out, but the ending is not sentimental because of that. After all, Bud is out of work, so their future is bleak. One could say that the ending of the film is not so much happy as hopeful—there is hope that Bud and Fran can start life anew and make a go of it, as they greet the new year together. “I like to think that things will wor
k out for them,” Wilder said, “and that they will get a better apartment. But there are no guarantees; so much for the supposed happy ending of this picture.” He added, “Some critics call me a cynic. I simply portray the rat race, and people who aren’t rats—like Bud and Fran—who get caught up in it.”

  In early June 1960, I attended a sneak preview of The Apartment at the Albee Theatre on Fountain Square in downtown Cincinnati. UA had scheduled the sneak deep in the heart of middle America to gauge the reaction of the so-called moral majority to the movie. Some filmgoers found the mixed tone of comedy and drama bewildering, especially a suicide attempt surfacing in a comedy. Be that as it may, there were only a few walk-outs during the picture; most of the audience did not seem offended by the movie’s dicey subject.

  Furthermore, around this time, The Apartment was approved by Geoffrey Shurlock as being in harmony with the censorship code. The Legion of Decency approved the picture as suitable for mature audiences. A legion spokesman, Father Patrick Sullivan, under whose influence the legion was becoming more enlightened in its approach to serious, artistic motion pictures, made a pronouncement. He declared that, although some of the legion’s consultors found the film problematic, others believed that in the movie “middle-aged lechery is shown for the pathetic and grotesque thing it is.”54 Sullivan, who was Monsignor Little’s executive assistant, was impressed with the movie’s theme, as expressed by Dr. Dreyfuss, when he exhorts Bud to be a mensch. It is Dr. Dreyfuss, said Sullivan, who serves as the moral compass of the picture.55

  The Apartment premiered at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on June 21, 1960. The notices were decidedly mixed. On the positive side, they acknowledged that Wilder had brought a mischievous attitude to the formerly taboo subject of extramarital affairs. The movie was hailed by some as the best American comedy since Wilder’s own Some Like It Hot; he had once again handled a potentially grim theme with wit and compassion. Like Wilder’s previous film, The Apartment accomplished a sophisticated balancing act between cynicism and sentiment. In short, proclaimed Variety, The Apartment was a picture that “could only spring from a talented, imaginative” filmmaker.56