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@TK-421 Challenged me to write a post about The Apartment before Christmas. I'm not going to use spoiler tags because this movie is a classic from 1960. It's an IMDb Top 100, and I think it deserves to be there. Great film, I thoroughly enjoyed it. The last paragraph paints this film in a worse light then it probably deserves. It's even a Christmas movie if you want to squeeze it in.
The Summary: Baxter works at a huge insurance company in New York and to to accelerate Baxter’s career trajectory he lets junior executives and later Jeff a senior executive use his apartment to cheat on their wives.
I come from a Christian denomination that - in the not-so-distant past - banned going to movie theaters and all alcohol consumption. Watching this had me nodding my head, thinking I totally see why they felt that way about films like The Apartment. Released in 1960, it's black-and-white, so I think it comes off more risqué because I'm mentally bucketing it with '40s flicks, but Hollywood - always more progressive than the general populace - was already barreling toward the full-blown late '60s revolution. Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot came out the year before and is just as (and in light of current trans issues) even more norm breaking.
I’m no film historian, but if The Apartment wasn’t the first, it must have been very close to creating the template for the bawdy office Christmas party trope. It's all there (short of nudity) full on pre-HR debauchery with people getting hammered, hooking up wherever they can find space. I’m sure Mad Men borrowed heavily for it's office culture.
You can, of course, make the standard progressive culture-war points: powerful men exploiting female staff, systemic sexism, etc. But flip the lens a bit, and this film could almost have been written by a modern manosphere/red-piller.
Baxter is a cuck in almost every sense of the term. He literally crawls into the still-warm bed after the alphas finish their trysts. Even after he learns that Jeff (married father of two) has been carrying on a long-term affair with his love interest Fran Baxter keeps letting Jeff go at his one true love in the apartment. When Fran attempts suicide with sleeping pills, Baxter nurses her back to health, all while actively trying to keep Jeff and Fran together. This isn’t Fran’s first rodeo; her previous beau is in prison. Since it’s the 1960’s she not just in it for the sex, she actually falls suicidally in love with the bad boys, and she doesn’t have any kids. But Fran only turns to the nice guy after she’s been "run through".
P.S. And small culture war take it's interesting to think about how much technology replaced thousands of jobs represented in this film
I watched this in the cinema with my ex years ago. She'd seen it years earlier as a child, and after we came out of the cinema, she commented that, upon a first watch, she hadn't appreciated the significance of the scene where Jeff presents Fran with her Christmas present: a crisp $100 bill. As a child, she'd thought – how kind of him! It was only later she was like ohhhh, he's just treating her like a prostitute.
If you haven't seen it, I'd also highly recommend Wilder's earlier film Double Indemnity, which stars Fred MacMurray (the actor who plays Jeff here). It's one of my favourite movies ever, literally in my top ten. Most "thrillers" from the fifties or earlier can be quite slow and dull by modern standards, and even the better ones are quite far from "thrilling". Double Indemnity is the exception, a movie which is just as tense and nerve-wracking as the year it came out(that scene where Neff can't get his car to start!) , and which still finds room for plenty of wry humour while it's at it.
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