Wednesday, January 11, 2012

The Apartment


The Apartment is one of my favorite movies, and every time I see it, it shoots higher up on my list. It's perfectly written, first and foremost,

it's perfectly shot and directed,


and it's perfectly acted.


The tri-fecta is undoubtable (not a word). EVERYONE MUST SEE THE APARTMENT. Written and Directed by Billy Wilder and starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine. The Apartment won best picture in 1960.

On to my rant about connections and influences in film and pop culture which I'm obsessed with:

Billy Wilder directed Some Like It Hot in 1959.


It would be his biggest hit. It stars Jack Lemmon and one Marilyn Monroe (maybe the peak of all their careers) (ps - Jack Lemmon and Billy Wilder were buried side by side and Marilyn is nearby in the same cemetery). One year later, Lemmon and Wilder do The Apartment, starring Shirley MacLaine in a dark, tough, sad, short haired, witty, cynical, role. A polar opposite of Monroe, but absolutely adorable in her own way.

Here's my connections; the movie The Baxter (2005). The phrase "baxter" in the movie is a name for a guy who never gets the girl.


My question is, since the main character in The Apartment's name is C.C. Baxter, does the phrase come from The Apartment? Was it around before The Apartment, thereby C.C.Baxter being cleverly named?

Just like when old people say, "Are you gas lighting me?" (as in, "are you trying to cause me to think I'm crazy") Are they referring to just the movie Gaslight (1944) where the couple tries to drive the mom out of the house by using a gas lighting trick to make her think she's crazy, or was that a phrase before that movie?

It's gotta be from the movie cos that's too obscure a thought to just conjure up, don't ya think? (this has truly become a rant) (I would be embarrassing you right now if we were in public)

There are other small similarities between The Baxter and The Apartment; the office environment, the proper name calling (Mr/Miss) and the harmless, good guy, main character who never got the girl and needed to just grow a pair and do the right thing.

The first sentence of the IMDB for The Baxter says, "In the style of a Howard Hawks comedy." Bah... They know nothing... Trust me, it's more of a satirical Billy Wilder.

...but the one other thing I want to talk about here is the Michelle Williams character. She looks VERY much like the Shirley MacLaine character.

Right?

Stay with me... Michelle Williams plays a Shirley MacLaine character who is an opposite of Marilyn Monroe...

Michelle Williams also played Marilyn Monroe in My Week With Marilyn (2011).


Did I just blow your mind?

I have a 3 point connection with The Apartment and Some Kind Of Wonderful (1987)

but I won't bore you with it. Ask me later.

I've already written about Shirley MacLaine's complex and dark character in my ode to the female cinematic dark horse blog http://iminlovewiththeoldworld.blogspot.com/2011/04/dark-ones.html I fall for the Kubelik's and their helpless broken ways.

Now more about the movie...

After watching it again today, the themes are not what I remember. I remember it as a love story, but really it's all about the growth of the 2 main characters. Baxter is called a Schnook twice in the film... "Some schnook's apartment". Then his Jewish doctor neighbor told him he needed to be a mentsh, which is a good human being. A schnook (or "schmuck"), what he currently was, was not. Eventually he learned how he could become a mentsh and did. Kubelik needed to play the right cards in her "good hand" (insider). She was always picking the wrong guy, at the wrong place, at the wrong time... Kubelik-wise (insider on top of an insider).

I love the two of them together. I wish they made a sequel of the two in the apartment just bantering and cooking diner and playing cards. (I'll draw a comic of it, maybe).

No man cooks a spaghetti and meatballs diner as good as Jack Lemmon.

I especially love any time they casually touched. You can feel the electricity. You can sense that he is happy to be touching her arm. The first time they touched, he locked arms with her to walk to his office.

My heart raced a little with excitement, because I know that feeling of wanting to just do something simple like that for a really long time... I mean, I can imagine what that would be like to finally get to, or have the guts to.

Great line:
"How could I be so stupid? You think I would have learned by now. When you're in love with a married man, you shouldn't wear mascara."

Great Scene:
"I like it that way, it lets me look the way I feel."

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