DVD Pick of the Month: March

A key comedy

By D.K. Holm

If I had the power to command into existence with the flick of a wand anything I deemed worthy of being, it would be a modern remake of The Apartment (1960) starring Tom Hanks, Renee Zellweger, and Alec Baldwin. Hanks is the modern engaging onscreen-Everyman (like the original film’s Jack Lemmon), able to balance comedy and drama, often simultaneously. Zellweger is the modern kook (though Shirley MacLaine was able to bring pathos and a wry maturity to the full, rich, psychologically-acute role), and Baldwin (unlike Fred MacMurray in the original) would give Hanks’s character real competition.

With another flick of the wand, I would then prevent someone like Neil LaBute (Nurse Betty, The Wicker Man) from helming the project, from turning it into another depressing account of modern romance as a power play with the spoils going to the strongest. Instead, I would hand the reins to Cameron Crowe (original director Billy Wilder’s disciple), who would keep the bittersweet flavor of the original (though probably with more sweet than bitter). The beauty of it all is that the script would barely need updating, save for perhaps turning a crucial compact mirror into a camera phone.

But then, I look at the recently released The Apartment and wonder, why bother? Isn’t the film already perfect in and of itself—indeed, one of the rare perfect films in all American cinema? I can think of only a handful of others: Casablanca, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, All About Eve, Charade, The Godfather, Jaws, L.A. Confidential. But The Apartment is rendered a little different by turning the romantic comedy inside-out.

As a ‘60s sex farce, it gives us Jack Lemmon as C. C. “Bud” Baxter, an insurance company drone who has slipped into the service of occasionally offering up his apartment at night to higher-up execs seeking trysts with office underlings. This he does cynically; it’s the way America works, the way to get ahead. However, when it dawns on him that the most powerful man in the building is using his apartment to woo the very woman that Baxter likes, the young hustler’s ideals (such as they are) are shattered. The Apartment is set over the holiday season, from around Christmas to New Year’s, and is the perfect comedy for manic-depressives and suicidals.

Daringly, Wilder specialized in rogues and hustlers as his central characters. Almost all of his main characters are untrustworthy, from Joe Gillis in Sunset Blvd. to Sefton in Stalag 17. The Apartment is unusual in having so many rogues in one picture, as well as for bifurcating (so to speak) the usual central rogue into two people—one of them who’s not quite so bad and is ultimately rewarded for changing his ways. Fred MacMurray is fine (indeed, unexpected) as the exec who uses both Baxter and MacLaine’s characters callously, but I itch to see Alec Baldwin in the same part.

This new disc comes with an improved transfer, a commentary track from a film scholar not usually associated with Wilder studies (but who offers a meticulous moment-by-moment analysis), a making-of that will probably be old hat to those who have read the many bios and books on Wilder already, and another making-of tracking Lemmon’s career.

As for Lemmon and Wilder’s ability to blend humor and seriousness, often in the same scene (or what Quentin Tarantino might call two great tastes for the price of one): well, let’s just say the new cover art for the DVD is misleading in advertising The Apartment as a mere frolicsome sex comedy, given that the extras on the very disc itself go out of their way to proclaim the filmmaker’s unique mix of comedy and tragedy.

(The Apartment, Special Edition, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, one disc, $19.95, black and white wide screen image, 2.35:1 in English, French, and Spanish, plus English and Spanish subtitles, audio commentary by Bruce Block, two docs, "Inside THE APARTMENT" and "Magic Time: The Art of Jack Lemmon," street date February 5th, 2008; this disc supersedes an earlier release from June 2001)