Looked at now, it’s hard to decide whether the ending of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment is really even a remotely happy one, as opposed to a sad capitulation. Certainly the two principals (Jack Lemmon’s C. C. Baxter and Shirley MacLaine’s Fran Kubelik) regard each other with genuine-seeming delight in the final shot, and the film pulls off the conceit of the two never even using each other’s first names, let alone kissing or more; the formality and caution makes them an oasis of mutual decency and regard in a mostly crass world. But on the other hand, it’s the kind of device that obscures as much as it reveals character (likewise the snappy Wilder dialogue – “that’s the way it crumbles, cookie-wise’), and the film provides precious little evidence that they’re well-matched in any substantive regard (one wonders if Kubelik looks happy mostly because she knows she’ll never flip for the trying-too-hard Baxter as she has in the past for various unsuitable guys, finally giving her a protective upper hand). On the whole, one probably chooses to feel uplifted, if only because the rest of the film is so seeped in the disheartening sexual go-rounds that surround them in the workplace: the sense of a relentlessly predatory culture, of a genuinely callous attitude toward women, certainly holds up, such that the takeaway might merely be that if you find something that’s just half a step above squalidity, you shut up and deal. On the other hand, the portrayal of the office itself, with its dystopia-worthy rows of desks and its stifling hierarchies, is less productive, and at times the movie just seems grumpily dated, as in the scene of Baxter flipping through old movies and sponsor announcements in search of something to watch with his TV dinner, eventually giving up in exasperation. Whether or not one rates Wilder’s film as a masterpiece, it retains its mordant singularity, even if there’s something rather depressing about that too.
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