Shut Up and Deal

The Apartment and a steaming mug of mum’s cinnamon cappuccino; and rainy days, when the world seems a dismal, lonely place cease to bother me, forget bother, they zip right by. It is just one of those movies, the perfect blend of hope and despair, not romantic slush where the down but not out protagonist is a near perfect figure who the world seems to constantly misunderstand/ underestimate, (Jerry McGuire, Wimbledon both of which I like) instead the characters all have shades of grey. Lemmon plays CC Baxter, an ambitious clerk in an insurance firm who’ll do anything for a raise, including letting his bosses use his apartment for their … um…“trysts”. And the ever lovely Shirley MacLaine is a loveable elevator operator who is however having an affair with one of the bosses, on the dubious promises of marriage.

What prevents the Apartment from being a typical, the underdog prevails and there is hope for us all type of flick is the fact that the movie has a darker, dissatisfied feel to it, a sort of permanent sense of loneliness which begins to lift near the closing. The sharp wit and one-liners all draw laughs yet we see through Baxter’s façade and glimpse the desperation underneath. The movie is hugely entertaining and is even slapstick in places, yet it retains its dignity and warms one with delicate and moving scenes, constructed with extreme care. The time when Lemmon hides away the razors or the scene with the bowler hat and his gloating or even the closing scene are lovely to behold. All in all the movie never fails to deliver, or, the coffee is way too good.