Is Fred MacMurray always a dick in his movies?
Anyway…The Apartment has been showing on one of the pay channels I get for about a month. I’ve dvr’d it and deleted it without watching it three different times. I dvr’d it again last night and forced myself to watch it this morning and I’m kicking myself in the ass for not watching it sooner.
It wasn’t anything like I expected. They always promote Billy Wilder films as being hysterically funny romps but this film was only moderately funny to me…I fell in love with both Jack Lemmon’s and Shirley MacLaine’s characters, though. MacLaine has such a reputation of being a bad ass (according to Wikipedia, Clint Eastwood once said of her: “It’s hard to feel any great warmth to her. She’s too unfeminine and has too much balls. She’s very, very hard.” so seeing her play someone so sensitive and soft-spoken was a nice change. She’s freaking gorgeous as well.
Jack Lemmon is, as ever, Jack Lemmon. Sweet, self-deprecating and wonderful. I could watch him forever.
And, as I mentioned at the top, Fred MacMurray was his dickiest. Interesting appearances as fellow dicks from Ray Walston and David White. Everyone’s performance was perfect…Wilder sure must have had a way with actors.
I’d like to see this in a letterbox edition because watching it this way everything seemed to be getting chopped out of the shot and when you’re dealing with a visual actor like Jack Lemmon, that means you miss a lot.
Another for the list of “Will definitely watch again” films.