There was a time when moving up the corporate ladder was a perfectly logical choice, and compromises were regarded as minor irritations. Trapped with mentality where men prostituted themselves to the corporation in pursuit of promotion, C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) slaves for a large Manhattan insurance company, crunching numbers by day and lending his apartment key to corporate executives after hours in Billy Wilder's 1960 Oscar winner, The Apartment.

Wilder captures the essence of Baxter's lonely life in an opening sequence, where he anonymously joins hundreds of other regimented souls pouring into a huge office space governed by bell signals and the clock. At 5:20 PM the entire 19th floor evacuates except for Baxter, who stays late at the office—not because he's eager to do overtime work, but he wants to rise up in the organization. And he can't even get into his own apartment until 8 PM, since a married executive is entertaining his mistress at his apartment until then. In fact, four executives all call him "buddy boy" for the same reason, and all submit glowing reports to the Personnel Office in exchange for his apartment key.

So, Baxter has created his own version of Hell in Wilder's image—surrounded by no-names scrunched behind typewriters and phones during the day, often locked out from his own apartment, gaining late night entry to a frozen TV dinner and old television movies continually interrupted by commercials. His one bit of sunshine remains his daily greeting of the pleasant, but aloof cute elevator girl Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), who continually turns down all dating offers in the office.

As such, she becomes more admirable than Baxter, who doesn't say "no" to any office superior who wants his key for a fling. Baxter even has to spend working hours on the phone juggling the schedules of their illicit affairs, and hide his key lending habits from the landlady and next door neighbor, Dr. Dreyfuss (Jack Kruschen), who hears the women squealing and logically assumes that Baxter is a sex crazed wild man.

Essentially, Baxter is good hearted—he just has some warped values that are far more in keeping with those of Traditionalists that believe in company loyalty and that promotions are a true measure of success. Comedies require romance and complications, so Fran plays a major role there, as does big boss Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray). After growing up with the television series My Three Sons and Walt Disney's absent minded professor, it's a bit strange to see MacMurray playing a sinister role, but he did that before in Wilder's Double Indemnity and carries it off again in The Apartment.

The cruelest moment comes when Sheldrake offers his Christmas present to Fran inside Baxter's apartment—a hundred-dollar bill. MacLaine's reaction lands her an Oscar nomination and stardom. It's a pitiful look of recognition that she's become little more than a prostitute to the philandering Sheldrake, whose intentions of divorcing his wife and leaving his two sons are shallow promises. It gives her subsequent actions plausibility because she is no cheap and ditsy bombshell. Yet she sincerely loves the jerk, which compels her to give him more chances than logic would dictate.

The eventual outcome is hardly in doubt, and the swell in the theme music with MacLaine scurrying through the Manhattan streets confirms the standard comedy formula near the end. The film marks a significant turning point in the careers of both Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine, where Lemmon comes off his earlier comic performance in Some Like it Hot to show that he can add dramatic touches to his persona and MacClaine establishes herself as a capable leading lady.

Wilder's Some Like it Hot works much better as pure comedy, and his darker Double Indemnity and brilliant Sunset Blvd. are superior dramatic works, but The Apartment serves as competent entertainment and marks the era. On one hand it does examine some basic values of the post War years and serves as sociological evidence for the times, yet on the other hand I can almost hear Billy Wilder mouth MacLaine's final words, "Shut up and deal."

So rent the film for a night. It's still worth a look.