Welcome to Saturday Night at the Movies.

I'm your host, Glenn Holland.

Tonight's movie is the 1960 romantic comedy drama "The Apartment."

It was directed by Billy Wilder from an original screenplay Wilder wrote with I.A.L.

Diamond.

"The Apartment" stars Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine and Fred McMurray, with support from Ray Walston Jack Kruschen, David Lewis, and Edie Adams.

C.C.

Baxter is a numbers cruncher in Section W, Desk 861, in the Ordinary Policy Department, Premium Accounting Division, of Consolidated Life Insurance, a huge firm in New York City.

Baxter is a good and faithful employee whose willingness to please his superiors has put him in an uncomfortable position.

He's frequently required to vacate his humble apartment on West 67th Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to allow some higher up or other to use it to entertain a mistress or a girlfriend or a casual pickup.

Sometimes this happens according to a set schedule.

Sometimes he's asked on short notice, and frequently Baxter finds himself spending most of the night wandering the streets until his apartment is vacant.

His neighbors have noticed his apparent carousing and frequent liquor purchases, and one, Dr. Dreyfuss, has warned Baxter of the dangers of a dissipated lifestyle and encouraged him to reform and be a mensch.

When Baxter is recommended for promotion, he comes the attention of Personnel Manager Jeff Sheldrake, who has become aware of what Baxter has been doing, but instead of firing him, Sheldrake makes Baxter his Second Administrative Assistant, on the condition that Sheldrake will from then on have first rights to the use of Baxter's apartment.

Baxter willingly agrees, unaware that Sheldrake's mistress is Ms. Kubelik, a company elevator operator Baxter himself secretly loves.

Billy Wilder stands out among the directors of Hollywood's Golden Age for his versatility, his wit, and his keen eye for the absurdities of American culture.

Born into a family of Polish Jews in 1906 in a town that was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

While there, became a journalist in Vienna and later in Berlin.

He also began writing screenplays, first for silent and then for sound pictures.

When Hitler came to power in Germany, Wilder immigrated to France, then in 1934 to the United States.

He shared an apartment with Peter Lorre while they both learned English.

That same year, Lorre appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's "The Man Who Knew Too Much" while Wilder wrote his first English screenplay, "Music in the Air," adapted from a Broadway musical by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II.

Wilder received his first Oscar nomination for his screenplay for MGM's 1939 romantic comedy "Ninotchka," directed by Ernst Lubitsch and starring Greta Garbo and Melvin Douglas.

Wilder collaborated on the screenplay with Charles Brackett, who was his writing partner from 1938 to 1950.

Together, they wrote several of the films Wilder directed during those years, including "The Lost Weekend" in 1945, "The Emperor Waltz" in 1948, and "Sunset Boulevard" in 1950.

In 1957, Wilder corroborated for the first time with I.A.L.

Diamond on "Love in the Afternoon" starring Gary Cooper, Audrey Hepburn, and Maurice Chevalier.

Together, Wilder and Diamond wrote another 11 films, including "Some Like It Hot" in 1959, "Irma La Douce" in 1963, and "The Fortune Cookie" in 1966, all starring Jack Lemmon.

Wilder and Diamond wrote the screenplay for "The Apartment" specifically for Jack Lemmon, based on his performance in "Some Like It Hot."

Wilder said the initial idea was a movie about the guy who climbs into the warm bed left by two lovers.

In a 1960 article in the "New York Times," Wilder said he had originally thought the idea would work best as a play, but as the story grew to include not only a complicated romance but also office politics and personal ambition, Wilder realized only a film could convey the huge impersonality of the offices and routine of Consolidated Life Insurance, where C.C.

Baxter aspires to succeed, no matter the cost to himself or his principles.

As a result, Diamond pointed out in that same "Times" article, "The Apartment" has a lot to say about the mores of the American business community.

American prosperity in the aftermath of the Second World War led to the rise of the so-called organization man, the white collar worker who labored in a large anonymous business firm where he was often nothing more than a small cog in a very large machine.

These men exhibited the traditional values of hard work, loyalty, discipline, and self-denial but those virtues were too often undervalued or worse exploited by those further up in the business hierarchy.

Hollywood might treat stories about the plight of the organization man with seriousness, as in the 1956 drama, the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, written and directed by Nunnally Johnson and starring Gregory Peck Jennifer Jones, and Frederick March or the whole thing might become the premise for a farce like the 1967 film version of the 1961 musical hit How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

Written and directed by David Swift and starring Robert Morse Michelle Lee and Rudy Valy, but The Apartment manages at the same time to be both serious and funny.

Combining comedy with near tragedy as critic Jeff Stafford wrote in 2003.

"The most astonishing thing about The Apartment is how Billy Wilder manages to keep the tone light and playful while exposing the worst aspects of Manhattan corporate life.

From the drunken office parties to the casual adultery committed by married employees.

After all, the film revolves around a man who aids and abets his business superiors in a series of adulterous relationships and a woman ultimately driven to attempt suicide because of the way she has been treated by his boss.

It's only the sympathetic nature of both Jack Lemons and Shirley McLean's performances and the Grace Wilder in diamond of bestowed upon their characters.

That brings the audience to see them as flawed but worthwhile human beings and rejoice of their final understated reconciliation.

The title, The Apartment, carries a double meaning on the one hand the apartment makes possible Baxter's ascent and consolidated life insurance when he makes it available to his philandering superiors.

On the other hand, it is also the place where all the detritus of their dalliances, both human and otherwise accumulates.

And so also the place where Baxter must face all the unfortunate consequences of his unprincipled climb up the corporate ladder.

This is the case in part because the apartment is the place where the calculations behind Baxter's office politics intersect with real life.

His place is a rundown walk up flat in an old building in what was at the time, a not very fashionable address on the upper west side of Manhattan.

His neighbor, Dr. Dreyfus, who thinks the carousing going on in the apartment every evening, is just Baxter Sewing his wild oats offers him medical advice peppered with Yiddish common sense.

In the end, real life wins out.

Baxter makes the decision to be a mensch a compassionate man of integrity and rejects the self-centered ethics of the workplace for an open-heartedness that offers the possibility of real love.

Art Director Alexander Tranter and set designer Edward G. Boyle created a dark shabby flat for Baxter that contrasts sharply with the cold and personality of consolidated life's corporate offices.

Roger Ebert wrote in a retrospective article in the Chicago Sun Times in 2001, "The design of Baxter's apartment makes his bedroom door in the background just to the left of center, a focal point in their reside, the secrets of his masters, the reasons for his resentment, the arena for his own lonely slumber and eventually the stage on which Ms. Kublik will play out the crucial transition in her life."

Trower and Boyle won the Oscar for best art direction in a black and white film one of the five Academy Awards The Apartment received including Best Picture and Best Director for Billy Wilder.

The Apartment is now regarded as one of the great film comedies.

Jack Lemon later reflected on the difficult trick its director had pulled off.

"I always felt Billy Wilder grew a rose in a garbage pail with this one."

He said, "He was throwing cold water right in our faces about the terrible false premises with which most of our society lives.

He challenged our priorities and the way we rationalize our behavior on the grounds of getting ahead in America at a time when it wasn't fashionable to challenge those things.

He gave us a pretty good jolt", Lemon concluded "And it hasn't been done a hell of a lot better since then".

Please join us again next time for another Saturday Night at the Movies.

I'm Glenn Holland.

Goodnight.