My favourite Christmas film: The Apartment

Billy Wilder’s 1960 classic comes complete with a festive office party, booze-fuelled flirtations and the liberation that comes with finding love

Billy Wilder’s Oscar-winning romance-farce isn’t a Christmas movie exactly – elves, Santa and reindeer are in very short supply – but the holiday season, as it specifically manifested itself in the drunken, libidinous era of the Mad Men early 1960s, is central to its maudlin, sentimental tone. Which is, of course, what makes it absolutely brilliant, as if the entire cast and crew were operating through a fug of whisky fumes and a cacophony of party tooters.

The origins of The Apartment are reasonably well known, and fundamentally non-Christmassy: after watching Brief Encounter, Wilder wrote a note to himself, “What about the poor schnook who has to crawl into the still-warm bed of the lovers?” Sticking this bedroom-shuffling scenario – with its potential for misunderstandings, embarrassments and humiliations – into the Christmas/New Year week, with its heady atmosphere, booze-fuelled fumblings and lowered inhibitions, was a stroke of genius, and makes the whole film hum brilliantly.

The famous office-party scene is a case in point: a white-collar bacchanal on the cusp of the permissive era, through which a charmingly oblivious CC Baxter (Jack Lemmon) steers the love of his life, elevator girl Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine). Having got a few drinks down himself, Baxter’s open-book expressiveness is entirely in keeping with the general mood, while having everything crammed into the space means key encounters – Miss Olsen, the Sheldrake family photo, the cracked compact – can all be arranged in quick succession. That last shot, as Wilder told fellow director Cameron Crowe, was one of his favourites in the entire film: “Three things are accomplished in that one moment. Very nice.”

If this set up – of misery and deflation to the background interference of middle-aged men hitting on their secretaries – is extraordinary enough, its counterpoint at the point of the New Year countdown is, in stark contrast, almost unbelievably life-affirming. Kubelik ducks out on Sheldrake during a streamer-festooned Auld Lang Syne, and heads for Baxter – her excited race up the stairs to his landing is one of my favourite moments in cinema. (Touchingly, she still calls him “Mr Baxter”, even when she thinks he’s shot himself. Full liberation, clearly, had not quite yet arrived.) Rewatching the ending, though, shows that The Apartment is itself subject of a bit of memory-fugging nostalgia: while Baxter’s devotion shines through, Kubelik is not nearly so committed. You get the feeling her main emotion is relief. But there’s a place for that at Christmas, too.

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