The Apartment

The Apartment

1960

Director: Billy Wilder

Starring: Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray

If there is such a thing as a perfect film, The Apartment strikes awfully close to the mark.  Full of quiet comedy and a streak of pathos so deep that it seems to become sadder the more I think about it, The Apartment is utterly lovely from open to finish.  It certainly helps that when I think about “my type” of film, The Apartment fits the bill almost to the tee.  I have always preferred what I call “small films,” films that have a story that only concerns a handful of people in a limited number of locations dealing with regular, ordinary, everyday problems.  And while the central conceit of The Apartment is played for ludicrous satire, it is so gloriously small in its scope that I love it more and more each time I see it.  This is my kind of movie.

C.C. Baxter (Lemmon) works in insurance in a big, generic corporation in Manhattan.  He often works late, not because he’s driven but because four of his bosses regularly use his apartment in the west sixties as a trysting place for their extramarital affairs.  Baxter trades his apartment for promotions at work, leading him to ultimately come up before big boss Sheldrake (MacMurray) who has heard about Baxter’s place through the grapevine.  Sheldrake wants to use the apartment as well to continue his affair with cute and perky elevator girl Fran Kubelik (MacLaine).  Thing is, though, that Baxter, has fallen hard for Fran, not knowing she is Sheldrake’s lover.  Fran, for her part, is too hung up on the married guy she knows is no good to pay any notice to Baxter’s earnest attentions.  Things come to a head when Fran is dumped in Baxter’s apartment.

  

While there’s certainly more to this film than C.C. Baxter as played by Jack Lemmon, it can be hard for me to see it.  This central character and this brilliant performance completely make the film for me.  This is my personal favorite Jack Lemmon performance because it strikes such a fine balance between comedy and tragedy.  Lemmon makes me laugh as he watches his typewriter at his desk, nodding his head along with its rhythm.  About an hour later, he breaks my heart as he frantically paces his apartment after finding a comatose Fran lying in his bed.  Neither is played too extreme; Lemmon, definitely known for his hammy comedic talents (and I mean that in the best possible way) never lets his hamminess completely take over the lighthearted scenes.  The opposite is true as well; when the tenor turns more somber, he never dreams of ranting and raving and throwing things around to express his angst.  Instead, it’s all done so perfectly quietly in his face where I can read the depth of sadness and worry he is feeling.  Lemmon makes my heart ache in this film.  He is utterly sublime.

But Lemmon would not be as amazing as he is were it not for the creation of the story itself, and that credit goes to Billy Wilder and I.A.L Diamond.  Lemmon’s perfect blend of funny and heart-wrenching pain comes directly from a story that makes it abundantly clear from the get-go that no one is above reproach.  No heroes, no villains, just regular people making bad choices.  Sheldrake is perhaps the clearest-cut villain from the cast of characters, but even he seems less dastardly and more simply an arrogant man used to getting his way.  There are even moments where I feel sympathy for him (albeit not many).  And Baxter?  I suppose he is the de facto hero, but what I adore about this story is that really, he is not.  Is Baxter a good person?  Well, that depends.  At first glance, yes, you see his earnest interest in Fran and you think, wow, what a nice guy.  You see him throw away what other people think of him in order to take the blame himself rather than incriminate others, and his self-sacrifice seems positively noble.  Indeed, that self-sacrifice is another component of Lemmon’s performance as Baxter that utterly breaks my heart.  But then back it up: Baxter trades his apartment, where he lives, for its use for sexual favors, all in order to climb the corporate ladder.  He has sold more than a bit of his soul, making seedy bargains to work his way to that elusive corner office.  From the very beginning, I yearn for Baxter to finally say “No” to his demanding bosses, his bosses who kick him out on the street at 2am because they met a Marilyn Monroe lookalike (lovely little in-joke from Wilder there), but he can’t.  He doesn’t have the necessary spine to get himself out of the web he’s woven for himself and so simply keeps surrendering to the lewd demands of others.  Baxter, a hero?  Hardly.  I think he is a good man, but deeply flawed, and he must learn to overcome it in some small way.

Opposite Baxter is MacLaine’s Fran Kubelik, another brilliantly written character.  Fran is believably stuck in a toxic relationship that she desperately wants to end yet cannot.  I love that Fran knows in her head that she needs to end the affair with Mr. Sheldrake.  Fran knows this, she says it over and over again.  And yet, her heart won’t let her.  She is in love with him despite desperately not wanting to be.  This makes her sad and frustrated and everything comes to a head.  This sort of situation, of knowing that you SHOULDN’T be in a certain relationship, yet not being able to actually cut and run, this is a difficult situation to believably portray, but I believe it completely in The Apartment.  MacLaine is fantastic and helps me believe that Fran knows better yet can’t find the strength to walk away.  So our two main characters, those we feel should be our heroes, both can’t seem to find the strength to end the morally reprehensible situations they find themselves stuck in.

It is the utter ordinariness of the film that I love as well.  The Apartment is rife with ordinary, everyday touches that make me love it even more.  I love Baxter’s drab little apartment that only grows seedier as the film continues.  I love him unceremoniously lighting the oven and preparing a foil-wrapped TV dinner.  I love him drinking the leftover cocktails from the party as his place.  I love the electric blanket he has to plug in.  I love the simple feast of spaghetti and meatballs he prepares, complete with grated Parmesan from a jar.  I love Fran’s taxi driver of a brother-in-law.  I love her broken compact mirror.  There is no attempt to glamorize the sets in The Apartment, and I love that.  I mean, I really love that.  So gloriously, perfectly ordinary, lumps and all.

There is so much more to The Apartment; the fantastic set design, the gorgeous cinematography, the witty banter, script-wise, and the rampant social commentary running through the film.  All this is great and important, but that’s not why I love The Apartment.  I love it because of its characters, because of their brokenness, because of Jack Lemmon, because of the perfect tiny details, and because it breaks my heart and makes me laugh at the exact same time.  And it’s aged extraordinarily well.  I recently put this on while my parents were visiting, and my mother watched it in spite of herself.  Still engrossing, still wonderful, still relevant, still real. 

Arbitrary Rating: 10/10, ratings-wise.

La Dolce Vita

La Dolce Vita (re-post from my previous site)

1960

Director: Federico Fellini

Starring: Marcello Mastroianni, Anouk Aimee, Anita Ekberg, Yvonne Furneaux

La Dolce Vita opens with a very famous shot of a helicopter flying a gigantic statue of Christ over the city of Rome, and the ludicrous nature of this action, in a way, completely sets the tone for this incredibly famous film.  What on earth is going on, you may ask.  To which Fellini replies: Exactly.

Marcello Rubini (Mastroianni) is a gossip columnist who kind of sort of both loves and hates his life.  The movie doesn’t exactly have a plot; it’s more an exploration of a “day in the life” of this man.  We move from episode to episode, all the while following Marcello as he is buffeted from one situation to another.  He is not exactly in control of his fate, and we are along for the ride as life moves him through the film.

Marcello as the central character is interesting.  He is not a hero, not in the least.  I’m not even sure he’s a good man.  He’s a weak man, a man who talks of being taken seriously then gets distracted.  He has a girlfriend and a lover and still gets seduced by other women.  He flirts with anything in a skirt, yet he does so because he feels he has to, not because he wants to.  He speaks of love with such shallow feeling, it’s frightening.  Yet for all of this, he is not condoned by the film.  I do not envy his life; I don’t see how anyone could.  He is a man sick to death of his life – why would you envy that?  Yes, his life throws him in the path of celebrities and beautiful women, but he takes such little enjoyment from it, it’s downright depressing.  Ultimately, though, Fellini loves his Marcello for all his faults.  It’s a fascinating character study, really.  Marcello is not good, but he’s not evil.  He’s not a hero, but he’s far from a villain.  He’s just a man.  An ordinary, tired, almost middle-aged man who wonders what his life has become.  If anything, Marcello is sad.  That’s how I read him at least, and if ever there was a character open to interpretation, this is it.

There are moments of tremendous poignancy which, for me, emotionally ground the film in the middle of all the whacko-nutso behavior.  Two sequences in particular stand out as moments of sad gravity: the Steiner sequence and the scenes with Marcello’s father.  In the first, Marcello meets with his old friend Steiner.  Steiner is everything Marcello is not: serious, focused, married, a father.  Marcello idolizes Steiner and treats him with reverence.  Marcello goes to a dinner party at Steiner’s apartment, and the people who are there are serious artists – or, at least, much more serious about art and living than all the vainglorious celebrities that Marcello reports on.  I found myself thinking, “Ah!  At last!  We have found the hero of the film!  This is the man that will make over Marcello!”  Fellini, knowing all too well the pedestal that he had seated Steiner upon, knew it would not do to have a hero, not in this film, and in a shockingly sad and devastating sequence, reminds us that people like Steiner, as wonderful as they may seem, are only human too. 

In the second sequence, Marcello’s father, a traveling salesman, comes to visit unexpectedly.  Marcello takes him out on the town to a cabaret, where they all get drunk and Marcello marvels at his father’s excesses.  Perhaps he was cut from the same cloth?  Marcello’s father goes home with a cabaret girl but has some sort of an episode, and he winds up leaving her apartment looking weak and frail.  This, to me, is not the sad part.  The part that sticks in my mind is what immediately follows.  Marcello begs his father to stay one more day in Rome.  Begs.  Completely begs.  And his father says no.  This simple exchange, only a minute or two on screen, is beyond sad.  A grown man has finally realized that he doesn’t know his father but that he WANTS to know his father, and his father steadfastly refuses.  This little moment of heartbreak and agony in the midst of all the excess of the rest of the film reminds you that Fellini can do serious just as well as he can do ridiculous.

 

How Fellini chooses to inhabit his world is fascinating.  I don’t just mean the main characters, but all the people who appear on screen.  When watching this film, watch the extras.  Look at them.  They are just as bizarre as the characters with lines.  Look at the woman with the spider rhinestone glasses.  Who is she?  No one is incidental in Fellini’s world – even his extras have enormous stories that they aren’t telling.

 

I was struck by the unbelievable shot composition of La Dolce Vita - even in comparison with other fantastically photographed films.  Holy cow, but Fellini has an impeccable eye.  It’s not something I really noticed the first time I watched it about five years ago.  I admit that, in that first viewing, I had no idea what the eff I was watching.  I feel like I was watching it just to watch it, without really understanding it.  I don’t pretend to understand La Dolce Vita completely after my second viewing, but I feel like I got more out of it this time around, and I was amazed the shot composition more this time around.  Scene after scene is breathtaking.  I put it right up there with Sven Nykvist’s work in The Seventh Seal, an absolute favorite of mine.  Fellini clearly loves black and white, as he uses black and white phenomenally well, not just in the photography but also the costumes.  Some shots are symmetrical, beautiful in their alignment.  Others are point of view – when Marcello runs up the tower steps, we suddenly see the curved wall through his eyes, and get a rush of excitement.  And Fellini loves the panorama.  His crowd-scapes are fascinating.  I can’t even try to logically put my feelings into words – you just have to see it for yourself.

 

One thing I have recently started to notice about films is the location they present.  I don’t mean, “Hey, look, shot in London!”  Rather, what is the version of the location that the director is showing us?  The New York City shown in, say, Sex and the City is a very different New York City shown in Midnight Cowboy.  So through the lens of these new glasses, I find it interesting to discover Fellini’s Rome.  For this is, most definitely, Fellini’s Rome.  It is a city of dirt roads right next to glittering new high rises.  There is dust and construction and clutter all over the place, contrasting with the clean, white lines of sophisticated buildings, lending the city a constant sense of pandemonium.  The city seems to be in the middle of nowhere – characters drive for two seconds and are then in the country.  Fellini’s Rome seems an isolated place to me.  

 

In many ways, La Dolce Vita is a bit of a tough nut to crack.  Made between Nights of Cabiria and 8½, La Dolce Vita clearly straddles Fellini’s transition from straightforward, realistic narrative to off-the-deep-end whimsy and surrealism.  There are elements of both in this, the middle film.  It’s a film that demands repeated viewings; I have a feeling that what I get out of it will change the more I live my life.  As a film, I feel like I still don’t totally get it, but it’s a heady ride.

Add-on: Because I’m me and I’m still copying old reviews from my previous site onto this one (as is the case with La Dolce Vita – this review was written about a year ago), I seriously wanted to re-evaluate the score I gave this.  Do I really like Fellini THAT much?  No, I thought; I’m not really a Fellini fan, and he goes to some really weird places in his later films.  But then I re-read what I wrote, and I remembered exactly how excited this movie made me.  Just how good the photography is.  Just how sad parts of it really get.  Just how much it really did touch me, in a strange Fellini-esque way.  I will NOT let my less than enthusiastic opinion of Fellini in general deter me from recognizing how much I actually enjoy this film of his.

Arbitrary rating: 8/10, and in terms of Fellini, one of my favorites.  I tend not to enjoy him nearly as much after he went off the deep end with his later works.

Psycho

 

Psycho

1960

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Starring: Janet Leigh, Anthony Perkins, Vera Miles, John Gavin

Don’t go in the bathroom.

I have to say this from the get-go: I have to talk about spoilers in this write up.  I hope that readers of this blog know that I try really hard not to spoil a film if I can possibly help it, but I can’t help it here.  So… if you haven’t seen Pyscho, just skip this whole entry.  Go read something else.  Or, even better, go watch Psycho.

So is that perfectly clear?  I’ll be spoiling away here?  You know what you’re getting yourself into?  Fantastic.

The police officer has warned you!

Marion Crane (Leigh) is a receptionist for a realtor in Phoenix.  She loves her sexy boyfriend Sam (Gavin) but they’re too poor to marry.  When an opportunity presents itself, she leaves town with $40,000 in cold hard cash, running away to marry her boyfriend.  But Marion is a pretty shitty thief, and she is plagued by attacks of anxiety.  She pulls over in a rainstorm to spend the night at the Bates Motel where she is met by quirky oddball Norman (Perkins) who manages the place while his overbearing mother watches over the motel from their house on the hilltop.  Poor Marion doesn’t make it through the night at the Bates Motel, which prompts Sam and Marion’s sister Lila (Miles) to start investigating Marion’s disappearance.

Part of the reason I mention the spoilers at the beginning is because I had this film massively spoiled for me.  I suppose it’s my own fault – I didn’t get around to seeing Psycho until I was in my late twenties.  By then, being as interested in pop culture as I am, bits and pieces had been continually leaked to me and I had put everything together.  In all honesty, because of this and because of the enormity of Psycho’s reputation, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed the first time I saw it.  I mean really, how on earth was it going to live up to its incredibly ridiculous reputation?  It just couldn’t, not for me.  I rather wish I had seen it when I was younger, as it would have been lovely not to expect Janet Leigh’s shower scene death or Norman Bates dressed as his own mother.  Psycho will always have a touch of the disappointing to me.

Something I’ve realized about Hitchcock is just how much of an innovator he was.  He made successful films, but he also liked to experiment with film – just consider Rope.  I consider the major innovation in Psycho to be the narrative (along with some pretty badass shot composition).  I mean really, the dude essentially invented an entire subgenre of films with this one explosive film, the slasher horror genre, with a nice dose of the concept of the serial killer film as well.  Psycho was technically based on a novel (which was based on a real life killer), but Hitchcock, by his own admission, read it then completely threw it away, cherry-picking things he liked and changing things he didn’t.

The film is almost three stories in one.  The first half hour is focused entirely on Marion’s anxiety-laden decision to steal the $40,000.  We meet her in a seedy hotel (with a great crotch shot of her boyfriend right above her face that made laugh, it was so suggestive) and establish her financial difficulties.  When she finally decides to flee with the cash, we have what I consider to be the tensest parts of the film.  Marion is not a good criminal – she’s never done it before, after all – so when a cop stops her on the road to ask her some routine questions, she’s stupidly nervous in her responses, which naturally raises red flags for said cop.  Her decision to trade in her car for a different one at a used car shop is unexpectedly filled with danger.  Marion’s escape from Phoenix to the Bates Motel is incredibly tense and suspenseful.  That’s story #1.

hee hee hee...

Story #2 starts as soon as Marion pulls into the Bates Motel and we introduce Norman.  This story is about a sad, lonely man living alone with his vicious mother, and we openly feel sympathy for him, just like Marion.  Still, he’s a little off, so while the sense of suspense has faded from the first part of the movie, it’s been replaced with a different feeling, one of unease.  In the classic parlor room conversation between Marion and Normal, Hitchcock rarely films the two in a two-shot, instead choosing alternating one-shots to help convince us how they different these two are.  Marion is shot with a lovely, flattering light, surrounded by soft shapes, emphasizing that she’s fundamentally likeable.  Norman, however – ha ha ha.  Norman is shot from unflattering angles with harsh lighting, and he’s surrounded by the birds he’s stuffed, many of which are arranged in horribly vicious positions filled with sharp angles.  Our initial sympathy for Normal is fading a bit, and the feeling of unease is increasing.  When Marion is killed in the classic shower scene, a scene so famous it’s a bit ridiculous, Norman finds the body and cleans up after the killer.  I found the clean-up more interesting than the actual murder.  Norman is shocked by Marion’s body, but watch how he cleans up – with ruthless efficiency (just like the Spanish Inquisition).  He barely pauses for breath as he goes about scrubbing the bathroom clean then dumping the car, with the body, in the swamp.  I love Hitchcock’s touch of having the car sink most of the way then stop.  It’s a heart-stopping moment, least of which is because you realize that you are rooting for a man to get away with covering up a murder.  

Story #3 starts as soon as the car has sunk and is also my least favorite portion of the film.  Marion’s sister Lila is investigating Marion’s disappearance with the help of Marion’s boyfriend Sam and a private investigator.  This part of the film has a hint of the haunted house to it as we get peeks for the first time behind the door of Norman’s mother’s house.  The house holds all the answers to the secrets that have been asked, and it is in the house that additional murders are committed and attempted, but also where we do finally get our resolution.  The clunky investigating skills of Lila and Sam are laughable, but I think they’re meant to be.  We have Norman’s final attack, the discovery of the mother, and then that ending.

Even my husband, who is not nearly as analytical as I am when it comes to film, commented independently (I was trying to remain mum on the subject, as I was curious what he thought) that he felt the psychiatrist ending was unnecessary.  “Show us a bit of it,” he said, “and show us Norman wrapped up in the blanket, but we didn’t really need all of that.  Plus it was way too long.”  Honey, I completely agree.  There’s far too much exposition at the end of the film.  Really, we get it.  We’ve seen Norman dressed up like dear old Mama.  You don’t need to blather on for many minutes about his multiple personality disorder.  Thank goodness for the cut to Norman in the room, because it manages to get back that sense of creepiness that we lost in the psychobabble.  (I suppose Hitch really does love his psychobabble – Spellbound is proof enough of that.)

I forgot how good Anthony Perkins is as Norman Bates.  He stands out amongst his cast members.  The fifties and sixties were a time of great change in film, changes that included approaches to acting style.  Perkins’ performance seems to come from the same school of thought that Marlon Brando championed, related to the idea of method acting, where a role is completely embodied in a very naturalistic manner by the actor.  Everyone else in the film, however, is much more old school Hollywood in their performances.  They’re fine, but they feel far more theatrical, and therefore, less real.  Perkins, with all his stutters and tics and nervous twitches, is so much better.  It’s easy to understand why Perkins was never capable of completely shedding Norman Bates – he’s just too good.  (My husband would appreciate me adding that he thought Janet Leigh did a very nice job too.  While I don’t think she was as good as Perkins, I do think this is the best performance I’ve ever seen by her.)

 

I also forgot just how good Bernard Herrmann’s score is.  Everyone knows the knife slashing “REE REE REE!” of the shower sequence, but there’s so much more to Psycho’s score than just some dissonant chords.  Done entirely with a string orchestra (as a clarinetist, I officially want to lodge a complaint to Herrmann – show some woodwinds some love, man!), the score as a whole is very good.  It’s alternately thrilling and then quiet and tense.  It’s particularly good in the first half of the film, helping greatly to up the tension when Marion is fleeing.  (My husband would now appreciate me adding that the main theme of Psycho – not the REE REE REE bit but the actual main theme – is used as a musical introduction when his favorite band Dream Theater performs live.)

The last thing I want to say about Psycho is that it will always remind of an anecdote from my family.  My mother was 10 when this film came out, and Hitchcock flooded the airwaves with advertisement and strategic marketing techniques (No one admitted after the film has started!).  My grandfather, who was a hoot and a half, was rather taken with Hitchcock’s personality, and would march around the house quoting the ads, saying “Don’t go in the bawwwthroom,” as he was mimicking Hitchcock’s low voice and British accent.  I can hear my grandfather saying that, as well as my mother imitating my grandfather.  It makes me smile. 

I really like the first hour of Pyscho much more than the last 45 minutes.  It’s stronger, it’s tenser, it’s more interesting.  Solving the mystery of Psycho in the last half is necessary but clunky.  But I will absolutely give Hitchcock his due, and admit that though this films lacks some traditional Hitchcockian suspense elements (not all, but some), he also pretty much invented the slasher horror genre, the psychopathic serial killer genre, and must have also supplied a huge inspiration to what would eventually become the police procedural television series.

I just wish I hadn’t had the whole dang thing spoiled for me.  It certainly sapped the film of some (most?) of its power.

Arbitrary Rating: 8/10