Summary
We see New York City from above. A male narrator tells us that “on November 1, 1959, the population of New York City was 8,042,783.” He then tells us that if you laid all these people down one right after the other, you would reach Pakistan from Times Square. “I know facts like this because I work for an insurance company, Consolidated Life,” he tells us. We see a large office building as the narrator gives us some statistics about his company. The narrator's name is C.C. Baxter, and we see him working at his desk in the accounting division. He narrates how long he’s been with the company, and that he makes about $94.70 a week. Baxter eyes the clock as it reaches 5:20 and a bell rings to signal closing time. We see the employees packing up as Baxter tells us that the closing times are staggered so that the elevators don’t get clogged up at closing time. Everyone leaves, but Baxter stays behind to work some more, a habit—he tells us—that is less about ambition and more “just a way of killing time” before going home to his apartment.
The scene shifts and we see Baxter’s apartment, which he tells us in the West 60s, close to Central Park. His rent, he tells us, is $85 a month, and it is not a fancy apartment, but perfect for a bachelor like himself. “The only problem is I can’t always get in when I want to,” he says, looking up at his apartment window, where dance music seems to be playing. Up in the apartment, we see a woman, named Sylvia, humming along with the music and dancing up to a man, who tells her that they need to get out of Baxter’s apartment, as it’s getting late. When the man tells Sylvia that he promised “the guy” he’d be out of there at a reasonable hour, Sylvia wants to know whose apartment they’re in. “Some schnook that works in the office,” says the man, referring to Baxter. Baxter walks down the street and lights a cigarette, waiting for the couple to leave. He greets his landlord, Mrs. Leiberman, who wants to talk about the weather, before asking him why he’s standing outside the building. He lies and tells her that he’s waiting for a friend and they say goodnight to one another. As the businessman and Sylvia come out of the building, Baxter hides in the shadows. It becomes clear that the businessman is married and having an affair with Sylvia in Baxter’s apartment.
As the couple leaves, Baxter goes up the steps to his apartment. In the hall, he runs into his neighbor Mrs. Dreyfuss, who catches him retrieving his key from under the mat and tells him that his apartment was very noisy earlier in the evening. He deflects her prying comments and goes into his apartment. As he cleans up the mess that the businessman left, the doorbell rings and the businessman, whose name is Mr. Kirkeby, comes back in looking for Sylvia’s galoshes. Baxter reminds him that he was supposed to be out of the apartment at 8 PM. Mr. Kirkeby apologizes, before mentioning to Baxter that he put in a good word for him with someone named Mr. Sheldrake at the office. “You’re on your way up, my boy!” Mr. Kirkeby says to Baxter. Mr. Kirkeby tells Baxter he’ll pay him for all the alcohol he and his girlfriend drank and asks about the cheese crackers that Baxter used to keep in the apartment, before letting himself out. In the kitchen, Baxter lights the oven, takes out a frozen dinner, and tosses it in. He pours himself a drink and chugs it, cheers-ing to no one. He then takes out a bunch of bottles into the hall to be recycled.
In the hall, Baxter runs into a doctor who is just getting home from making a house call. “Some clown on 57th at Schrafft’s ate a club sandwich and forgot to take out the toothpick,” the doctor tells him. Baxter tries to say goodnight, but the doctor notices all the bottles and questions Baxter about his drinking, before mentioning that he can hear that Baxter is often entertaining female visitors; smirking, the doctor says, “Sometimes there’s a twi-night double-header!” The doctor then asks Baxter if he would be willing to leave his body to the university for research. Baxter excuses himself and goes into his apartment as the doctor yells, “Slow down, kid!” Back in his apartment, Baxter pulls his dinner out of the oven, grabs a beer, and sits down on his couch to eat. He turns on the television, which is playing an old movie, Grand Hotel. When a cigarette advertisement begins to play, he switches the channel to a western, then switches again to a movie with a raucous bar fight, back to the western, and finally back to Grand Hotel. It seems like the movie is about to begin, when another advertisement plays, this time for dentures. He shuts off the television and goes to bed.
Just as he is settling into bed the phone rings. It’s a coworker named Joe Dobisch, who is looking to use Baxter’s apartment to sleep with a woman who “looks like Marilyn Monroe,” but Baxter informs him that it’s too late, he took a sleeping pill, and he’s already in bed. Dobisch threatens to give Baxter a bad efficiency report at work if he doesn’t let him use his apartment. Eventually Baxter agrees, frustratedly putting on his coat and vacating his apartment. Before he leaves, he puts a note on the record player advising Dobisch not to play it too loud and wake up his neighbors. As he comes out of his apartment, Dobisch and the Marilyn lookalike are getting out of a cab. The woman thinks it’s his mother’s apartment and worries about waking her, but Dobisch insists, “Don’t worry about her, one squawk from her and she’s out of a job!” Upstairs, Dobitsch tells the woman to get the key from under the mat and they go into Baxter’s apartment. As they giggle drunkenly, the doctor comes out into the hall, where he hears their giggling and dance music begin to play. The doctor calls to his wife: “Mildred! He’s at it again!” We see Baxter sitting down on a park bench in the cold as leaves fall around him.
The next day, the lobby of Baxter’s office building is bustling. He walks towards the elevator to go to work, wiping his nose, having evidently developed a cold from being out in the cold weather so late. He greets Mr. Kirkeby at the elevator, who makes no reference to Baxter and his arrangement. An elevator woman, Ms. Kubelik, cheerily greets everyone by name as they get onto the elevator. Baxter turns to Ms. Kubelik and notices she got a short haircut, of which she says, “It was making me nervous so I chopped it off. Big mistake, huh?” She notices he has a cold, but assures him that he doesn’t have to worry about passing the cold along, as she never gets sick. As they arrive on the 19th floor, Baxter gets off, followed by Mr. Kirkeby, who Ms. Kubelik scolds for pinching her, threatening, “One of these days I’m gonna shut these doors on you.” Mr. Kirkeby goes over to Baxter and tries to commiserate about the fact that Ms. Kubelik won’t go on a date with him. “It could be she’s just a nice, respectable girl,” Baxter suggests, but Mr. Kirkeby dismisses him as a goody-goody and walks away.
At his desk, Baxter makes a call to Mr. Dobisch, who immediately apologizes for the fact that his date from the previous night did some painting on Baxter’s wall. “You see, my friend kept insisting that Picasso was a bum, so she started to do that mural,” Dobisch explains. Aggravated, Baxter informs Dobisch that he left the wrong key under the mat. Dobisch is apologetic, telling Baxter that he will send the key down and that he is submitting an efficiency report that afternoon that will likely get Baxter a promotion. Baxter thanks Dobisch and hangs up. A delivery boy brings Baxter his key and Baxter takes his temperature. He then calls another businessman named Vanderhof, and tells him that he needs his apartment to himself that evening, so will need to cancel the appointment they made. Vanderhof won’t hear it, and insists that he needs access to the apartment that evening. Even when Baxter tells him that he has a cold and needs to go straight to bed, Vanderhof urges him to just spend the night at the Turkish baths to get over the cold. Baxter insists that he needs his apartment that evening, and Vanderhof backs off and reschedules for the following Wednesday. Looking through his planner, Baxter notices that he has someone penciled in for next Wednesday, tells Vanderhof he will think about it, and hangs up the phone.
Flipping through his Rolodex, Baxter makes a call to another businessman, Mr. Eichelberger, and asks if he can reschedule his appointment for the following Wednesday. When Mr. Eichelberger proposes they reschedule for Friday, Baxter realizes he must move another appointment around and makes another call, this time to Kirkeby. Kirkeby tells him he has to check to see if he can reschedule before calling Sylvia, the girl from the night before, who turns out to be an operator in the office. Sylvia can do Thursday, and Kirkeby calls Baxter back to inform him so. With his calendar figured out, Baxter is free to go home and rest that evening. Suddenly, the man at the desk next to Baxter’s tells Baxter that Mr. Sheldrake from personnel is trying to get in touch and they want to see him upstairs. Exuberantly, Baxter gets up from his desk and rushes to go upstairs. As the elevator opens, Ms. Kubelik pops her head out and brings Baxter upstairs. As the elevator goes up, Baxter brags to Ms. Kubelik about his efficiency and the fact that he is likely to be getting a promotion. She smiles at him and informs him that he’s the nicest man in the office, and the only one who ever takes off his hat in the elevator. “Something happens to men in elevators. It’s the change of altitude. The blood rushes to their head,” she jokes, referring to how lecherous some of the men can be. Baxter invites her to have a meal with her in the cafeteria some time just as they arrive on the 27th floor. Ms. Kubelik doesn’t give him an answer either way.
Analysis
The beginning of the film presents the viewer with a rather titillating premise. C.C. Baxter, a seemingly normal employee at a large office building in Manhattan, has set up a side business, loaning out his apartment to older businessmen so they have a place to carry on their extramarital affairs. After he first introduces himself, he tells us that he likes to stay late at the office, not because he is especially ambitious, but because he just likes to spend more time there. We soon learn that he is staying late because he cannot, in fact, get in to his own apartment. It is being used by Mr. Kirkeby and Sylvia, who listen to loud dance music and carry on an affair late into the night. This premise sets a quasi-farcical tone for the film right away. The notion that a clerk at an office would turn his own home into a quasi-brothel for his professional superiors, in hopes that it might bring him more opportunities in his career, is an absurd one.
An especially comedic irony of Baxter’s situation is that no one else in the apartment building knows what is going on. As such, everyone thinks that Baxter is the one getting busy in his apartment until late into the night. While Baxter is in fact waiting to get back to his apartment just so he can eat his dinner, people like his next-door neighbors—a doctor and his wife—believe that Baxter has a nearly insatiable sexual appetite. When the doctor confronts Baxter about his supposed hijinks in the hall, he seems at once titillated and disapproving. One cannot tell if the doctor is envious or if the doctor is genuinely concerned about Baxter’s health, which creates a particularly comedic effect. Whether the doctor is horrified or approving is beside the point, in fact; either way, he is misreading Baxter’s arrangement entirely.
By immediately exposing the businessmen who work at Baxter’s office as ridiculous and lying philanderers, the film establishes that the New York of The Apartment is never quite as it seems, that most matters have two sides to them. Businessmen who dress respectably for work and maintain their appointments with a meticulous attention are in fact careless and disloyal spouses, at the whims of their crass mistresses’ demands. Mr. Kirkeby and Baxter greet each other cordially at the elevators in the morning, when the night before Mr. Kirkeby was drunkenly entertaining a mistress in Baxter’s living room. His mistress is, in fact, one of the operators in the office. The formalities and hierarchies that govern the daytime goings-on at the office building do not exist after hours. Hierarchies break down when the end-of-day bell rings. Clerks help bosses score, bosses score with secretaries and operators. Performance and double identities are quite common.
One character that seems not to subscribe to the artifice of corporate life is Ms. Fran Kubelik, the elevator girl. With a uniquely short haircut and a flower on her lapel, Ms. Kubelik is a pure heart, an idiosyncratic free spirit, all the more alluring because she seems unattainable. As they emerge from the elevator, Mr. Kirkeby bemoans the fact that Ms. Kubelik refuses to go on a date with him. The fact that Ms. Kubelik is harder to seduce, that she is not taken in by a businessman’s usual invitations, makes her all the more appealing, shows that she is not as “easy” as some of the other girls in the office. When Mr. Kirkeby mistakes Ms. Kubelik’s insouciance as a kind of irreverence or flaw, Baxter offers, “It could be she’s just a nice, respectable girl.” While this seems like a reasonable explanation for Ms. Kubelik’s behavior, Kirkeby dismisses Baxter and his proposition. Ms. Kubelik is an anomaly in an office full of louts, cheaters, and easy girls, precisely because she has her own brand of self-respect and integrity.
The film has a breezy, comic, and light-hearted tone. While the plot deals with some rather dubious scenarios right off the bat, the tone that director Billy Wilder sets keeps it from becoming especially serious or dramatic at any point. Baxter’s loaning of his apartment out to philandering businessmen is a joke rather than a cause for alarm, and it opens up many opportunities for comic misunderstandings. This includes when his neighbors suspect him of carrying on countless affairs, as well as when Baxter must rearrange his calendar so as to get his own bedroom for the night to sleep off a cold. Baxter makes an outrageous number of phone calls to different businessmen in the office; indeed, it seems that he has booked his apartment for every day of the week. Billy Wilder treats every scenario with a light touch, and his depiction of midcentury office life takes a satirical standpoint rather than an overtly critical one. The two-timing businessmen are buffoons more than they are villains, and Baxter’s ridiculous role as a sex landlord is not so much immoral as it is opportunistic.
