Summary
Baxter asks Fran how the bowler hat looks on him, and she hands him her compact. As he opens it, he looks at his reflection in the broken mirror, recognizing the compact that he returned to Mr. Sheldrake earlier. “What’s the matter?” Fran asks, and Baxter hands it back to her dejectedly, telling her the mirror is broken. “Yes, I know. I like it like that. Makes me look the way I feel,” she tells him. Baxter stares at her, disappointed, as his phone rings. He picks it up, asking Fran to leave him some privacy. “Have a nice Christmas,” she says, leaving his office. On the phone is Mr. Sheldrake, who wants to confirm that he will be needing the apartment that evening. Baxter looks disappointed, grabs his jacket, and leaves the office. In the main office, Sylvia does a dance on one of the tables. Mr. Kirkeby stops Baxter on his way out of the office and asks to use the apartment the following day. Baxter just looks at him, before wandering sadly out of the office.
We see Baxter sitting in a smoky bar drinking martinis and smoking. He makes a design with the olives on toothpicks. Suddenly a Santa impersonator comes over to the bar and begins ringing a bell. When Baxter scowls at him, the Santa quickly hurries away. A woman at the end of the bar watches Baxter, then starts making spitballs and shooting them at him with her straw. Baxter doesn’t notice any of the straw wrappers hitting him, so she finally walks over and tells him, “If you buy me a drink I’ll buy you some music.” She then wanders over to the jukebox and Baxter orders her a Rum Collins. She comes over to the bar and asks Baxter how he feels about Castro. She tells him that she doesn’t care for Castro, then complains about her husband, Mickey, who is in jail in Cuba—“he’s a jockey; they caught him dopin’ a horse.” The woman asks him if he’s married, and begins to imply that he should invite her over to his empty apartment.
The scene shifts to Baxter’s apartment, where Sheldrake is speaking to Fran, who cries on the couch. He smokes and paces around the room, insisting that it’s not so easy to ask for a divorce. “I can’t bring it up now!” he says, as Fran sobs. Fran tells him that she ran into Ms. Olsen at the Christmas party, and when Sheldrake tries to assure Fran that he’s long called things off with Ms. Olsen, she goes down the list of all the people Sheldrake has had affairs with. Mr. Sheldrake hears her out, before trying to reason with her, telling her that she’s a different kind of girl and that he loves her in a way he didn’t love the others. Fran continues to cry and make cynical remarks, before handing Sheldrake a Christmas present. It’s a record of the music played by the pianist at the Chinese restaurant they meet at. “We’d better keep it here,” Sheldrake says, putting it down on Baxter’s table. He then takes $100 out of his pocket and hands it to Fran as a Christmas present. When Fran refuses the cash, Sheldrake puts it down beside her and tells her he needs to get home to his family.
Sheldrake leaves the apartment, but Fran says she’s going to stay behind to do her makeup. She picks up the record of the pianist from the Chinese restaurant and puts it on, weeping next to Baxter’s Christmas tree. She grabs her bag, goes to the bathroom, and washes her face as the music plays. Suddenly she spots Baxter’s sleeping pills on the shelf and looks at the label for a moment. She then looks at the money that Sheldrake left for her. As dramatic music plays, Fran fills up a glass with water and proceeds to take the pills. The scene shifts back to the bar, where Baxter and the woman who asked him to buy her a drink are dancing. They dance cheek to cheek to swanky big band music, while the man in the Santa suit sits at the bar drinking. The bartender yells at Baxter and the woman, urging them to leave the bar. Baxter invites the woman to come over to his apartment.
As they approach Baxter’s apartment, the woman talks about her husband, lamenting the fact that he’s all alone in a jail in Cuba. On the stairs, the woman asks Baxter if he has a girlfriend and he implies that he is still hung up on another woman. They introduce themselves to one another, and the woman tells Baxter her name is Mrs. Margie MacDougall. As they go into the apartment, Baxter jokingly tells Margie that she is now alone with a “notorious sex pot.” He sends her to get some ice from the kitchen and as he takes off his coat, Baxter notices Fran’s record on the record player and begins to play it. He dances around to the music, when suddenly he notices Fran’s gloves on the coffee table, which he brings to the bedroom and throws on the bed. As he closes the door to the bedroom, he realizes that he just threw his gloves on Fran, who is passed out on his bed. He goes back into the bedroom and urges Fran to wake up and get out of his apartment. “It’s past checking out time!” he snarls at her, annoyed that she would stay past her welcome in his apartment.
When Fran doesn’t respond and appears completely limp and unconscious, Baxter notices his empty bottle of sleeping pills in her lap. He becomes frantic and runs next door to get the doctor. The doctor comes to the door and Baxter tells him that a girl has passed out in his bed from overdosing on sleeping pills. Rushing back to his apartment, Baxter ushers Margie out the door; she is surprised and offended by Baxter’s unceremonious goodbye, screaming that she’ll tell her husband all about how Baxter treated her. Having gotten Margie out the door, Baxter notices that the record is still playing on the record player, and he rushes over to shut it off. He runs into the bedroom where the doctor is examining Fran. The doctor asks Baxter to help him bring Fran into the bathroom to pump her stomach, before saying, “You’d better put some coffee on, and pray.” As Baxter walks over to the bathroom, he hears Fran coughing up the pills. On the side table, he finds a suicide note, and puts it in his pocket as the doctor carries Fran out of the bathroom.
The doctor puts Fran down on a chair in the living room and instructs Baxter to roll up her right sleeve. “Wanna tell me what happened?” the doctor says, and Baxter makes up a story about a fight they were having earlier. “So you went right out and picked yourself up another dame!” the doctor says, to which Baxter responds, “Something like that.” After the doctor gives Fran a shot and several slaps in the face, Fran begins to stir, moaning quietly. The water begins to boil and Baxter runs to make some coffee, which he brings to the doctor, who feeds some to Fran. Fran begins to wake up more and more, eventually coming back into consciousness. The doctor asks Fran if she recognizes Baxter, and she correctly identifies him as “Mr. Baxter.” “What are you doing here?” she asks him, and Baxter tries to prompt her to keep her story in line with the one he gave to the doctor. Fran is confused and wants to go back to sleep, but the doctor becomes firm, holding her face and insisting that she drink the coffee. The doctor and Baxter lift Fran to her feet and the doctor tells him that they will have to keep her awake for the next two hours in order to keep her alive.
Analysis
Baxter is exceedingly disappointed to learn that Fran Kubelik, the charming elevator girl, is the one having an affair with Mr. Sheldrake. Before he discovered this, he was fine with Sheldrake having an affair and using his apartment. When he learns that it is Fran, however, a grave expression passes over his face. He is shocked to learn that the girl whom he has idealized so much is just the “other woman” to his deceitful boss. Jack Lemmon’s elastic and expressive face drops and he becomes almost catatonic, walking out of the office party, through the rows and rows of covered typewriters. With the loss of his main work crush, Baxter finds himself alienated by the corporate wasteland surrounding him. No promotion can comfort him about the fact that the woman he loves is having an affair with another man—and in his apartment, no less.
The complications of the plot come to a head on Christmas Eve, a symbolic holiday where family, giving, and love are all in the air. Despondent about the fact that his office crush is sleeping with the boss that just gave him a promotion, Baxter takes a place at a bar and downs martinis late into the night. He is preyed upon by a lonely woman whose husband has mysteriously been incarcerated in Havana. Deflated and missing his usual wide-eyed pluck, Baxter becomes a hapless drunk at the bar, going home with the most aggressive woman who will take him in. Meanwhile, the charming Fran loses her usual bright-eyed pluck as well when she realizes that Mr. Sheldrake is playing her for a fool, has slept with a number of other women in the office, and has no intention of divorcing his wife to be with her. With mascara running down her cheeks, she stays behind after Sheldrake in Baxter’s apartment (without knowing it’s his) and downs a bottle of sleeping pills. The Apartment sets up a suspenseful and dramatic chain of events to bring Baxter and Fran together, including a self-destructive evening of drinking and a suicide attempt.
Even though the stakes are high, however, and the repercussions of the corporate intrigue are getting dramatic, the film continually tows a tonal line between drama and comedy. Baxter ends up at a tawdry bar on Christmas Eve, an undoubtedly pathetic turn of events, but his date from the bar is an absurd caricature, and says a number air-headed things to comic effect. Additionally, Fran’s suicide attempt is an undoubtedly tragic event, but Baxter’s discovery of it is at once terrifying and humorous. Fran’s limp body becomes the cause for an almost slapstick-level comedic routine, as Baxter tries to eject the ditzy Margie from his apartment, get the doctor over to save Fran’s life, and come up with a likely story to explain the strange assembly in his apartment. The Apartment is undoubtedly a comedy, but it also unflinchingly explores the darkness of its characters’ plights. While the initial premise of the film—that Baxter lends out his apartment to business executives so they can carry out clandestine affairs—is treated glibly in the beginning, its repercussions are nearly fatal and no laughing matter. Fran’s resuscitation is an extended process and requires a great deal of care and objectivity from the doctor and from Baxter. The film doesn’t shy away from showing the visceral reality of Fran’s fatal decision, but it does so while also positioning the suicide attempt within the absurd context of Baxter’s strange domestic situation. The film excels at the juxtaposition between the comic and the dark.
The film is shot in such a way that it highlights this juxtaposition of tones. At times, the camera angles heighten the absurdity of the plot, like when the camera zooms in on the expressiveness of Jack Lemmon’s face, his mood turning from lighthearted to put-upon in a simple shift of expression, or when the camera pans from Baxter and Margie dancing cheek-to-cheek over to a drunken Santa Claus sitting alone at the bar on Christmas Eve. These sight gags and visual cues, highlighted by the perspective of the camera, heighten the comedy of the film. There are other moments, however, that heighten the film’s sense of drama, tragedy, loneliness, and alienation. For instance, after Baxter realizes that it is Fran with whom Sheldrake is having an affair, he trudges out of the office Christmas party completely depressed, and we see the debauchery of the party shot from above. Baxter walks past a giant group of people assembled around a desk on which the operator Sylvia does a seductive dance. Shot from above, the viewer clearly sees the contrast between Baxter and the other partygoers; from a distance we see his position as a sad and earnest romantic in a sea of detached corporate wife-swappers. He wanders past the countless rows of typewriters, symbols of his professional alienation, and walks out the door.
The cinematography reflects a shift in tone later when the doctor and Baxter must keep Fran awake to save her life. After a mad dash to retrieve the doctor, get Margie out of the apartment, and revive Fran, the camera settles and stops for the first time in awhile, as the doctor uses smelling salts and a number of slaps to the face to wake Fran up. Baxter cannot bear to watch, and stands with his back to the procedure on the other side of the frame, praying for Fran’s recovery. Then when Fran begins to doze, the doctor quickly enlists Baxter to help him carry her around the living room to keep her awake. The camera takes a stationary position in the corner of the room at about thigh level. Baxter and the doctor walk Fran back and forth across the living room, in and out of the frame, but the camera stays put and the viewer does not get to see their faces clearly. The stillness of the camera in this moment reflects the dramatic stakes of the situation. As the camera does not move, so the viewer feels the powerlessness of the characters as they wait to see whether Fran will survive.
