The Apartment

How this film uses it

The Consolidated Life insurance office looks too vast to be real. Wilder and designer Alexander Trauner got that scale with forced perspective, a trick that fakes depth. They used smaller and smaller desks and actors as the set stretches toward the horizon. The office ends up feeling like a machine, and Baxter like 1 of its parts.

Where to see it

The establishing shot of the insurance floor. Rows of identical desks shrink toward a vanishing point, and the rigid pattern of the institution dwarfs the people in it.

How this film uses it

Baxter's apartment is his greatest asset and also his deepest loneliness. He can't use it, it's decorated for a life he isn't living and it's filled with other people's happiness. When Fran arrives injured and lives in it properly for the first time, the place finally works as a home, and so does he.

Where to see it

Fran's recovery in Baxter's apartment. Her presence makes the place feel lived in, and the set design marks the emotional shift.

How this film uses it

The film runs as a broad romantic comedy, with pratfalls, mistaken identities and the charm of Jack Lemmon. At the same time, it's a film about loneliness, exploitation and a woman's attempted suicide. Wilder never resolves the tension. The comedy and the tragedy need each other.

Where to see it

Fran's overdose and Baxter's response. The tone shifts from comedy to real crisis within a single sequence, and neither tone cancels the other.

How this film uses it

Baxter's funniest scenes are also his most desperate. He strains spaghetti with a tennis racquet, and he juggles the revolving door of executives using his apartment. The comedy is how a man copes when he has made himself complicit in something he can't afford to name.

Where to see it

The spaghetti straining sequence. His resourcefulness comes out of complete loneliness, so you can't separate the comedy from the sadness of the moment.

How this film uses it

The film sets up Baxter and Sheldrake as opposite ends of the class ladder. Baxter is the nobody clerk who wants to be a somebody, and Sheldrake is the executive who has everything Baxter wants. Fran lives in both worlds and in neither. As a matter of fact, the way she moves between them is how the film resolves both its romance and its moral question.

Where to see it

Baxter's confrontation with Sheldrake at the end. The clerk returns the key and chooses dignity over promotion, and he rejects the class ladder.

How this film uses it

The insurance office is filmed in extreme wide angle with forced perspective. The rows of identical desks stretch to the vanishing point, and Baxter is 1 of hundreds. Sheldrake's corner office is warm, private and roomy. The contrast between the 2 spaces tells you who has power before anyone speaks.

Where to see it

The open-plan office wide shot. Baxter sits at his desk with hundreds of identical employees around him. A single composition makes the film's point about corporate hierarchy.

How this film uses it

The broken compact mirror Fran uses is the film's central object. It's cracked and shows her face in 2 halves. It gets left behind in Baxter's apartment, and Baxter returns it to Sheldrake without knowing whose it is. Later Fran opens the same compact so Baxter can check his new bowler hat, and the crack tells him everything about Sheldrake and Fran. She says she likes it that way, because it makes her look the way she feels. Its crack stands for a connection that is imperfect and real.

Where to see it

Baxter seeing his face in Fran's cracked compact as she shows him his new hat. The broken compact identifies Fran as Sheldrake's mistress, so the object carries both the film's revelation and its emotional resolution.