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List Price: $14.98Amazon.com's Price: $13.49 You Save: $1.49 (10%)Prices subject to change.
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Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Binding: DVD
Brand: TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX HOME ENT
EAN: 0883904100805
Format: Collector's Edition, Black & White, Dubbed, Subtitled
Label: MGM (Video & DVD)
Manufacturer: MGM (Video & DVD)
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: MGM (Video & DVD)
Region Code: 1
Release Date: February 05, 2008
Running Time: 125 minutes
Sales Rank: 4537
Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
Theatrical Release Date: 1960
Editorial Review:
Description:
Winner* of five 1960 Academy AwardsÂ(r), including Best Picture, The Apartment is legendary writer/director Billy Wilder at his scathing, satirical best, and one of 'the finest comedies Hollywood has turned out' (Newsweek). C.C. 'Bud' Baxter (Jack Lemmon) knows the way to success in business...it's through the door of his apartment! By providing a perfect hideaway for philandering bosses, the ambitious young employee reaps a series of undeserved promotions. But when Bud lends the key to big boss J.D. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), he not only advances his career, but his own love life as well. For Sheldrake's mistress is the lovely Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), elevator girl and angel of Bud's dreams. Convinced that he is the only man for Fran, Bud must makethe most important executive decision of his career: lose the girl...or his job. *1960: Director, Story and Screenplay, Editing, Art Direction (B&W)
Amazon.com essential video:
Romance at its most anti-romantic--that is the Billy Wilder stamp of genius, and this Best Picture Academy Award winner from 1960 is no exception. Set in a decidedly unsavory world of corporate climbing and philandering, the great filmmaker's trenchant, witty satire-melodrama takes the office politics of a corporation and plays them out in the apartment of lonely clerk C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon). By lending out his digs to the higher-ups for nightly extramarital flings with their secretaries, Baxter has managed to ascend the business ladder faster than even he imagined. The story turns even uglier, though, when Baxter's crush on the building's melancholy elevator operator (Shirley MacLaine) runs up against her long-standing affair with the big boss (a superbly smarmy Fred MacMurray). The situation comes to a head when she tries to commit suicide in Baxter's apartment. Not the happiest or cleanest of scenarios, and one that earned the famously caustic and cynically humored Wilder his share of outraged responses, but looking at it now, it is a funny, startlingly clear-eyed vision of urban emptiness and is unfailingly understanding of the crazy decisions our hearts sometimes make. Lemmon and MacLaine are ideally matched, and while everyone cites Wilder's Some Like It Hot closing line 'Nobody's perfect' as his best, MacLaine's no-nonsense final words--'Shut up and deal'--are every bit as memorable. Wilder won three Oscars for The Apartment, for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay (cowritten with longtime collaborator I.A.L. Diamond). --Robert Abele
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Love's for Rent, Desire's for Hire, in Wilder Satire
To avoid redundancy, I will not provide a comprehensive analysis of The Apartment (Collector's Edition). A great many reviewers before me already have written such excellent critiques of the immortal Billy Wilder's remarkably timeless farce here on Amazon.com. My two cents here, then, will zoom in tightly on the movie's portrayal of working women and its exploration of their inner lives.
The Apartment was released in 1960, and in nearly half a century some things remain the same when ... Read More
Rating: - Liberal 1950s New York Mores + Suicide
This movie provides great sociological insight into 1950s liberal New York's sexual mores. It also features suicide attempts by the two protagonists. Shirley MacLaine's character takes an overdose of sleeping pills; Jack Lemmon's character admits he tried to shoot himself as a younger man.
The suicide theme plays through to the very end, when MacLaine hears the "pop" of a champagne cork and thinks Lemmon has shot himself again.
The movie is mostly about sexual mores, however. ... Read More
Rating: - WHAT COULD BE WILDER?
THE APARTMENT was a wonderful satirical harpooning of the corporate world in the sixties ( when I first saw it ),and it hasn't lost any of its 'edge' in the intervening decades. Although Billy Wilder's view of romance always seemed to be slightly askew, even with darker subject matter ( attempted suicide, as a for instance ) there was usually a current of hope beneath the ascerbic wit inherent in his films.
Jack Lemmon's character, C.C. Baxter, has inadvertantly found his key to success, and ... Read More
Rating: - Ah, insurance companies....
Very, very good and a bit sad. And most frighteningly there is a scene early on in the movie that shows show Jack Lemmon working in an insurance company in a sea of desk. I would say "pre-cubicle days" but it was nearly duplicated at an insurance company in New York in real life around 1989. Had I seen the movie beforehand I would not have been able to work there without giggleing every time I entered that gigantic room.
Fred MacMurray was wonderful, and in this movie I can really see what ... Read More
Rating: - One of my top ten films of all time...
I have seen many great films during my days on this planet, by many great directors, writers, and/or producers. And I really can't remember when I first saw this 1960 "best picture" winner, since I was only five or six years old when it first came out. But over time, upon repeated viewings, I've come back to it with so much enjoyment and a warm feeling that this was (and is), truly one of my top ten Hollywood movies of all time. My "top ten" includes many great films (Close Encounters, the original Apocalypse ... Read More
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