Essential Cinema: The Wilder Touch

THE APARTMENT

Directed by Billy Wilder

USA, 1960, 2h 5min, DCP

Essential Cinema  The Wilder Touch

There are no current or future screenings planned for this film.

The October 23 screening will feature an introduction by writer and scholar Noah Isenberg, editor of Billy Wilder On Assignment and a forthcoming book about Wilder’s SOME LIKE IT HOT.

Always a keen observer and deflater of American mores, Wilder found his dream couple in Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine. Lemmon plays a young and ambitious office worker who, in the hopes of currying favor from his higher-ups, lends his apartment to corporate execs for romantic trysts with their mistresses. At the same time he becomes more and more attached to the elevator operator Fran Kubelik (MacLaine.) When these two aspects of his romantic and work life begin to conflict, he finds himself in a real quandary. A near-perfect film, romantic and world-weary in equal proportions.

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