The writer-director’s humane and often surprisingly dark romantic
comedy shows him at his finest with two charming leads in Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine
Jack Lemmon often gets referred to as the great everyman of
American actors – down-to-earth, identifiable, a little put-upon but fundamentally decent. And that’s the image that gets projected when his character in The Apartment, a lowly insurance accountant named CC “Bud” Baxter, is first shown at desk #861 on the 19th floor of the Consolidated Life building in
New York – a city whose population, he tells us, would stretch from “Times Square to the outskirts of Karachi” if they were laid end-to-end. What man could be more average than the one sitting among a sea of office drones so expansive that they work from 8.50am to 5.20pm, every day, just to stagger the elevator times?
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