Given all we that are learning and all that we have always known about certain men in certain jobs, why oh why would anyone want to spend time watching a movie about an ambitious weakling who lends out his apartment to philandering executives for after-hours hookups? A movie that is billed as a romantic comedy and infuriatingly holds up as such? Why?!

I certainly didn't feel like it. In fact, I'm supposed to be writing about Baby Face (1933), a film about an ambitious man-trap who uses the corporate ladder to better her circumstances the only way she knows how. THAT movie's protagonist is steely, goal-directed. After a lifetime of sexual exploitation and poverty, Lily Powers (Barbara Stanwyck) wants the kind of security that money and power provide and the fastest way to achieve that is to go where the money is and exploit men's weaknesses. She uses sex to get ahead because she learned early that her greatest skill was sizing up men: what they want to hear, how they want her to be, and how to make them feel powerful. I get Lily Powers: nobody pushes her around, not even the Hays Office.

But The Apartment kept intruding on me, with its gross premise and its many Academy Awards. It is a 57-year-old, irritatingly recognizable tale of a man who uses sex (if tangentially) to get ahead, who keeps his superiors' secrets, and compartmentalizes the sleaze of it enough to enjoy his advancement until someone he actually knows and likes is adversely affected. It is exactly the stuff that is supposedly shocking us all to our core today: that there are men in power who engage in sexual misconduct in the workplace as an expression of that power and hurt the less powerful in the process.

In The Apartment, Jack Lemmon plays C.C. Baxter, a low-level employee at an insurance company who happens to have an apartment felicitously close to work. Some of the married executives learn about his bachelor pad and promise Baxter promotions and perks in exchange for the use of his place for adulterous hookups. Since this is a comedy, we only see the consensual liaisons and get to sniff at the callous, dreadful men who exploit their underling and string along their women. Baxter finds the arrangement distasteful and gross, but goes along, catching colds while he waits outside some nights and catching sidelong glances in the mornings from neighbors who think he is a sexual dynamo. When The Guys come through with a meager promotion, Baxter believes it's all paying off.

Meanwhile, news of The Apartment reaches the head of personnel, a Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), who decides to get in on the action, offering Baxter a meteoric promotion in exchange for exclusive access to the place. At first, Baxter thinks he's being noticed for his work, since he has been there for several years, but it's the key or no promotion. To complicate things further, Baxter learns that Sheldrake's office conquest is the smart, cute elevator operator, Fran Kubelick (Shirley MacLaine), the girl for whom Baxter has a Thing. This fact not only dashes his own hopes in that regard, but also makes working for Sheldrake and being in his own apartment all the more difficult.

Unfortunately, Sheldrake's most immediate past mistress (played beautifully by Edie Adams) clues Fran in on Sheldrake's pattern, laying out the history of his conquests, tracing his path from girl to girl, department to department. Fran and Sheldrake break up spectacularly in Baxter's apartment (which she still does not know is his) and Fran impulsively downs a bottle of sleeping pills she finds in the medicine cabinet. Baxter comes home to discover an unconscious Fran in his bed, leaps to her aid, and lets her recuperate there for several days. Fran makes clear that Baxter is too weak a man for her (the apartment set-up is gross), but they become friends nonetheless.

Eventually, of course, these two get together. It takes a smooth retaliatory act by Sheldrake's secretary, Sheldrake's own personality, and Baxter finally listening to that little voice to do it, but it happens.

Billy Wilder, the co-writer and director of the film, does a masterful job of making us care for both Baxter and Miss Kubelick, who are required to navigate some difficult moral terrain: he is the social climber making dubious professional choices; she is a regular girl who falls in love with a married man. Jack Lemmon is marvelous at conveying pangs of conscience in his face and body; you can see this likable weakling register the sordid situation he's enabling, quickly rationalize it, then continue down his path. Shirley MacLaine can play vulnerable with incredible strength of character and natural humor: unlike Baxter, Fran Kubelick is fully aware of the consequences of her actions and chooses to meet them head on. (Like Lily in Baby Face, which I swear to god I'll get back to, but with more introspection.) Fred MacMurray, despite all the nonsensical hand-wringing over this role ruining his "good guy" image, has always been superb at playing a smooth-talking heel.*

It irritates me that this is a great romantic comedy, because it is. I hate that I had to steel myself to watch it again because I was worried that my memory of it would be wrong -- wrong in the way you might think "Oh look, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is on. I love that movie. I bet it's not rapey at all." I feared that the sexual politics in The Apartment would be too broadly drawn, that Baxter might be less aware that not every encounter there would be consensual (Ray Walston is super sketchy); that he wouldn't see his bosses for who they were or be disgusted with himself. I worried that Shirley MacLaine's character would have less self-awareness or that we'd be asked to sympathize somehow with the adulterous executives. The film is better than my concerns and I'm so relieved.

But I *hate* that The Apartment is nearly sixty years old and is probably the only film to date that makes us look at workplace sexual misconduct from the point of view of one of the "nice" guys -- a guy who didn't think too hard about what he was doing to get ahead and enjoyed his perks with vague unease until he just couldn't do it anymore.

Here's what finally tips the scales for Baxter: he had just come into his boss's office with a bunch of charts and stats about personnel and a plan to improve retention. He was positively giddy about it. Sheldrake waves the work away and tells Baxter that his wife has kicked him out and he and Fran are back together, so hand over the key. In that moment, Baxter realizes that as a newly promoted junior executive, not only will he have to be OK with the object of his affection sleeping with his boss in Baxter's bed, but none of the work he will ever do in that office will be taken seriously. Ever. His success in the company will always be whispered about and his merits never fully acknowledged no matter what he does -- as if he were one of the girls, instead of one of the boys.

So he says no.

And loses his job. As did Miss Kubelick. As does Sheldrake's secretary, fired by her boss and former lover.

But you know who's still head of Personnel*?

And that, boys and girls, is why we can't have nice things, like pay equity or a woman president.

Sugarpuss: [After asking the biology professor to  check her throat]  SLIGHT rosiness! It's as red as the Daily Worker and just as sore!

                       *  *  *

Sugarpuss: [looking through Potts' books] Oh, "Greek philosophy!" I got a set like this with a radio inside.
​​
                       *  *  *

Prof. Potts: Make no mistake, I shall regret the absence of your keen mind; unfortunately, it is inseparable from an extremely disturbing body.

                       *  *  *
​
Prof. Potts: I made an ass of myself and I know it.
Prof. Jerome: Oh, well, we all have, Potts.
Prof. Potts: Yes, but I was the lead donkey.

What is it about a tough-talking girl with a good heart, great legs, and a healthy romantic appetite? If that girl has a sense of irony and enough self-confidence to floor a room full of academics, then I'm sunk. This is exactly how Barbara Stanwyck ruined me for other women as Katherine "Sugarpuss" O'Shea, bespangled nightclub singer, in the great Howard Hawks/Billy Wilder romp, Ball of Fire. 

In a Victorian mansion on the quiet side of town, eight rumpled academics are hard at work on a new encyclopedia. They are older, socially-awkward professors, each with his own area of specialty. The youngest among them is Professor Bertram Potts (Gary Cooper), a linguist who is charged with updating the "slang" section. Potts has been gathering regular Joes from around town to help with his research: taxi drivers, garbage men, you know, Allen Jenkins types (and he's one of them). He goes to a nightclub one evening in search of some really good words and tries to recruit the club's headliner, Sugarpuss (Shugie). She refuses point blank.

At that moment, however, Shugie's boyfriend, handsome mobster Joe Lilac (Dana Andrews), has been up to something especially mobby and has to beat it out of town. Before she has time to rip up Prof. Pott's card, Lilac's goons, Pastrami (Dan Duryea) and Asthma (Ralph Peters), yank Shugie out of the club and tell her to lay low until things cool down. Ding! What better place to hide than a house full of Abercrombies?

Still in her costume, Shugie shimmies her way through the front door, and since none of these guys have ever seen spangles up close like this, they're completely on board, 

I mean...

So Shugie settles in and makes friends with all the fellas, teaching them how to dance and mix cocktails and such. She even helps Prof. Potts with his slang research on the regular and begins to take an interest in his work. For his part, Potts has begun to take an interest in her -- not just for the spangles, but on accounta because (that's a pleonasm) she is intelligent and curious. And he is young and healthy and not blind or dead.
​
Shugie also has eyes that see and has not failed to notice that Prof. Potts is one hot philologist. They develop feelings for one another: hers conflicted (she still has Dana Andrews in the wings, remember); his sincere and marriage-minded.

Speaking of the mobster boyfriend, Joe Lilac has been apprised of Shugie's doings and whereabouts by his goons -- who, by the way, are great goons. Dan Duryea is at his high, quiet slippery best and Asthma (the other one) looks like he was born with a machine gun in his hand. Lilac's lawyer advises him to marry Shugie so that she won't be able to testify against him in his upcoming racketeering trial. Posing as Shugie's father, Lilac phones the encyclopedia house to tell her to meet him in Jersey to get married. Potts takes the opportunity to ask "Mr. O'Shea" for his daughter's hand, which Lilac obviously grants, because now he can use the cover of eight professors to sneak Shugie out to meet him right under the cops' noses. 

Poor Shugie. If she refuses Lilac, he'll have everybody killed. Also, with a choice between a guy who "gets more bang outta you than any dame he ever knew" and another who quotes Shakespeare, she'd rather stick with Potts, with whom she has, in spite of herself, fallen in love:

She agrees to marry Potts, knowing she'll break his heart and humiliate him in front his colleagues, who are also her friends. He gives her the world's smallest ring with the world's sweetest inscription. Once they've safely delivered Shugie into Lilac's hands, however, Lilac tosses Shugie a million carat diamond ring, socks Potts in the eye, and sends them all packing back to their encyclopedia, Because he knows Shugie is actually in love with Potts, Lilac also sends Pastrami and Asthma along to guard them until the marriage is official.

Back in their library under the watchful guns of Lilac's goons, the professors realize that the ring Shugie gave back to Potts was Lilac's ring. According to the psychology professor in their midst, this means she kept the one she truly wanted: the one Potts gave her. Emboldened by love and hope, Potts and his friends science their way past the gunmen and rescue Shugie just in time. 

And they lived happily ever after, see?

I love Sugarpuss O'Shea for the same reasons Professor Bertram Potts does: she's tough, sweet, smart, and sexy. ​She had us both at "yum-yum."

This post is my contribution to the Reel Infatuation Blogathon, hosted by Font & Frock and Silver Screenings.

Visit the blogathon pages to see how many ways a person can swoon. So many great posts and picks. 

I love that The Fortune Cookie is structured like a caper film. The adventure is about two guys trying to make big money out of a small accident: will they get the money? will they give up? will they get caught?  It's comparatively small-time for a caper film -- no jewels or art to be stolen, but all is set to that trademark Billy Wilder dialog, unfolding through flawed, slightly unlikable characters, and that makes it big.

Jack Lemmon plays Harry Hinkle, a sports cameraman who is injured while covering a football game by one of the players, Luther "Boom Boom" Jackson (Ron Rich). While in the hospital, Hinkle's brother-in-law, "Whiplash Wille" Gingrich (Walter Matthau), convinces Harry to sue the football team for damages, defraud the insurance companies, and cash in with a huge settlement. The prospect of paying out half a million bucks to "Shyster Gingrich" (an oft-repeated phrase that makes me giggle every time) is too much for the insurance company, so they hire crack detective Chester Purkey (Wilder stable actor Cliff Osmond) to put Hinkle under surveillance in the hopes of discovering fraud.

The more lying Hinkle has to do, however, the less comfortable he becomes with the whole scheme. He's fine with using his injury to win back the affections of his crummy ex-wife, Sandy (Judi West), a pretty if unpleasant woman who is eager to get a piece of the action. But Harry is less happy about deceiving Boom-Boom, who feels so guilty for causing the injury that he's been taking time away from the team to take care of Harry, and in the process, is getting fined and benched for missing so much practice.

Boom-Boom is also beginning to drink, plays poorly on the field, and is getting into bar fights. On the evening Gingrich sews up a $200,000 settlement, Boom-Boom is arrested on a drunk and disorderly charge. Seeing how upset Hinkle is over the plight of his football player friend -- and in one last effort to prove fraud -- Purkey decides to pay the "invalid" a visit and do a little race-baiting to get a literal rise out of Harry. 

It works. But it also all works out: Sandy is shown up to be the gold-digger she is, Gingrich makes lemonade out of the lemons that are the pieces of a torn-up settlement check, and Hinkle helps his friend get back on track.

No one is better than Walter Matthau at fast-talking shysterism. During the making of this film, Matthau had a heart attack and all production stopped while he recovered. During said recovery, Matthau lost 30 pounds and had to wear a heavy coat for the remainder of the shooting for continuity's sake. The Fortune Cookie was also the first time Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon were teamed up in a film, and that turned out pretty well.

I feel sorriest for Lurene Tuttle, who plays Hinkle's mother in this film, because her dialog consists mostly of screams and sobs. She's very good at it, but it's a waste of some good potential mom acting.

The Fortune Cookie is a charming movie about the problems of cheating -- on your family, your friends, and the system. It's also ahead of its time in the treatment of friendship between a white guy and  black guy without it being really about that. Refreshing and subtly revolutionary for a very racially charged time. But make sure you remember where you filed the DVD or you'll have to watch it streaming with Polish subtitles on YouTube.

This post is my (late) contribution to The Billy Wilder Blogathon, hosted by Outspoken & Freckled and Once Upon a Screen.

Please check out all the other bloggers who managed to get their entries in on time!