synopsis:

'The Apartment' centers around C.

C. Baxter, one of the nearly 31,000 employees at an insurance company. The company is such a behemoth that the hours of workers' shifts and their freedom to enter and exit the building must be carefully regulated so as not to overburden the elevators. Whenever possible, C.

C. squeezes into the elevator operated by Fran Kubelik, a pixie-faced charmer who appreciates C.

C.'s politeness and kind conversation almost as much as he appreciates her girlish dimples and casual attractiveness.baxter has been lending out his apartment to various suits around the office so they can conduct their extramarital dalliances without their respective Missuses ever being the wiser. In any event, these arrangements often require baxter to work two or three overtime hours each day before he can come home to an empty, available apartment. Not infrequently, we find him hunched over on the sidewalk next to his stoop waiting for one of his colleagues to exit with an invariably voluptuous, invariably insipid evening companion.

Baxter has no girlfriend and, apparently, no family. Patted on the back and called ''buddy boy'' by the executives who use him, he dreams of a better job and an office of his own. One day he even gets up his nerve and asks out one of the elevator girls, Miss Kubelik, but she stands him up at the last moment because of a crisis in her relationship with the big boss, Mr. Sheldrake. while Baxter and Miss Kubelik may indeed like each other, they are both slaves to the company's value system. He wants to be the boss' assistant, she wants to be the boss' wife, and both of them are so blinded by the concept of ''boss'' that they can't see Mr. Sheldrake for an untrustworthy rat.after a suicide attempt, kubelik hauls herself together and gives Sheldrake another chance. Like Baxter, she has not been forced into job prostitution, but chosen it. about this movie:

'the apartment', starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray, Jack Kruschen, Edie Adams, Ray Walston, David Lewis, David White and Joan Shawlee, is about as poisonous and black-hearted as major-studio comedies have ever been, and yet its status as a "comedy" has rarely if ever been challenged. The film's material is so dark that suicide, or the illusion of it, is the terrain of more than a few gags and wit-snappings.

When Billy Wilder made 'The Apartment' in 1960, ''the organization man'' was still a current term. One of the opening shots in the movie shows Baxter as one of a vast horde of wage slaves, working in a room where the desks line up in parallel rows almost to the vanishing point.