“Shut up and deal…”


Welcome to another edition of Wednesday Night at the Movies. Sorry about the mess. I’ve been sick in bed all day with a cold, an how appropriate is that, irony-wise? At any rate, I haven’t had time to clean the apartment and get things ready for company. Let’s just get this thread started and, if you don’t mind, I’ll straighten up and put the last touches on this post, writerly-wise.

“I love you, Miss Kubelik. You hear what I said? I absolutely adore you.”

“Shut up and deal?”

The most romantic exchange in the most romantic movie ever made, love story-wise. In my opinion. At any rate, it’s the only romantic comedy that breaks my heart and makes me happy every time I watch. Billy Wilder’s 1960 classic, The Apartment.

What’s funny is that Billy Wilder’s 1960 classic, The Apartment, isn’t about a boy and girl meeting and falling in love. It’s about two people who are already in love. Not just in love. They’re married. They just don’t know it yet. Fran Kubelik, elevator operator, and C.C. Baxter, 19th floor, ordinary policy division, accounting department, Section W, Desk 861, three years, ten months on the job, taking home $94.70 a week, have a married couple’s morning conversation the first time we see them together on Miss Kubelik’s elevator. Their conversation is a mixture of small talk and exchanges of unimportant news and information that only matters to either of them because the other one’s saying it and hearing it.

The next time they’re together she’s worrying about his cold and fussing over the way he’s dressed for a meeting with the boss and he’s responding in a that foolish way some men have of being with their wives, playing at being a big shot while giving himself over to her tender loving care like a little boy. It looks like a pretty good marriage. C.C.’s got some growing up to do still. He needs to learn that it’s not enough for him to be interested in her. He has to make her as much an object of his care as she’s made him an object of hers. She has to learn some things too, mainly that what she’s doing with him and what she’s getting from him is love and that she’s been mistaking being the object of a man’s desire for being the object of his care, but that, we figure, is what the movie’s going to be about, how they learn what they need to learn. And so it is.

Which is why it’s perfect that the last time we see them together she’s deflecting his attempts to be romantic in order to make him be her husband—that is the last time we see them together they are doing nothing more than sitting home together to play cards.

People sometimes talk about “chemistry,” that spark between stars of movie, and what causes it or why it’s missing. Is it just good acting? The result of the stars liking each other? An accident? Or is it really chemical? What’s not mentioned as much is the chemistry between two characters. If the characters really have no reason to be talking to each other, the stars have nothing to act together. Then there is nothing to put on screen but what exists between the actors. Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine have enough of that first sort of chemistry, although I wouldn’t say they burn up the screen. But Fran Kubilek and C.C. Baxter have the second sort. The script by Billy Wilder and I.A. Diamond gives the two of them nothing but reasons to talk to each other. In fact, when Miss Kubilek isn’t around, Baxter hardly has any reason to talk at all, which is fine because he’s played by Jack Lemmon who is one of the funniest silent film comics since Buster Keaton.

It’s amazing how much screen time director Billy Wilder gave over to long scenes of Lemmon doing little and saying less. He just lets the camera sit still and watch Lemmon move.

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September 25th, 2008
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