The Apartment (1960)

USA 125m, B&W
Director: Billy Wilder; Cast: Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray, Jack Kruschen

C. C. Baxter is an unmarried clerk working for a large New York insurance firm who is looking to advance his placement in the company by lending his apartment to the managers in his department for their extramarital affairs. Things get complicated when he realizes that his “girl” Fran is his Director’s mistress, and that she has been taken to his apartment by another man. The Apartment is mainly a comedic love story set in a stereotypical 1960s male-dominated workplace. Now considered unconscionable in the North American workplace, this scenario has been employed in the retro-1960s television series Mad Men, for which the Apartment seems to have been inspiration (Klaus Ming June 2010).