Posted on January 4, 2019 at 10:18 pm
This fascinating video essay shows us what the Oscar-winning Billy Wilder film “The Apartment” would look like without the actors, revealing the role that the setting plays in telling the story. After all, that is the name of the film.
Posted on January 5, 2016 at 3:40 pm
Turner Classic Movies is leading off 2016 with a great choice for their star of the month: Fred MacMurray. I grew up watching him as the genial single dad in “My Three Sons,” and the inventor of flubber (flying rubber) in “The Absent-Minded Professor.” It was only when I was a teenager that I discovered he was outstanding in films that included dark comedy (the fiendish boss in “The Apartment”), light romantic comedy (“Take a Letter, Darling”), westerns (“The Trail of the Lonesome Pine”), musicals (“Where Do We Go From Here?”), Disney family movies (“The Shaggy Dog”), touching love stories (“Remember the Night”), and the film noir classic, “Double Indemnity.”
MacMurray worked with top directors including Edward Dmytryk (“The Caine Mutiny”), George Stevens (“Alice Adams”), Mitchell Leisen (“No Time for Love”), Billy Wilder (“The Apartment”) and Preston Sturges (“Remember the Night”) and actors Barbara Stanwyck, Humphrey Bogart, Marlene Dietrich and, in seven films, Claudette Colbert, beginning with “The Gilded Lily” (1935). He co-starred with Katharine Hepburn in “Alice Adams” (1935), with Joan Crawford in “Above Suspicion” (1943), and with Carole Lombard in four films: “Hands Across the Table” (1935), “The Princess Comes Across” (1936), “Swing High, Swing Low” (1937), and “True Confession” (1937). Here we see him go from insurance salesman to murder accomplice because Barbara Stanwyck is so impossible to resist. “I wonder if you wonder.”
On Wednesdays this month, TCM will show some of his best films, including “Double Indemnity,” “Too Many Husbands,” “Remember the Night,” “Woman’s World,” and “Callaway Went Thataway,” plus one of my favorite goofy movies, “Kisses for My President,” where he plays the husband of the first woman President.
Posted on December 30, 2012 at 3:57 pm
Billy Wilder’s bittersweet masterpiece “The Apartment” is a Best Picture Oscar winner about a man in a soulless desk job who loans out his apartment to executives for assignations in order to get promoted. Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine star.
Posted on December 26, 2011 at 6:24 pm
Rotten Tomatoes has a list of New Year’s Movies. Garry Marshall’s new all-star New Year’s Eve is by no means a classic, but it is sure to become an annual tradition. Here is my list of New Year’s Eve favorites.
When Harry Met Sally…is a sweet, funny love story starring Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal as two people who took a very long time to realize they were meant for each other. A series of New Year’s Eves punctuate their developing relationship.
Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn star in Holiday
The Apartment
The pilot episode of Futurama
Posted on July 6, 2011 at 9:00 am
This week’s release of “Horrible Bosses” made me think of some of the other terrible bosses in movies. Here are some of the bosses we love to hate on screen. Who am I leaving out? And which movie boss is most like your all-time worst boss?
The all-time bad movie boss champ has to be Kevin Spacey, who adds to his list by appearing in “Horrible Bosses” as a cruel, manipulative, and paranoid company president. I’m going to limit him to two on this list, but could choose others as well.
1. Kevin Spacey in Glengarry Glen Ross
2. Kevin Spacey in Swimming With Sharks
3. Gary Cole in Office Space
4. Sandra Bullock in The Proposal Everyone is terrified of this greyhound-slim and rattlesnake-mean editor, who can make the slightest error into a career-killer.
5. Fred MacMurray in The Apartment
6. Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl
7. Dabney Coleman in 9 to 5
8. Alistair Sim in A Christmas Carol
9. Charles Laughton in Mutiny on the Bounty
10. Denzel Washington in Training Day
Dishonorable mention: Paul Giamatti as Howard Stern’s boss in “Private Parts,” Meryl Streep in “The Devil Wears Prada,” Laura Linney in “The Nanny Diaries,” and Tom Cruise in “Tropic Thunder”
Many thanks to David Apatoff and Christopher Orr for sharing their suggestions.
