As The Apartment returns to the screen at the Théâtre des Variétés on Tuesday, December 16, 2025, at 7 p.m., as part of the “American Comedy” cycle presented by the Institut Audiovisuel de Monaco, the 1959 classic by Billy Wilder and his writing partner I.A.L. Diamond once again demonstrates its enduring sharpness. Filmed in black and white and running 125 minutes, the picture stars Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine and Fred MacMurray - actors who embody with unsettling precision the everyday compromises that shape corporate America.
The story, deceptively simple, exposes a broader social truth. Bud Baxter, one of countless employees in a vast insurance company, lends his apartment to his superiors, who use it as their private love nest in exchange for vague promises of advancement. When the all-powerful personnel director Jeff D. Sheldrake demands the key for himself, the gears of a system built on convenience, coercion and the illusion of success begin to show. As Gilles Colpart observes, “everything is bought and everything is sold” - and for the first time in Wilder’s career, this mercantilism reaches into the realm of love, threatening it not metaphorically but concretely.
This “curious Christmas tale,” as Colpart describes it, extends themes Wilder explored in Ace in the Hole and Stalag 17, yet pushes further: the corruption no longer touches only ideals or morality, it invades the intimate space between two people. Through Baxter and Fran Kubelik, Wilder exposes the fissure between appearances and truth - an enduring duality that defines his work.
Born in 1906 and passing in 2002, Wilder remains one of American cinema’s most versatile and incisive voices, mastering film noir (Double Indemnity), psychological drama (The Lost Weekend) and romantic comedy (Sabrina). Unlike Frank Capra, who shows people as they ought to be, Wilder shows them as they are - a stance that aligns him at times with the Italian comedies of Risi or Comencini. From Some Like It Hot to Avanti!, this clear-eyed vision fuels the ferocious humor of his films.
The screening of The Apartment thus stands as a tribute to a filmmaker who understood that every ordinary door, once opened, reveals a far larger truth about America and its contradictions.
Photo credits: Institut Audiovisuel de Monaco