Where to watch The Apartment (1960)

Trivia & production notes

• The Apartment was Billy Wilder's second collaboration with Jack Lemmon, following their success with Some Like It Hot in 1959.
• Paul Douglas was originally planned to play Sheldrake, but after his unexpected death, Fred MacMurray was cast in the role.
• The film's plot was partly inspired by a real Hollywood scandal in which producer Walter Wanger shot agent Jennings Lang over an affair with Wanger's wife, actress Joan Bennett, with Lang using an employee's apartment for the trysts.
• Billy Wilder based the film's concept on Noël Coward's Brief Encounter but was unable to make such a comedy about adultery in the 1940s due to Hays Code restrictions.
• Wilder improvised multiple scenes with Jack Lemmon despite his typical strict adherence to scripts, including one where Lemmon squirts nasal spray across a room and another where he strains spaghetti through the strings of a tennis racket.
• Art director Alexandre Trauner created the insurance office set using forced perspective with successively smaller people and desks, ultimately ending with children to simulate depth.
• The film's title theme, originally titled "Jealous Lover" and written by Charles Williams, first appeared in the 1949 film The Romantic Age.
• A recording of the theme by Ferrante Teicher reached number 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1960.
• Fred MacMurray was confronted on the street by angry women after the film's release, with some berating him for making a "dirty filthy movie" and one hitting him with her purse.
• Some critics called the film controversial for its depictions of infidelity, with Saturday Review critic Hollis Alpert dismissing it as "a dirty fairy tale."

Adapted from the Wikipedia article The Apartment, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.