muckefuck | Jack Lemmon, ultimate Nice Guy®

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Jack Lemmon, ultimate Nice Guy®

As per usual,

monshu and I had several invitations for Oscar Parties tonight and, as per usual, we turned them down in favour of a quiet night at home. Neither of us really has the stomach for the bloated mishegoss the Academy Awards have become; we haven't seen any of the nominated films--we don't even know who half the young stars are any more--and fashion-snarking just isn't our bag. Instead, we popped in a past award-winner: Best Picture 1960 The Apartment, directed by Billy Wilder (Best Director) and starring Jack Lemmon (who lost out to Burt Lancaster) and Shirley Maclaine (who lost out to Elizabeth Taylor).

OH. MY. GOD. That just might be the creepiest rom-com I've ever seen. Lemmon stalks a girl at work (using his position to access and memorise her personal records), keeps her locked and isolated in his apartment over Christmas after a suicide attempt (forbidding her to contact her worried family), and then unilaterally decides he's going to "take her off the hands" of her current paramour. And he's the good guy. What he is is a Nice Guy of the first order. (Quoth the Old Man: "I never realised what a slimy character he is.") With these kinds of role models, it's no wonder so many men have difficulty distinguishing "romance" from criminal activity.

Dinner was an aggressively simple preparation of the smoked pork butt I brought back from Paulina Meat Market on Monday. In fact, it was essentially identical to traditional Irish bacon and cabbage, despite the "Eastern European" pedigree of the recipe the GWO used. The only difference I noted was the addition of some brown sugar to the boiling liquid. Apparently, there's a linked recipe that uses this for a sweet sauerkraut soup, which attracted his eye since we've still got three pounds of kraut left over from my stab at dinner.

I was dubious when I saw the head of white cabbage, since I remember absolutely loathing boiled cabbage as a child. I don't know if it's a matter of my taste buds weakening, the effect of the added sugar, or what, but I found it all very palatable. Enough to consider having it again--provided we can once again get our hands on a nice hunk of smoked meat. A cheaper cut would have too much brine, making for a saltier broth that wouldn't be much use afterwards.

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I would have described the Oscars (concept) very much more scathingly than you have here; your Oscar night methodology sound very much like ours, except we didn't watch a movie.

Remind me: did we get round to Country Style Hungarian restaurant when you came visiting in Toronto? I recall we went to Kaplansky's for corned beef, but I don't remember about Country Style:

We [exclusive] did, but not we [inclusive]. If

paulintoronto hadn't've shown up as well, we'd never have gotten through the platter pictured above.

Jack Lemmon is great!
He had a similar creep factor in 'Days of Wine and Roses' – back in the days before sexual harrasment became inappropriate at work.
I'm curious to check out 'The Apartment'... I've never seen it before.

I've never found Shirley Maclaine so appealing before. It made me wish she had better options.

I like "The Apartment" a lot, but it's been a while and I mostly remember the claustropobic, constrained choices of Maclaine's character. Do you think Lemmon's character's creepiness is intentional, or is the film taking his part the way romantic comedies so often do?

Clearly you're encouraged to identify and sympathise with him. At first, he's presented as a poor honest zhlub being taken advantage of by selfish hectoring executives. It's only when MacMurray calls him into his office that you begin to realise what a slimy little schemer he really is.

But Wilder did a lot of noir as well, and I find it likely that he had some notion of the dark side to Mr Baxter. It would be interesting to see what he had to say about the film in interviews.

While there are some missing pages in the Google Books preview, it looks like Wilder really thought of Baxter as sympathetic, someone who stepped up when the moment came to be heroic. He's at least willing to go along with the idea that the theme is "Be a mensch" (even if he prefers "When you're in love with a married man, don't wear mascara."). He doesn't think they'll last, but primarily because of money friction (what with him and likely her being out of a job).

Aside: he also reports that Fred MacMurray was attacked on the street by a former fan who claimed that he'd ruined "My Three Sons" for her by acting in such a filthy movie. (Maybe she'd missed Double Indemnity?)

The other thing I find odd about the film is the desirability of the apartment itself. After all, New York City in 1960 must've had hundreds of hotels where "Mr and Mrs Smith" could check into for an hour or two with no questions asked. Certainly, it's nice to pocket the $5 (or whatever it was in 1960s play money), but it's never even mentioned as an alternative to be dismissed except at the very end, where MacMurray points out the impossibility of getting a hotel room on New Year's Eve. Is it just that "nice girls" in 1960 simply didn't go to motels with married men, but would go to a man's apartment? At least one of the philanderers lies and calls it his mother's place, but another is quite upfront about having borrowed from "some zhlub".

According to Wilder, they took the initial idea from an incident where a Hollywood agent was shot by a jealous husband, and it came out he'd been using a subordinate's place for his assignations. So it wasn't a New York thing per se, at least in its genesis.

I get the impression that Wilder saw it as largely a means of expressing power: being able to lean on people like that as a perk of success. (Why pay the dry cleaners to deliver your laundry if you can just have your secretary pick it up on her lunch hour?) As you note, it has the advantage of looking less tawdry-- no furtive checking into a hotel as "Mr. and Mrs. Smith", and if someone from the office or the bridge club sees you there are more options for plausible deniability. But I at least suspect that was secondary to the "I'm a big shot, and you can tell because some lesser schlub has to clear out of his apartment for me" aspect of it.

Yes! That movie is so creepy. And, as you say, damaging in just that Nice Guy way where his status as a decent person is entirely defined around the sincerity of his internal processes, with literally no relation to the impact of his actions on the object of his affections.

It's an uber-creepy movie and Lemmon was a master at that sort of sort of niceness.
Seven Year Itch is also really uncomfortable watching. Funny how we don't seem to make those sorts of films about predation any more (or maybe I'm just not watching them). I don't suppose it's gone away.

I can't think of another actor who could pull off that kind of manic smothering "helpfulness" without simply coming across as unhinged. I tried to search for reviews which talked about the dark side of this picture but even adding "creepy" or "creepy guy" to the search fails to turn up anything significant. In fact, I found a recent review by a feminist cultural critic calling it her favourite movie without evening so much as mentioning the problematic aspects. There's something about that guy's appeal that just seems to circumvent the ordinary ability to spot red flags.

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