The New Pictures

The Apartment (Mirisch; United Artists) is the funniest movie made in Hollywood since Some Like It Hot (TIME, March 23, 1959). What's more, it was made by the same two men, Producer-Director Billy Wilder and Writer I.A.L. Diamond, who made that uproarious travesty of transvestitism, and it features the same deft comedian. Jack Lemmon. There the similarities end. The earlier film was a Mack Sennett farce with boys for bathing beauties. Apartment is a comedy of men's-room humours and water-cooler politics that now and then among the belly laughs says something serious and sad about the struggle for success, about what it often does to a man, and about the horribly small world of big business.

The comedy turns on a redoubtable ironic notion: the rise of an organization man is presented as a sort of rogue's progress. The hero (Lemmon) is just another night-school diploma in the personnel files of a big insurance company until the fateful day when it dawns on him that if his own virtues are not enough, other people's vices might help. He lends his apartment to a department head who is having an affair with a telephone operator. Soon he is slipping his key to four philandering executives, and though he gets awfully tired of sitting in the park all evening, keymanship has its compensations. The hero's superiors write glowing reports on his work, and the reports soon come to the attention of the big boss (Fred MacMurray) himself. "Baxter," he confides to the hero, "as far as I'm concerned, you're executive material"--he wants the key too. Before long the hero is an assistant to the boss. Sud denly he discovers that he has outsmarted himself: the girl (Shirley MacLaine) that the boss takes to his apartment is the girl of his dreams, the girl he cannot enjoy his illgot gains without.

The point is keenly ironic, and many moviegoers will wish that Wilder and Diamond had lingered longer to drive it home. But they skip along like a couple of mischievous kids, serious about nothing but fun, much too shrewd to lecture the grownups--they might cut off a fellow's allowance. Indeed, Director Wilder in this picture establishes himself as one of the cinema's most skillful creators of comedy, low, medium or high. There is a great bit of buffoonery in which the bachelor hero uses a tennis racket as a spaghetti strainer. There is a piece of business in which the heroine, when asked how many affairs she has had, admits to three but unconsciously lifts four fingers. And there is a telephone conversation between Lover Mac-Murray and Mistress MacLaine (she has tried to commit suicide, and he couldn't care less about her condition--or more about the possible scandal) that makes a rarely profound and ignoble vignette.

Director Wilder handles his players superbly. He holds an amazingly tight rein on Actress MacLaine, which gives her performance a solidity she seldom achieves. Yet it is Actor Lemmon, surely the most sensitive and tasteful young comedian now at work in Hollywood, who really cuts the mustard and carries the show.

Wild River (20th Century-Fox). The story of the Tennessee Valley Authority is an epic in search of a poet. It has not found him in Elia Kazan, who produced and directed this picture, but it has found at least a man who can experience the elemental tensions of the tale--public against private interest, mule-team against machine society--and can extricate them from a script that smells less of the river than it does of the paste pot.

The film in fact is a crude pastiche of two novels: Scriptwriter Paul Osborn has lifted some characters and incidents from William Bradford Huie's Mud on the Stars, but much of his plot is taken from Borden Deal's Dunbar's Cove. As finally assembled, the picture tells the story of a young TVAgent (Montgomery Clift) who is ordered to turn an 80-year-old woman (Jo Van Fleet) off her land so that a big new dam can be closed, the area flooded, and a waterpower project set in motion. She refuses to budge. "I don't sell my land," she croaks fiercely, "my land that I poured my heart's blood into."

The agent tries to explain that a few individuals must suffer so that the whole region may gain: flood control, better crops, new industries, more jobs. "You don't love the land," he protests. "You love your land." She sends him packing with a proud but pathetic declaration of the frontier's faith: "I like things runnin' wild. I'm agin dams of any kind. And I ain't crawlin' to any guvmint." Evicted, she dies of a broken heart, and a new generation buries the old.

This is the mainstream of the story, and the script should have followed it through the film. Instead, it wanders aimlessly into backwaters of violence, sex, segregation and even antiSemitism. The sex develops into a love affair that, as these things go in Hollywood productions, is unusually fierce and sweet and natural. But the rough stuff is merely conventional, and the race question, in the last analysis, is begged. Kazan's direction, however, is firm--most of the leading players give creditable performances, and Lee Remick, as the back-country belle the hero falls for, is singularly touching. Most impressive of all is the wise and gentle moderation of the film's philosophy. Kazan comes down firmly on the side of eminent domain and the com monweal, but also takes time to recognize, with a kind of puzzled honesty, that what is good for the greatest number is often bad for the soul.

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