What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1960

The Year: 1960

What the Nominees Were: The Alamo, The Apartment, Elmer Gantry, Sons and Lovers, The Sundowners 

Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: In terms of American films, the two giants in the room here are Psycho and Spartacus. Other great American films include The Magnificent Seven and Comanche Station. Overseas was an embarrassment of riches as well, with Breathless, La Dolce Vita, Shoot the Piano Player and Peeping Tom.

What Should’ve Won and Did Win: The Apartment
How Hard Was the Decision: Very hard. Psycho is obviously a great film, and Spartacus is easily the best of the sword-and-sandal epics. Either of them could have been a shoe-in most other years, but I just couldn’t take away The Apartment’s win.

Director: Billy Wilder
Writers: Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond
Stars: Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray, Ray Walston, Edie Adams

The Story: A nebbish named C. C. Baxter lets higher-ups at his insurance company use his apartment to sleep with their mistresses. His boss finds out and demands it stop …because he wants exclusive use of this privilege for himself. It turns out the boss’s mistress is the elevator operator Baxter has a crush on, Miss Kubelik. When the boss jilts her, she attempts suicide in Baxter’s apartment, and he has to nurse her back to health.

Any Other Nominations or Wins: It won Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Art Direction and Editing. It lost Cinematography, Sound, Actor, Actress, and Supporting Actor for Jack Kruschen, who played the doctor next door.
How It Won: One can understand why Psycho wasn’t nominated (it may have come from an acclaimed director, but it was still a lurid low-budget horror shocker) but Spartacus would seem like a lock for a nomination and win. Maybe the Academy was prejudiced against it because it hired a blacklisted screenwriter? With that out of the way, there was really no competition for this stellar comedy-drama.

Why It Won:

1. Why was this the first comedy to win best picture? I have postulated in the past that the fundamental difference between literature and entertainment is that literature is about unintended consequences and entertainment is about intended consequences. If that definition holds, then this movie is obviously literature, because every action leads to a delightful spiral of consequences nobody foresaw or wanted, each an ironic reversal of anybody’s intentions. The movie ends with both Baxter and Kubelik getting exactly the happy endings they were promised by the supposed bad guy (who leaves his wife for Kubelik and promotes Baxter) …only to realize they never wanted them.
   
2. If Baxter was told to “be a mensch” by someone who fully understands his situation, it would just be good advice and much less interesting. But coming from a man who mistakenly thinks he’s much more of a heel than he is, at a time when Baxter is ironically doing the mostly right thing, it hits so much harder.
   
3. Miss Kubelik’s broken hand mirror changes hands several times, and of course so does Baxter’s key, and each one gives off a big bang every time it’s exchanged. The shot of Baxter seeing his reflection in the broken mirror and realizing what that means (that she’s his boss’s mistress) is one of the most heartbreaking shots in cinema.
   
4. Imagine making Some Like It Hot and then turning out The Apartment just one year later. We have some talented directors working today, but none who can work this fast in the current system. Just think of all the great films we’re losing out on!
5. We started this whole project by looking at The Crowd from 1928. This movie’s opening shot is copied from that movie, surely intentionally, and this too is an examination of an average American chewed up by the American Dream. My father once asked me what the point of homage shots are. Don’t they just take you out of the film? I said that the sort of people like me who recognize homage shots are never fully “in” a film, and such shots are a delightful shout-out to the fact that this film is in a certain tradition.
   

Ah, 1960: The ham that induces madness