Fred MacMurray The Apartment (1960)
Fred MacMurray (1908–1991) played J.D. Sheldrake in The Apartment — the personnel director who blackmails C.C. Baxter into sole apartment access, conducts a serial affair with Fran Kubelik, and pays her off with a hundred-dollar bill on Christmas Eve. The casting was a deliberate inversion of MacMurray's contemporary image, which by 1960 was Disney comedies and the squeaky-clean television family of My Three Sons. Wilder had already used MacMurray's salesman charm against type once before, in Double Indemnity (1944).
Before The Apartment
MacMurray was born in Kankakee, Illinois, and started as a saxophone player and band singer in the 1920s. He arrived at Paramount in 1934 and became one of the studio's most reliably employed leading men, making more than seventy pictures over the next two decades. His persona was Midwestern, friendly, professional — the kind of leading man who could carry a comedy or a romance without forcing the material.
The films most associated with the pre-Double Indemnity phase are screwball comedies: Hands Across the Table (1935) opposite Carole Lombard, The Princess Comes Across (1936), Swing High, Swing Low (1937). MacMurray was a working leading man — not a star with a defined dramatic register, but a dependable presence the studio could plug into a romantic comedy or a Western.
Double Indemnity broke the pattern
In 1944, Wilder cast MacMurray as Walter Neff in Double Indemnity, against significant studio resistance and against MacMurray's own initial protests. Neff is an insurance salesman who plots and executes a murder for a married woman (Barbara Stanwyck). The performance recasts MacMurray's friendly-salesman persona as something dangerous — the salesman who can sell himself on anything, including murder.
"I told Billy I couldn't do it. I'd never played a heavy. I was a saxophone player who got lucky. He said, 'That's exactly why you're going to do it. Nobody's going to see it coming.'" — Fred MacMurray, Cinephilia & Beyond (interview reprint)
Double Indemnity is now considered one of the greatest film noirs ever made and one of the great American screen performances. It is also the template for what Wilder would do with MacMurray sixteen years later.
Why Wilder wanted him for Sheldrake
By 1960, MacMurray's image had drifted in a different direction. The Disney comedies — The Shaggy Dog (1959), The Absent-Minded Professor (1961), Son of Flubber (1963) — had made him a wholesome family-film leading man. My Three Sons, which premiered the same year as The Apartment, was the consolidation of that image: the widowed father raising three boys with patience and warmth.
Wilder cast Sheldrake against this image with the same calculation he had used in 1944. Audiences would forgive MacMurray almost anything because he looked and sounded like the man you wanted as a neighbor. That forgiveness is exactly what Sheldrake exploits — both in-universe (his employees, his wife, Fran) and meta-textually (the audience's instinct to read MacMurray as a good guy).
"Billy Wilder cast Fred MacMurray as the heel because he knew that audiences would forgive MacMurray almost anything. That's what made him terrifying." — Glenn Kenny, The New York Times (2015) (paywalled, citation only)
The performance is built on small moments of charm deployed in service of cruelty. Sheldrake takes a phone call from his wife in Baxter's office, lying about Music Man tickets while offering them to Baxter; he pivots smoothly from threat to reward when he tells the Fowler-the-bookie story; he gives Fran a hundred-dollar bill as a Christmas present and checks his watch as he leaves. MacMurray plays each beat with the same easy warmth he had brought to twenty years of romantic comedies, which is what makes them devastating.
The hate mail problem
MacMurray reportedly received hate mail from My Three Sons viewers after The Apartment opened. Some of the letters demanded he stop ruining children's faith in fathers. The role had landed too well; the audience's confusion about which MacMurray was the real one was the precise effect Wilder had engineered.
"Fred got letters that said, 'How dare you do this to us.' And that was exactly what we wanted. The country wanted to think Fred MacMurray was Steve Douglas from My Three Sons. We wanted to remind them that Fred MacMurray was also Walter Neff." — I.A.L. Diamond, American Film Institute (1986)
After The Apartment
MacMurray went back to the Disney comedies and My Three Sons. The series ran twelve seasons, ending in 1972; he never again took a role with the moral darkness of Sheldrake or Walter Neff. The two performances against type — both for Wilder, separated by sixteen years — remain his most discussed work.
He retired from acting in 1978 and died in 1991. The Apartment and Double Indemnity are the films most consistently cited in his obituaries; the Disney pictures and My Three Sons are mentioned but not framed as the work that mattered most.
"The two MacMurray performances that survive are both Wilder. Without Wilder, MacMurray would be remembered as a pleasant 1940s second-tier leading man and a wholesome 1960s sitcom dad. With Wilder, he is one of the great screen heels." — David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (2014) (book, not available online)