Jack Lemmon The Apartment (1960)

Jack Lemmon (1925–2001) played C.C. Baxter in The Apartment — the role that fixed his screen persona for the rest of his career and earned him the second of his eight Academy Award nominations. He had won Best Supporting Actor for Mister Roberts (1955) and would go on to win Best Actor for Save the Tiger (1973). Across the seven films he made with Wilder, Lemmon became the actor through whom Wilder's late-career view of American manhood was filtered.

Before The Apartment

Lemmon was born John Uhler Lemmon III in Newton, Massachusetts. He attended Phillips Academy and Harvard, served in the Navy during World War II, and arrived in Hollywood after a stint in television and on Broadway. His early films were programmers — It Should Happen to You (1954), Three for the Show (1955) — but Mister Roberts (1955) made him a star and a Best Supporting Actor Oscar winner at thirty.

By the time he reached The Apartment, Lemmon had just made his first picture for Wilder: Some Like It Hot (1959). The collaboration would become one of the defining director-actor partnerships in American film. Wilder cast Lemmon in seven films:

  • Some Like It Hot (1959) — Jerry / Daphne
  • The Apartment (1960) — C.C. Baxter
  • Irma la Douce (1963) — Nestor / Lord X
  • The Fortune Cookie (1966) — Harry Hinkle
  • Avanti! (1972) — Wendell Armbruster
  • The Front Page (1974) — Hildy Johnson
  • Buddy Buddy (1981) — Victor Clooney

The Some Like It Hot / Apartment / Irma la Douce sequence is widely considered Wilder's peak as a director and Lemmon's peak as a leading man.

Why Wilder wrote Baxter for him

Wilder wrote the role specifically for Lemmon. The qualities he wanted — verbal speed, physical pliability, a comic instrument that could reach pathos without warning — were the qualities Lemmon had brought to Jerry/Daphne in Some Like It Hot. The difference was that Baxter is alone in almost every scene where the comedy lives. Lemmon plays the spaghetti-with-tennis-racket sequence, the cold-on-the-stoop sequence, and the drunken Christmas Eve pickup essentially as solo work.

"Jack could do anything. He could play comedy and tragedy in the same line, the same look. The Apartment asked him to be funny and heartbroken at once, and he did it better than anyone." — Billy Wilder, American Film Institute (1986)

Lemmon's specific gift in The Apartment is that he never plays Baxter as the victim of the schedule. He plays him as a man who has chosen this — chosen to be useful, chosen the corporate suffix grammar, chosen the sleeping-bag-in-Central-Park alternative to standing up to Mr. Kirkeby. The performance makes the moral collapse legible because the moral compromise was always visible.

"Lemmon's Baxter is the great American performance about complicity. He is not innocent at the start of the film. He is a willing accomplice in his own erasure, and what makes the performance devastating is that we see him knowing it the whole time." — David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (2014) (book, not available online)

The Lemmon-MacMurray-MacLaine triangle

The casting choices around Lemmon shaped the performance. Fred MacMurray as Sheldrake plays the executive heel with a salesman's warmth, which works against Lemmon's ingratiating decency — they read as the same kind of man, ten years apart on the same career ladder, with one terrifying difference. Shirley MacLaine as Fran provides the relational warmth that Baxter cannot give himself; her gin rummy and his fruitcake become their private language. See Cast and Characters (The Apartment).

What Lemmon said about the role

In a 1986 American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award tribute to Wilder, Lemmon spoke about the experience of shooting The Apartment:

"Billy and Iz wrote a script that you didn't have to act — you just had to play it. Every line was already doing the work." — Jack Lemmon, American Film Institute (1986)

Lemmon reportedly improvised one of the most quoted moments — the spaghetti-strained-through-a-tennis-racket bit — during rehearsal, and Wilder kept it.

After The Apartment

Lemmon's post-Apartment career divided into three modes. With Wilder, he continued the satirical mode. With Walter Matthau, he became one half of one of the great American screen comedy duos — The Fortune Cookie (1966), The Odd Couple (1968), The Front Page (1974), Grumpy Old Men (1993), and Out to Sea (1997). And he developed a serious dramatic mode that produced Days of Wine and Roses (1962), Save the Tiger (1973, his second Oscar), The China Syndrome (1979), Missing (1982, Cannes Best Actor), and Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) — for which he won the National Board of Review's Best Actor award playing Shelley "The Machine" Levene.

The Levene of Glengarry is a haunted descendant of C.C. Baxter — a salesman who has been useful too long, whose career arc has come to its terminal humiliation, and who can no longer make the system pay him for his cooperation.

Awards and legacy

Lemmon was nominated for eight Academy Awards (winning two), eleven Golden Globes (winning four), and received the AFI Lifetime Achievement Award in 1988. He died in 2001 at seventy-six. His son Chris Lemmon, also an actor, has written and performed extensively about his father's career.

The American Film Institute placed Lemmon at #22 on its 100 Years . . . 100 Stars list in 1999. (afi.com)

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