5. Corporate executives have never needed to borrow shabby apartments for an office affair. That's what hotels and cash are for.
4. Nor do executives openly expose themselves as cads and philanderers to their underlings.
3. Far from being a hero, the tenant (Jack Lemmon) is an ambitious toady, vacating his apartment whenever his bedroom is needed by his boss-- correction, bosses, plural, because five(!) executives use his apartment. If he charged them for it, he'd still be despicable, but at least he wouldn't be a schnook.
2. The girl (Shirley MacLaine) is simultaneously tough-talking and so vulnerable that she becomes suicidal when her predatory boss (Fred Macmurray) treats her like a whore. She's no victim. She has an affair with a married man. He doesn't respect her. Big surprise.
1. All these things add up to Billy Wilder and screenwriter I. A. L. Diamond trying to have it both ways-- comic and tragic. They convinced most of the audience (and the Academy) that Lemmon and Maclaine's characters are basically decent folk in an amoral world, but I'm not buying it. However much Wilder/Diamond try to manipulate the plot, the actions of those two characters are as amoral and selfish as any people in the film. The happy ending is appropriate, of course, because two perfectly matched chumps have found each other.
4. Nor do executives openly expose themselves as cads and philanderers to their underlings.
3. Far from being a hero, the tenant (Jack Lemmon) is an ambitious toady, vacating his apartment whenever his bedroom is needed by his boss-- correction, bosses, plural, because five(!) executives use his apartment. If he charged them for it, he'd still be despicable, but at least he wouldn't be a schnook.
2. The girl (Shirley MacLaine) is simultaneously tough-talking and so vulnerable that she becomes suicidal when her predatory boss (Fred Macmurray) treats her like a whore. She's no victim. She has an affair with a married man. He doesn't respect her. Big surprise.
1. All these things add up to Billy Wilder and screenwriter I. A. L. Diamond trying to have it both ways-- comic and tragic. They convinced most of the audience (and the Academy) that Lemmon and Maclaine's characters are basically decent folk in an amoral world, but I'm not buying it. However much Wilder/Diamond try to manipulate the plot, the actions of those two characters are as amoral and selfish as any people in the film. The happy ending is appropriate, of course, because two perfectly matched chumps have found each other.