The Apartment

After reading The Apartment, I must say that I was quite impressed. All considered it was a very well written, and well developed plot. A few things stuck out more than others especially. For one I found the characters, and their subsequent development, extremely gripping. Ms. Kubelik I found especially well developed. She was confused, a tad naive, just a tad, a very sympathetic individual, while at the same time, completely ridiculous for doing the things she did.
Baxtor worked as a sympathetic and highly relateable hero, that few in modern cinema copy. He at first seems like a total lifeless pushover, but as you become familiar with him and get to fully know him, you lean that he is in fact a very unique and quick person.
Mr. Shelden I found a little less significant as the other two. It was my opinion that at times his character became the womanizing elder boss that every down on his luck type character has. If he had had some more interesting quirks or perspectives about his nature, than maybe I wouldn't have ground to complain.
In a similar note I found Mrs. Olson informing his wife a tad bit of an abrupt and little bit trite way of dealing with that. Maybe I was hoping it would have been another unexpected twist like the rest of the script.
And it was exactly this, that made reading The Apartment such a great read. Your guessing from the start whats gonna lead to what, and finding out that Shelden was seeing Ms. Kubelik was the absolute icing on the cake of an already delicious dessert. The coincidences may be criticized by some, but apart from Mrs. Olson, I found them all not just believable and necessary, but great additions to the plot. The building of messes that Baxtor gets himself into, especially all his neighbors believing he is a womanizing bastard, like so many of his co-workers, is absolutely fantastic.
As I said earlier, the relateability of the movie is very high. Baxtor is all of us guys that are not the jerks stealing the girls, and might I say, thats a very large contingency of us. It took corporate America, back then, but still highly relative today, and made a mockery of it, with dignity ultimately, winning out.

-Matthew Ballinger

Discussion Questions
1. Did you like or dislike a large portion of the dialogue in the script, aka did you think it was funny and touchy, or impersonal and corny.

2. Did you think the ending was satisfying, or do you believe it ended a bit abruptly and cheaply?