It was probably my bad phrasing — or maybe I can blame it on the root canal — but two of my saner friends wrote to say, in effect, "How can you say that The Apartment is not a love story?" I said explicitly that it was but folks seemed to think I was arguing against that notion.
My point was that Mssrs. Wilder and Diamond chose to end their tale before Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine) had shown any real feelings for C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon). Wilder always said that he liked to leave things to the audience to project, and I suppose that's what he was doing here…but he was also choosing what to leave to our imaginations and what to show us, and he often showed us the cynicism, the rotten motives, and left us to fill in the nice redemptions, if any, that might have occurred after "The End." Fran is a character who has made a mess of her own life, falling for a man like Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray) who shows her whatever absolute minimum of affection is necessary to get her into bed for a quickie. Only when his marriage goes kablooey does he decide he's going to marry her and even that, he manages to make feel like some sort of grudging accommodation. Still, she's ready to marry the bastard. What changes her? Learning that Baxter really cares about her. That's when it suddenly dawns on the lady that the sweet, puppy-faced guy who fawned over her and nursed her really loves her.
And, you know, I buy all that. People do act that way, and I don't think it's inhumanly out of character for Fran to suddenly say to herself, "What the hell am I doing with this jerk Sheldrake when Baxter really cares about me?" So she rushes to him and, apart from a false alarm when she momentarily fears he's offed himself, she shows him no passion, no warmth, no nothing. She jokes about them getting married but doesn't act like she means it any more than when she was talking about being in love with ol' J.D. Sheldrake. Maybe less.
Still, I like the way The Apartment ends. I think that's one of the film's strengths. I just think that, as he often did — though not always — Wilder chose a story where an upbeat romance would have gotten in the way. These are not romantic people and for them to suddenly become healthy lovers would have been characterization whiplash. How they come together is valid and very, very human and I think much of what made Billy Wilder unique is that he didn't make a dive for the quick happy ending. Was this because, in his skeptical way, he rarely saw them in life? Or was it a crafty appraisal and respect for his audience's sensibilities? Either way, it sure made for some great movies.