L'appartamento

James Schamus

Somewhere between the inevitable “It’s a Wonderful Life” and the creepily campy “Ernest Saves Christmas” there is a perfect holiday movie for the whole family — one that will keep both the smirk on your teenager’s face and the tears flowing from your in-laws’ eyes. That movie is Billy Wilder’s 1960 masterpiece, “The Apartment.” Not a classic Christmas movie, you say? Look again. The action takes place primarily from Christmas Eve to New Year’s Eve, with moments that sum up to perfection the Christmas spirit according to Wilder: the despicable Sheldrake (played with greedy zest by Fred MacMurray), handing his downtrodden mistress, Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), her present, a crisp $100 bill; the prolonged Christmas Eve-to-Christmas Day sequence, in which Buddy Baxter (Jack Lemmon, above) finds her, overdosed on sleeping pills, at his apartment and, with the help of his next-door neighbor, force-feeds her coffee and slaps her repeatedly to keep her from collapse; and, most memorably, Sheldrake on the phone in his White Plains house, his children playing with their new toys around the Christmas tree in the background as he heartlessly hears the news of his mistress’s suicide attempt. [...]

di James Schamus, articolo completo (1871 caratteri spazi inclusi) su The New York Times