Billy Wilder’s classic romantic comedy turns 60 later this year and remains as funny and poignant as ever.

Following the success of ‘Some Like It Hot’ (1959), Wilder and screenwriting partner I.A.L. Diamond were keen to work with Jack Lemmon again and cast the actor in the lead role of their forthcoming production ‘The Apartment’.

Wilder had the idea for the story many years earlier after seeing David Leans ‘Brief Encounter’ (1945) in which two lovers use the apartment of an acquaintance to conduct an extramarital affair. In the directors own words, he wondered “What about the poor schnook who has to crawl into the still warm bed of the lovers?”.

The poor schnook here is C.C. “Bud” Baxter (Jack Lemmon), working as an insurance clerk in a New York high-rise, he’s a small cog in a large machine. Baxter is ambitious though and sees a chance to climb the corporate ladder by allowing four married company executives to take turns using his Upper West Side apartment for their duplicitous liaisons in exchange for glowing reports and promises of promotion.

When personnel director Jeff D. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray) gets wind of the arrangement, far from reprimanding the employee for unprofessional behaviour, he informs him he’s been promoted and demands use of the apartment himself. “Buddy Boy” Baxter agrees, unaware that it is Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacClaine), a company elevator girl he’s become smitten with, that Sheldrake will be meeting in the apartment later that night. Full of empty promises of divorcing his wife, Sheldrake rushes home to spend the Christmas and New Year holidays with his family, leaving a despairing Fran alone in a strange apartment where she finds a bottle of Baxter’s sleeping pills.

The scene is set for Baxter to avert a tragedy and for true love to find a way.

Only a few years earlier, Wilder would almost certainly have struggled to get a film as morally ambiguous as ‘The Apartment’ past the strict Hays Motion Picture Production code but the start of the decade saw a relaxation in censorship as a new era of permissiveness began to permeate American culture.

Shot in widescreen black and white, Joseph LaShelle’s cinematography and the skill in which Wilder combines mood and tone are key to the success of ‘The Apartment’. At times uplifting and romantic but never sentimental as well as downbeat and dark but not without hope.

At the 33rd Academy Awards ‘The Apartment’ received ten nominations, winning five including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay. Lemmon and MacClaine also picked up the Best Actor and Best Actress awards at the Golden Globes.

‘The Apartment’ is, quite simply, one of the best films ever made and that, as C.C. Baxter would say, is the way it crumbles...cookie-wise.