Not "Apartment." Two singles met at a new-fangled apartment party in New York. He is a depressing Nebraska lawyer, Jerry, who is agonizingly divorcing from his past while trying to grope for his future. And she is a goofy dancer and hoodie Gittel, unable to make money, suffering from ulcers and (sometimes) ready to put into her bed the boy she likes. And Jerry's kind of a first bedtime fit, but the Nebraska guy turned out to be a grated pepper who needed little more than a one-off hookup. And Gittel is not alien to romantic feelings.
This production by Robert Wise was shot in the format of fashionable in the late 50s and early 60s youth and social films about the search for pure love in a big city, in which it is very easy to feel loneliness. It was in this style that the paintings were staged, which received in 1956 and 1961 the main prizes of the Academy - "Marty" by Delbert Mann and "Apartment" by Billy Wilder. However, both "Marty" and "Apartment" is the aerobatics of this format of cinema. Wise, however, only at the beginning outlined some claims to good staging, in particular, initially bribed very successful dialogues, such as:
How old are you?
- Twenty-nine.
- Then stop acting like you're twenty-eight.
or
If you were such a popular lawyer in Nevada...
- In Nebraska.
- What's the difference?
- The difference is a thousand miles.
However, the film has two significant flaws that become insurmountable closer to the end. First, Wise made a theatrical-chamber film, in which 95% of the time the heroes of Robert Mitcham and Shirley McLaine, along with their squalid apartments, occupy. What is initially perceived as color, in the future begins to press. In addition, if McLane quite organically stretched out her role (a good episode, when she still decided to “give” her night guest, a birthday party), then for the sullen Mitcham the character was altogether unusual.
But this would be half the trouble, if not for the second – the movie to the second half frankly floats in the plot. In the film there is no dynamics, no heat, but only snot, clarification, romance, again snot... And all this for almost two hours, so that in the final the viewer saw a completely incomprehensible ending.
This film would have a chance at life, add the writers to it at least a little dynamics and understandable actions of the characters.
6 out of 10