black man shining shoes

Fred MacMurray tossing a coin afterwards, and the shoe shine guy being happy about the whole thing made me wince. It definitely showed how different things were back then.

BTW, I'm white.

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That's the way things were. How could you have done otherwise?

"Sometimes you have to take the bull by the tail, and face the truth" - G. Marx

When this movie was filmed, it was very common to see Afro-Americans shining shoes. Even when I worked downtown in the 1970's and 1980's, I would often have to pass a shoe shine stand (with Afro American employees) and occassionaly used their services. At this stand, not only did Afro Americans shine shoes, but one of them was also the owner of the business.
I realize that in this movie, the shoe shine man performed his service inside a private office. So I don't know if he was on staff to service the executives or hired from a shoe shine stand in the lobby of the building. However, I see nothing wrong with this accurate portrayal in this film.

I have absolutely no problem with it. Those were the days. The poster, classicmoviecomedy has a good point. Sheldrake is the type of character who would get his shoes shine on company time/expense and who would pay a tip that way - flipping a coin.

Let me share this bit from Cameron Crowe's book: "Conversations with Wilder" (1990) about that scene:

Wilder said:

I'll tell you a very funny story about him, the last story that I tell you with Mr. Fred MacMurray, who was a very stingy man. I loved it. I loved the man and I loved his stinginess too. It amused me. There was a scene in The Apartment before he comes into his office. He has his shoes shined by a black man. And then, from his suit, he gets out a quarter and he flips a tip to the shoeshine guy. And now, we're shooting it, and we're shooting it, and he cannot do it. And I say, "That's all right, it's too small, let's do it with a fifty-cent piece, it's bigger." And MacMurray says, "I would never give him fifty cents--I cannot play this scene."[Laughs].

Personally, I would say that Wilder's treatment of race is generally rather clever and subversive, and if you look you can see a difference between how things look superficially and what they represent.

Okay, so Black people in this movie... the insurance company, if you pay attention, is a multiethnic one. There are a great many black faces, male and female, amongst the employees shown, and just a few of these are menial (one of the janitors, the shoeshiner). The majority are clean-cut guys and girls in suits who clearly hold equal positions of prestige with their white colleagues. There are also many Black men enjoying the white female employee's tabletop dancing - it's very casually done, but remember any black gaze on a white woman was still largely taboo. What's more, there are several shots where these suited-and-booted white-collar African-Americans are in the foreground, which I do interpret a as deliberately positive portrayal, a pretty decent thing for Wilder to do given that this was made BEFORE Breakfast At Tiffany's and its excruciating caricature of Asians etc.

Okay, so in this context rewatch the shoe shining scene. Having already established this egalitarian, respectful environment, compare it with Sheldrake's disdainful attitude towards the shoeshiner - even the way the shot is composed, with Sheldrake posed so masterfully, basically announces that he is a complete tool. And top it off with the way he casually flips the coin. The message is clearly that he is an utter jerk, rather than being a slight against Black people.

It was 1960, it was a different time, do remember. After all, how many companies hold wild Christmas parties (or ANY parties) these days?

How do you feel about Baxter rifling through company records to get personal information on an employee? How do you feel about a doctor not telling the authorities about an attempted suicide (which not only breaks the law, but puts an unstable person's life at further risk)? How do you feel about the morality of what the apartment is being used for in the first place?

And all you want to know about is a black man shining shoes, which was commonplace at the time?

So what if the shoe shiner was black? Does it have to be a bad thing? All the shoe shiners near my office building are also black.