Maybe because history has made Psycho the most talked about film of 1960 I feel this almost gets lost, I dunno. Could also be because I think Fred MacMurray is quite under-appreciated too i.e. he's got a similar charm (to me) as Burt Lancaster and yet he's best known for his television career. I usually don't really like films this old but it's magic, you completely forget it's black & white.
shareExactly.
shareI think the actors in this film were under appreciated. Keep in mind this film was the last Black and White film to win the Best Picture Oscar until "Schindler's List" three decades later.
shareThere is a great deal of irony here.
In 1960, The Apartment won Best Picture and Billy Wilder won Best Director. Hitchcock was nominated(one of only five times) for Best Director(and lost to Wilder.) Psycho wasn't even nominated for Best Picture.
But the decades have rocketed Psycho not only to "best of 1960" status, but "possible top five of all time" status.
Consequently, The Apartment has rather been lost in the Psycho tidal wave.
But The Apartment offers its own wonderful meaning to our lives, and -- just like Psycho -- captures the year of its making, 1960 as the 50's prepared to yield to the 60's -- perfectly.
Unlike such bookended Technicolor Best Pictures such as Ben-Hur(1959) and West Side Story(1961), The Apartment is actually "small enough" to feel a great deal LIKE Psycho. They are both in black and white; both tell stories of "the little people" who are being grinded beneath the wheels of uncaring bosses and low earnings; both films "push the Hays Code envelope" of what was allowed on screen in 1960 (sex, violence), and both end up mixing genres so that comedy, drama, melancholy (and in Psycho's case only, ultra-violence) end up sharing the story.
Still, on its own and even if Psycho didn't come out that year, The Apartment is a unique achievement in Hays Code era American film...a film that spoke forthrightly to class, capitalism, unrequited love, and the undying urge to copulate.