Housing crisis

The Apartment

(1960)

Billy Wilder on the deaccession dock for the second straight Friday, but I wasn't really expecting to dump this one, and indeed I'm not. It is, though, one of those films that didn't click with me the first time. Hard to say why: it's one of the most grim comedies I know, and that's usually a sure sell for me. And something else that I've come to appreciate only recently: Shirley MacLaine was just absolutely irresistible as a kid. Oh, and you know who else I love? Hope Holiday as Mrs. Margie MacDougall, the lovely lonely woman who picks up C. C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) at a bar on Christmas Eve because she misses her jockey husband, jailed in Castro's Cuba for doping a horse.