“How about a movie? I hear The Apartment is good,” Joan baits Roger, waiting for an opportunity to describe the misfortune of Fran Kubelik, a congenial elevator operator played by Shirley MacLaine who sleeps with the married men her office building. “The way those men treated that poor girl, handing her around like a tray of canapés?” Joan snaps when Roger says nothing, “She tried to commit suicide”.
This exchange comes on heels of a hotel room tryst where Roger suggests Joan get her own apartment so they could stop sneaking around.
“Don’t you like things the way they are?” Joan asks while re-adjusting her dress.
“Are you kidding?” Roger responds. “This has been the best year of my life. Do you have any idea how unhappy I was before I met you? I was thinking about leaving my wife.”
Released in 1960, Billy Wilder’s The Apartment likely sparked similar spats between professional men and the women who loved them (no, not their wives—the other women who loved them). Jack Lemmon stars as a hapless middle-manager whose apartment is considered community property by his bosses: use the pad to conduct extra-marital liaisons. The suicide attempt to which Joan refers comes after MacLaine’s Kubelik, object of affection to Lemmon’s C.C. Baxter, is faced with the grim realization that Baxter’s Sheldrake, played by Fred MacMurray, is, despite his apparent interest in her, is cold, rational, and unlikely to leave his wife. Sound like anyone we know?
October 19, 2009
When Sterling (he can be so sassy!) reminisces about the early days of Don and Betty
“Mona said they looked like they were on top of our wedding cake.”
This recalls Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s, daughter of Teddy and general provocateur, dismissal of New York Governor Thomas Dewey as “the little man on the wedding cake.” It’s an odd (perhaps unintentional allusion), seeing as how Draper is far manlier than Dewey, but maybe this is just another one Roger’s clever ways of emasculating Don.
That fox.
• Footnote - via Ross Nowels
