While you might not think of The Apartment as a Christmas movie, most of the film occurs between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Besides it’s one of the best films ever made, regardless of the time of year.

Shut up and deal: Jack Lemmon as Bud, Shirley MacLaine as Fran in THE APARTMENT

Jack Lemmon stars as C.C. “Bud” Baxter, a worker bee at a giant insurance company. In an attempt to get ahead, he lets various married executives use his apartment for meetings with their girlfriends. It’s not the greatest arrangement…he has to find a way to occupy the time between the end of the business day and 8 p.m., when his “tenants” are supposed to be out. They consume all his groceries and leave the place a mess. But all the aggravation seems to pay off, when he gets promoted on the basis of his excellent job reviews. Summoned to see the top exec, Jeff Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), Bud is offered and accepts a promotion. There’s only one condition…Bud must now lend the key to the apartment to Sheldrake only, which Bud readily agrees to do. Soon after, Bud discovers that the girl Sheldrake is dallying with is the lovely company elevator operator Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine). Bud is in love with Fran, though he doesn’t know it yet. When he starts to figure that out, his life really gets complicated.

Billy Wilder directed and co-wrote this film, so you know it’s top-notch. Much of the time, the film has the trademark seriocomic vibe he imparted to another film he wrote and directed, Sunset Boulevard (1950). The Apartment is a satire of American corporate society, which apparently hasn’t changed much, a romantic comedy that’ll leave you with a lot of food for thought. The acting is uniformly great; Lemmon and MacLaine, one of the best on-screen couples ever, are perfect as the neurotics who don’t realize right away that they’re perfect for each other, and Fred MacMurray is astonishingly effective as one of the worst cads in a movie ever. I guess you could think of The Apartment as an ancestor to Mad Men in both setting and theme.

We’ll be showing it on Saturday, December 29 at 7:15 p.m. Hope to see you there!