THE APPARTMENT @ 65

Charlie Baxter is a drone at an insurance company, buzzing away with a crowd of others in a low cieling office that is about as close as you get to a hive on a human scale. He's still young but has ambitions. He often works late, as he says in his narration. Then we find out why. Through a series of small favours that escalated, he lends his appartment to a small group of executives who use it for extra marital sex. They keep him strung with promises of advancement but by this time those are sounding hollow. 

On the way into work each morning he has a smile and banter with the lift girl Fran. He's impressed by her as she handles herself firmly with the handsy execs and seems above the exploitation mill that Charlie enables. Then one day the promises are made good and he gets called upstairs. The mighty Mr Sheldrake wants to see him. There is the prospect of promotion but, really, it's just another suit buying into the appartment rort. He's already been stranded outdoors while his higher ups take their time in his home, his neighbours complain about the noise and he seems to be shrinking into a barely functional stasis. Will having his own office be worth it?

Billy Wilder's 1960 interpersonal epic is hard to call a comedy. As a director of funny films he was no slouch with the likes of The Seven Year Itch or Some Like it Hot behind him. The Appartment plays like a drama with an overlay of warmth rather than a series of payoffs. The concern here is finding the moral centre among the urban hellscape of privilege and advantage. 

Jack Lemmon's Charlie understands the order, however much he resents it but when he benefits from it the sense of freedom overcomes him and he falls into form, another exec. Shirley MacLaine's Fran returns an expression of one who has been through the mill and is witnessing yet more corruption. Care is taken to illustrate Fred MacMurray's Sheldrake's skill at manipulation, his conscience-free lying and emotional pressure. This is a cast responding to the call of elegant writing about a brutal work culture. It cuts very close and the relief is often a sobering pathos rather than a joke.

However, this is a comedy the same way that Network or Boogie Nights are comedies in that they beg of you to reserve your judgement until you have seen everything. The stratification that frames the conflict is the same whether it's a capitalist industry or a remote politburo and it could as easily have been set in Classical Greece as mid century New York. Lemmon's decency begs his pathos. MacLaine's outward incorruptibility (according to Charlie) is amour against experience. And Fred MacMurray's effortless maintenance of his droit de segnieur is chilling. His dismissal of  a previous victim, kept close as a secretary, will have resonance but it probably won't be premanent. The final scene gives us what we want but its lack od sentimentality makes it feel earned.

Wilder's career is a list of bangers and (probably) others that will need seeking. That the same hand at the helm brought us the creepy Hollywood self-portrait of Sunset Boulevard and the durably hilarious Some Like it Hot could make this dark remionder of the world of work and the consequences of unchecked privilege should come as no surprise. It was films like this that broke the stiffness of the Hollywood in the decade to come and made way for the liberation of the '70s. Another debt we owe to Billy Wilder. Pay it in the best way: seek it out and watch it.

PEEPING TOM @ 65

We watch as a sex worker gets killed by a client, almost entirely through the crosshairs of a camera viewfinder. Through the same crosshairs we watch the police investigation the next morning. The camera operator is Mark Lewis, young, fresh faced and lethal. He shoots porn above a newsagents as a moonlighting job but mostly pulls focus on feature films. He lives in a large terrace house in London which he partially lets to tenants. He has little to do with them, preferring to stay upstairs watching his home movies. 

One night he pauses at the window of the mother/daughter pair on the ground floor. There's a party going on for young, sweet Helen and they notice him gazing in a little too long. Helen is curious and catches him on the stair, offering a slice of cake. She follows him upstairs and asks about his camera. Of course she wants to see something. He shows her a series of experiment films his biologist father took of the young Mark which go from charming to unnerving in seconds. Ok, that's where he got it from. Helen is scooped back by one of her party guests and leaves, disturbed but intrigued.

Reading all that, you might have come to the conclusion that this is an early serial killer film like M or its fellow 1960 horror Psycho. That's true enough when you consider the onscreen murders in the film itself and the implied bulk of previous crimes canned away on celluloid in Mark's attic, but most of the running time is actually taken up with a romance. It's a strange and unsettling romance but a romance all the same. 

Casting is key, here. Carl Boehm as Mark, is supposedly a Londoner. The actor makes no attempt at disguising his Teutonic accent. Powell, no slouch at maximising the value of his casts, appears to have encouraged this, and not just for giving his lead actor a comfortable base. No explanation is given for Boehm's voice which could be a prototype for every Kraftwerk album ever made and this affords it an unease that the posher English voice Mark Lewis might be expected to affect. It is there to unnerve an audience who had had the time to learn of the horrifying extent that the Nazi scientists took their experiments. His grown up Peter Lorre cooing sounded of the laboratory and the death camp; nothing homely, nothing warm.

Anna Massey as Helen has escaped from a Cliff Richard movie into a London that hasn't yet started its '60s swing. She is less pure than unformed and eager to find definition, even by the side of a soft voiced monster. She is not turned off by Mark's private cinema of his father's cruelty but enticed by its results. It's unknowing rather than naivete that drives her to pursue him, persuading him to leave his now-organic camera behind on a dinner date. She sees him stop and linger near a necking couple and reach for the mechanism but just pulls him away, as though she is flicking away the cigarette of a compulsive smoker. We have seen her courted by far more eligible specimens in the same residential crew but it is the other that attracts her. This does lead to a confrontation, as it must within the era's ethics but she has followed it to that point through fascination.

Necessary mention must be given to Helen's hard-arse mother played by Maxine Audley. Embittered and toughly cynical, she suspects Mark of horrors and confronts him about his compulsive behaviour. Her blindness prohibits her from being either horrified by his record or seduced by it. She warns him away from her daughter, knowing, with or without evidence, that he is beyond redemption. She knows him through his sound, thudding on the floor above, the projector ticking away. With the teen romances of the '50s fading, this difficult morsel of love and violence was a good decade before its time. You could look ahead to Badlands, Taxi Driver or Natural Born Killers but you'd still not find as dark and deep a pairing as Helen and Mark but there it was.

Peeping Tom was savaged by critics and left alone by audiences on release and sank into obscurity for decades until corners of the now obsolete late night movies on TV allowed it some air. Michael Powell's career was finished in the UK and found himself thrown back to the fate of criminal pariahs by getting transported to Australia where he made films as celebrated as They're a Weird Mob and as winced at as the dodgy Age of Consent. It wasn't until the '80s that Martin Scorsese took up the champion token and arranged for the restoration of the likes of Red Shoes, Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus and, finally, the strangest one, Peeping Tom.

I knew about this film from an article in a magazine about a rare cinema screening of it. I needed to see it but there was no way. A friend, much later, lent me his TV tape of it and I was hooked. This is a film not to love but to acknowledge. If you get to know Powell's stunning work with long time collaborator Emeric Pressburger you might resist this on first look but the aesthetic, the use of colour and the strange mix of the urban merry England and dark fantasy carry over. As a marker for a junction in crime fiction cinema, add this to the same year's Psycho for context and watch the time line as the rest of the world caught up. 

Viewing notes: I first saw this as a dub from TV then as a DVD, then Criterion's Blu-Ray and finally Studio Canal's stunning 4K which is currently available in Australia (including a Blu-Ray disc) at a moderate price.