The Apartment and How to Succeed in Business…
I do a weekly movie review on my other blog, and recently, I reviewed The Apartment.
I mention this because I’m self-aggrandizing Matthew Weiner often cites The Apartment as one of his major influences in creating Mad Men. The era (The Apartment is a 1960 film) and the business milieu are obvious, but at the oft-cited Burns Center event, he also talked about the way that The Apartment starts with a lot already going on; that more of the movie shows you things that the characters already know (Baxter has a crush on Fran, Baxter’s apartment is being used by management, etc.), than shows you things that haven’t happened yet. When something new happens, it’s major.
Another very visible movie for us Mad Hatters is How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, starring Robert Morse (our own Bertram Cooper). Weiner says he didn’t have Robert Morse specifically in mind for the role, just someone venerable from the era who could hold that kind of power.
If you’re not familiar with How to Succeed…, it’s a musical about, well, succeeding in business. An ambitious window-washer (Morse) uses a book of the same title as the film to guide him up the corporate ladder. The jobs don’t matter, the work doesn’t matter, and the methods don’t matter. It’s all about success.
I compare the two in my review:
There is a lot going on here about American business. Baxter really cares about insurance; he thinks and communicates in actuarial numbers. The higher you go up the management ladder, the less people care, but the product is significant, the numbers are significant. Look at how that changes: By the time of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1967), no one in the company knows what their product even is. And yes, How to Succeed… is significantly more comedic, but it’s also more cynical. In the seven years between the two films, the notion of a corporate “home” became darker and darker.
In both The Apartment and How to Succeed…, the hero steps on others to rise in business. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) has remorse about that, and Finch (Morse) doesn’t. In Mad Men, it’s not about others at all, it’s about yourself. Pete will blackmail Don to his own detriment, what’s important is how Don handles it. They compete less with each other than with their own demons.
If How to Succeed… represents an increasingly dark and cynical view of business as the decade progresses, we might certainly see signs of that as season 2 begins.
June 30th, 2008 at 8:52 am
I have a friend who’s a big cinephile and huge Billy Wilder fan and claims The Apartment is the perfect movie. No scene is wasted no dialogue is extraneous. It’s perfectly crafted. Watching Mad Men I often feel Weiner is going for that as well. Nothing wasted.
I have to overcome my meh feelings about musicals so I can watch How to Succeed in Business.
June 30th, 2008 at 9:01 am
I’m a huge musical fan, latenac, but in general, I don’t think How to Succeed fits the musical mode. I mean, it does in that it’s a movie where people burst into song, but it’s so satiric and brightly painted that it somehow strikes a different chord.
June 30th, 2008 at 11:46 am
I’d been wanting to mention that I bought How To and viewed it recently, but I was having trouble working it into conversation.
It’s definitely a product of its time. The song about A Secretary is Not a Toy kinda left me with the impression that she really sorta was one — yes, I get that this is satire and filled with stereotypes, but I also think that there was some truth there that it was a man’s world, baby. (Boys Will Be Boys! And Boys Like Toys!)
Mad Men, while being about then, is a product of now. When secretaries are treated like objects, we know the writers don’t believe that, or wouldn’t dare let on that they believed that.
With a female lead, what would Suceed have been like? A rise to the top of the steno pool? What was her name — Jonesy — had risen as far as she could by being secretary to the president. Nothing wrong with that, but indicitive of the mindset, and telling that not once was a woman competition for Ponty — they were all love interests, maternal figures, or tools to get ahead.
Rosemary, the love interest, was intelligent, but no competition on the workfront. She seemed to read business magazines, but it was unclear if that was really her thing or “a feminine trap.” I think it was the former, and if so then why did there seem to be no ambition to rise in the company? She made a heck of a cheerleader though.
Let’s not even discuss Heddy (Oooog) Larue, our Worldwide Wicket Treasure Girl.
And I enjoyed it — just commenting and thinking out loud.
Robert Morse did a terrific job, I must say, and I had the songs stuck in my head all weekend. Robert Morse as Bertram Cooper — inspired!