(Updated) The classic film The Apartment (1960) depicts the middle-class Manhattan apartment of one CC Baxter, aka "Buddy-boy", in a style that can be described as Post-Linear. After watching this film many times, I will finally attempt to answer the question: did Buddy-boy's apartment exist in our space-time dimension or what?
It seems normal enough from the hallway. (All photos are screencaps from The Apartment.)
But once you get inside...
...This is inside the apartment, looking back toward next door. It must go back 20 or 30 feet. Look at the bedroom way back there, and compare it with the distance between their front doors. Isn't that supposed to be the other apartment?
Here he is, inside the front door on the right, and the kitchen on the left. This end of the outside wall is in the middle. Is it actually farther back than the other side of the wall, outside?
Here's a view in the opposite direction, from the kitchen. Buddy-boy's front door is out in the living room (on the left), and the space from here to there is supposed to be less than the space between their front doors.
So, looking over these pictures and keeping in mind it is a SMALL APARTMENT, where we're constrained to put estimates on the low side, I get:
- about a foot from the front-door-wall to the kitchen (as seen in the picture of him with the tray),
- then it looks like a kind of hallway cupboard, (in the kitchen photo, the knobs are just above his back)
and...a glass door?
With a towel hanging over it.
The left side of the kitchen doorway has a couple sets of shelves, with some other apparatus tucked away there (looks like my old DAT).
I think we're looking at (at least)
1 foot from the front-door-wall to the kitchen,
6 feet from the kitchen doorway to the sink (2 ft per shelf section)
4 feet for the stove and the sink,
AND at least a foot, in front of that back wall. (There's another stove tucked in against the wall).
= 12 feet from the front door to the back wall of the kitchen.
How do we estimate the distance outside, between the two front doors (with all this architecture on the other side of that wall)?
With a door:
(It's the door, here. A 36"-inch wide apartment door, c 1959.)
3 more doors between them = 9 feet. Counting from the right side of his doorway to the left side of her doorway. 9 feet. In a space that's 12 feet on the other side.
Well, using doors to measure, maybe it's still barely possible that the kitchen is stuck in that teeny space between the doors...wait a minute, it's Mrs Dreyfuss-
Hmm, they ARE close apartments. But what's with those windows on the shared wall? What's on the other side? In his kitchen?
I don't see any windows!
Let's look at that bedroom again.
Obviously, too far back to give the other apartment much room behind their own front door. Maybe Mrs Dreyfuss is standing in front of a little entryway, just inside the door? A vestibule, perhaps? The lovely windows that don't exist on the other side lending an air of open welcome?
Well, except for Buddy-boy's bathroom. It's inside the bedroom, to the right, and goes back at least another 5 feet, behind the kitchen.
Mrs Dreyfuss would be standing next to the shaving mirror. With no napkins!
But the final rabbited lintel between the lallies (thx, Mr Blandings) has to be the view from the bedroom, itself:
That's the wall they supposedly share with the apartment next door. The bathroom (aka The Dreyfuss's entryway) even has a window. There is no way these apartments exist, next door to each other, in linear space.
Billy Wilder was a very careful director. I suggest that he was aware that the architecture of the set didn't work. Because, it DOES work, if you understand the layout is reversed.
Look at how much more space he's got if you turn it around, like a mirror.
And to Wilder's point: the story may not be factual. But it
is a reflection.
