Quarterly Review of Film and Video

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A Review of “The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in

American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975”

John Thomas McGuire

To cite this article: John Thomas McGuire (2014) A Review of “The Apartment Plot: Urban Living
in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975”, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 31:3,
285-288, DOI: 10.1080/10509208.2011.646583

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2011.646583

Published online: 10 Feb 2014.

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 Reviews 285

The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film

and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975
by Pamela Robertson Wojcik. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2010

JOHN THOMAS McGUIRE

The shift from urbanization to suburbanization after 1945 in the United States accordingly
received extensive cinematic examination, from Cary Grant’s comedic contortions in H.C.
Potter’s Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948) to Kevin Spacey’s middle-aged
anomie in Sam Mendes’s American Beauty (1999). Yet the urban facades established as the
definite mise-en-scene of this country’s films by World War I did not totally disappear in the
wake of these dramatic postwar developments. Directors such as Billy Wilder continued to
set their films in the midst of metropolises, and as one who grew up in the shadow of New
York City in the 1970s and early 1980s, I certainly remained aware of the city’s impact
on films such as Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (1975). Pamela Robertson Wojcik’s
The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975 is
therefore a badly needed, invaluable consideration of the continuation of urban milieus in
mainstream films after the end of World War II.
Unlike some authors, Wojcik’s introduction deftly and evocatively interweaves her
personal experiences with an explication of her book’s major theme, which encompasses
an examination of how cinema and popular culture in the thirty years since the end of World
War II constructed a “philosophy of urbanism” (xi). As she further explains, the material
considered in the book centers on an “apartment plot,” or where the narrative makes such
a domicile a central device (3). Wojcik thus not bases her interpretation on the wide range
of films that considered the many aspects of apartment living, from romantic comedies
to thrillers, but she also cleverly exempts urban film auteurs who have already received
extensive consideration, such as Lumet and Elia Kazan. Moreover, by ending her analysis
in 1975, Wojcik not only concludes her analysis at an important economic turning point for
the urban United States, but also concludes at the cusp of the cinematic milieu undertaking
what she aptly calls a “dystopic view” of urbanism (268).
In addition, Wojcik’s focus on apartments naturally elicits a key feature of her analysis:
how such a domicile can represent “an important alternative to dominant discourses of and
about America in the mid-twentieth century, and a key signifier of an emerging singles dis-
course” (5). The years from 1945 through 1975 encompassed the most important part of the
twentieth century in the United States, at least domestically. Stresses on conformity, ranging
from the maintaining of heterosexuality to the renewing of the Victorian ideal of domes-
ticity, encountered by the mid-1960s countervailing pressures from African-Americans,
gays and lesbians, and feminists. Perhaps films from 1945 through 1965 did try, as Wojcik
claims, to enforce social conventions such as “the ‘taming’ of the feminine . . . and the
deracialization of urban space” (43). But there can also be no doubt that by the late 1960s
mainstream films began to reflect the counter reactions to conventionality.
The first chapter encompasses an examination of perhaps the quintessential New York
City apartment picture of its time, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). Wojcik provides
286 Reviews

a meticulous examination of the film’s famous opening sequence to show how Hitchcock
immediately centers his audience in the Greenwich Village apartment courtyard through
a tantalizing mixture of images and sounds. She thus persuasively demonstrates how the
sequence evokes both the “geography of space and . . . a sense of setting” (50). But Wojcik
otherwise provides little new interpretation. One can understand her reluctance, given
that Rear Window has already received extensive critical examination, particularly in its
exploration of voyeurism. Yet she unnecessarily shies away from analyzing, for example,
Hitchcock’s “strong identification and fascination with femininity” (57). One could argue
that Lisa, played by Grace Kelly, becomes an assertive presence, even risking her safety to
obtain critical evidence for her hobbled fiancé. Such an exploration would naturally congeal
with Wojcik’s later examination of femininity in apartment films. But her subsequent
examinations of space in the apartment milieus in such films as Gene Saks’s Barefoot in
the Park (1967) and Blake Edwards’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) do counterbalance her
lack of ruminations on the Hitchcock classic.
The most successful section of The Apartment Plot comes in the second through
fourth chapters, when Wojcik examines the depictions of masculinity and femininity in
the depictions of apartment living in films and popular culture, and then demonstrates the
combination of those two spheres in marital cinematic depictions. In the second chapter
the author deftly describes how the “bachelor pad” concept came into public consciousness
with the rise of Playboy magazine. This evocation of young men cavorting in luxurious
apartments received immediate confirmation in such films as Charles Walters’s The Tender
Trap (1955) and Bud Yorkin’s Come Blow Your Horn (1963). That both releases featured
the “ring-a-ding” Frank Sinatra provided no coincidence. But even Mr. Rat Pack needed to
follow societal conventions of the time, as his characters eventually leave their pads behind
to embrace the martial state.
As has been often noted, comedy’s broad strokes of amusement can conceal its sharp
assessments of societal developments. To her credit Wojcik refrains from an extensive
examination of the romantic comedies starring Rock Hudson and Doris Day, except for
the first, and arguably best film, Michael Gordon’s Pillow Talk (1959). Instead, the author
concentrates on other, arguably no less interesting, comedies created by Universal Studios
and its imitators, from approximately 1959 through 1965. Wojcik also provides a successful
transition from such comedies of the Eisenhower Era to later, groundbreaking films. Having
previously noted how the permeability of apartment living leads to the uneasy maintenance
of a “public privacy” (133), she demonstrates how this social insecurity reached its cinematic
apex in William Friedkin’s The Boys in the Band (1970). The film’s gay protagonists joyfully
express their sexual identities within an apartment, even line-dancing on the patio, only to
retreat protectively in the presence of a straight man.
Wojcik’s examination of apartment milieus and gender deepens in the third chapter.
Using Holly Golighty from Breakfast at Tiffany’s as an archetype, she skillfully describes
how modernity’s typically masculine sense of independence uneasily co-existed in the mid-
twentieth century with society’s traditional demands of female domesticity. This conflict
became especially clear through the work of Betty Friedan and Helen Gurley Brown in
the early 1960s. Films of the time offered an artistic compromise, depicting aggressive,
bohemian “single girls” who nonetheless eventually settled for marital bliss, thus appearing
as “temporary moderns” in their urban apartment domiciles (158). Wojcik uses other popular
culture sources to their fullest extent in this chapter, drawing upon such literary sources
as Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything (1958). Moreover, her use of such films as Gene
Saks’s Cactus Flower (1969) and Alan J. Pakula’s Klute (1971), fully demonstrates how
the seemingly carefree, even daring lifestyles of their female protagonists (Jane Fonda’s
 Reviews 287

character in Pakula’s film is a prostitute) nonetheless remain unfulfilled until they engage
in seemingly permanent relationships with men.
Three films become essential to the fourth chapter’s examination of marital tensions
arising over the bohemian-like expectations of a newly married woman and the most
traditional considerations of her new husband. In Barefoot in the Park (1967) Jane Fonda’s
Corie initially luxuriates in the seeming freedom of her new walk-up apartment and revels in
the attention lavished upon her by her suave, if elderly, neighbor. Her lawyer husband Paul,
played by Robert Redford, eventually becomes emotionally exhausted and psychologically
threatened. The tensions become resolved when Corie agrees to conform to her husband’s
expectations. No such ready resolution, however, occurs in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s
Baby (1968) and Frank Perry’s Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970). Rosemary Woodhouse’s
dreams of establishing a secure domestic existence become extinguished by a combination
of supernatural evil and her husband’s desire for success in his acting career. Wojcik is
especially good at showing how Perry’s reinterpretation of the original source material
makes Diary of A Mad Housewife’s end more ambiguous, as the female protagonist finds
no surcease in her narcissistic husband, an equally pretentious extramarital lover, or in
group therapy.
At times, however, Wojcik emphasizes mise-en-scene and scenario at the expense
of other factors in a film’s production. This becomes most glaring when she considers
Rosemary’s Baby and Diary of A Mad Housewife. While paying appropriate attention
to the effective use of cinematography, she never fully examines Polanski’s established
ability to evoke a subtle, if at times blackly comedic, dread and even horror in apartment
interiors. The Polish-born director firmly established his mastery of urban disaffection in
Repulsion (1965), subtly demonstrating the mental deterioration of a young, emotionally
fragile woman in a London flat. Two motifs—the distorted view of a person through an
apartment peephole and the intrusion of sounds from other apartments—are seen in both
films. Wojcik could also have noted how Perry, with the collaboration of his screenwriter
wife, Eleanor, successfully continued the sense of alienation established by their previous
efforts, David and Lisa (1962) and The Swimmer (1968). These omissions seem especially
puzzling given her ready elaboration of Hitchcock’s conceptions in Rear Window.
The fifth and last chapter encompasses the most interesting, but also the most flawed,
material. Wojcik skillfully demonstrates how the creation and rise of Ebony magazine
echoed the growing identification of African-Americans with middle class values after
World War II. She also effectively shows how the film career of Sidney Poitier mirrored these
societal developments, from the protagonist who asserts his masculinity in Daniel Petrie’s
A Raisin in the Sun (1961) to the successful bachelor who matures through his relationship
with the title character in Daniel Mann’s For Love of Ivy (1968). This interpretation stands
as a welcome corrective to the usual scholarly conclusion that Poitier simply copied “white
manners” throughout his cinematic career (249). Wojcik also uses underrated films such as
John Berry’s Claudine (1974) to illustrate how African-American protagonists struggled
to emerge from their complex personal and social circumstances in the early 1970s. The
couple played by James Earl Jones and Diahann Carroll emerge as flawed, yet human
characters, trying to maintain their love despite welfare restrictions and failed previous
marriages.
This chapter, however, also suffers from three weaknesses. First, Wojcik awkwardly
apologizes for including race in a separate chapter, seeing that situation as a “potentially
token gesture that can be ignored or segmented” (233). Her subsequent, extensive analysis
belies the need for such an apologia. Second, Wojcik seems to limit her examination
of popular culture to an unnecessary extent. She does not, for example, examine the
288 Reviews

impact of The Jeffersons, a groundbreaking series in television history, if only because it

depicted African-Americans as eager middle-class participants. Finally, a corresponding
examination of earlier films that considered white ethnics’ shifts from working-class to
middle-class circumstances might have sharpened the chapter’s effect. In Richard Brooks’
The Catered Affair (1956), for example, the complexities of a working-class family’s
upward mobility are examined in the context of a daughter’s upcoming wedding. Even so,
The Apartment Plot is a deeply researched, clearly structured, probing, always intriguing
look at how urban living became expressed in the United States’ cinematic and popular
depictions of apartment residency from the end of World War II to the fall of Saigon to the
North Vietnamese. It should encourage further explorations.

John Thomas McGuire is an instructor in the State University of New York. His writings on cinema range
from early sound production to the urban films of Billy Wilder, the subject of his forthcoming article in the
Quarterly Review of Video and Film.