Rehoboth Beach Film Society’s Cinema Art Theater will present a Classic Film Series starting May 2, 2025, with Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, Oscar’s best picture of 1960. The film stars Jack Lemmon as a mid-level functionary in a large insurance company hoping to get ahead by letting his bosses borrow his apartment for their various extramarital affairs. A luminous Shirley MacLaine co-stars as an elevator operator in his office building who captures his romantic interest, and Fred MacMurray plays a manipulative executive far removed from his portrayal of lovable patriarch Steven Douglas on TV’s My Three Sons.
The late Roger Ebert notes that “by the time he made The Apartment, Wilder had become a master at a kind of sardonic, satiric comedy that had sadness at its center.” Cowriting with I.A.L. Diamond, Wilder not only delivers one of the screen’s all-time great romantic comedy-dramas, he also gives us flawed, believable, funny and sad characters—and a remarkably frank (at east for its time) look at what we would now call toxic masculinity.
Don’t miss the chance to see this film on the big screen, just in time for its 65th anniversary in glorious black and white and widescreen—and watch this space for upcoming classic film screenings and series!
Film times are 1 pm on Friday, May 2; 4:30 pm on Sun., May 4 and 1 pm on Thurs., May 8. Admission is $9 for members, $11.50 for general audiences and $5 for students (student tickets available only at the theater box office). View the film schedule and purchase advance tickets online at rehobothfilm.com or at the Cinema Art Theater box office in Lewes, Wednesday-Sunday from 12:00 Noon to 5:00 PM.
