Why The Apartment's Trailer Still Works Decades Later
Most people think of The Apartment as just a romantic comedy when they watch it today. The theatrical trailer from 1960 tells a different story. It positions the film as something sharper, darker, and more complicated than a standard Rom-Com. That framing choice matters when you're studying how trailers sell movies. The original trailer runs about two minutes and forty-five seconds. It opens with voiceover narration that hits the ground running, establishing the premise without a single visual gag. The voice tells you about a man who lends his apartment to executives so he can climb the corporate ladder. Then it pivots to the complications. That structure—setup, twist, escalation—was the standard formula of the era, but Wilder's team executed it with unusual precision. What stands out to me after spending years analyzing vintage promotional material is how aggressively the trailer leans into the dramatic stakes. The comedy beats are there, sure. But the trailer also highlights the emotional toll on Shirley MacLaine's character, Fran Kubelik. It doesn't shy away from the fact that she's dealing with an affair and workplace pressure. That risk in selling a mainstream studio picture paid off. The film grossed over $25 million domestically against a $2.9 million budget.
I ran into an interesting problem once when trying to source a clean print of the original trailer for a screening I organized. Every DVD release I found had it compressed or, worse, replaced with a later re-release cut. The workaround was tracking down a 35mm telecine transfer from the Paramount archive footage database. It took about six weeks and cost roughly $400 in licensing fees, but the quality difference was night and day compared to the standard definition sources floating around online. If you're doing this kind of project, start early and don't assume streaming services will have anything usable.
How the Trailer Constructs its Pitch
The editing rhythm in this trailer is worth studying closely. It moves from rapid-fire comedic scenes into slower, more dramatic moments without any jarring transition. The editor, Charles Griffith, understood that you need to vary the pacing so the viewer doesn't tune out. The first thirty seconds are quick cuts. Then it holds on a longer dialogue exchange between Jack Lemmon and Fred MacMurray. After that, another rapid burst. This pattern repeats until the final title card. The voiceover is another tool that most modern trailer editors abandon. Today, voiceover is considered old-fashioned. In 1960, it was standard practice. The narrator here does heavy lifting—explaining plot points that the visuals alone wouldn't make clear. The apartment lending concept is inherently confusing without context. The narrator bridges that gap in about four lines of copy. One thing beginners often miss is how the trailer handles the romantic subplot. It doesn't reveal the ending. It doesn't even fully confirm whether Lemmon and MacLaine end up together. That was a deliberate choice. Studio test screenings in the late fifties showed that audiences preferred ambiguity in romantic endings, especially when the film had comedic elements. The trailer preserves that uncertainty while still making the romance feel central enough to care about.
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Where the Trailer Falls Short
Not everything about this promotional piece holds up. The biggest weakness is how little it addresses the film's satirical edge. The Apartment is fundamentally a critique of corporate culture and the way power dynamics ruin lives. The trailer mostly sells it as a quirky workplace comedy with romantic complications. That framing probably helped broaden the audience, but it also meant a significant chunk of what makes the film worth watching gets lost in translation. There's also the matter of the title treatment. The stylized font and floating lettering feel dated even by 1960 standards. Some modern viewers find it distracting. I understand the complaint, but it's also a period artifact that documents a specific era of graphic design in film marketing. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing depends on what you're using the trailer for. If your goal is purely educational or archival, I'd recommend pairing the trailer with the documentary "The Make-Up Man: A Portrait of Cecil Hellmuth" or at minimum reading Charles Le Mahieu's analysis of Wilder's marketing strategies. Those sources fill in the gaps that the trailer itself leaves open.
Practical Notes on Access
You can find scattered clips on YouTube, but they're almost always low quality and heavily trimmed. Full official prints are difficult to locate through legitimate channels. Major streaming platforms tend to host either the movie itself or brief excerpt compilations rather than the complete original trailer. If you need a high-quality version for research or presentation purposes, your best path is going through a university film library or contacting Paramount directly for educational licensing. Budget at least three to four weeks for the process, and expect to pay somewhere between two hundred and five hundred dollars depending on your use case. The film itself is widely available on streaming and physical media. Watching the full feature alongside the trailer gives you a much clearer picture of what was emphasized and what was deliberately left out of the promotional campaign. That contrast is where the real insight lives.
