Shirley MacLaine, during the seminar she gave at my school, talked a lot about The Apartment<\/i>, directed by Wilder, and starring Jack Lemmon and Fred MacMurray.<\/p>\n
— In the final scene, where Miss Kubelik shows up at his apartment, and he’s packing, she breaks out the cards but he resists playing with her, and he finally blurts out: “I love you, Miss Kubelik!” She keeps shuffling. He repeats: “Did you hear what I said, Miss Kubelik? I said I absolutely adore you!” She slowly looks over at him, grins, and holds out the deck of cards to him, saying, “Shut up and deal.” There’s a moment between them – he smiles – she smiles, takes off her coat – the music swells, and he starts to deal the cards, and the movie is over. It’s a long well-written juicy scene ( Wilder wrote it with IAL Diamond, his writing partner)– one of those great movie scenes with a beginning, middle and end, like a mini-play, where the characters start out ONE way (he’s moving, he’s leaving, he’s getting out) and end up another way (they’re going to be together.) It’s all done in one take, which just makes me BEMOAN the current use of dueling close-ups in scenes such as this one. No. Billy Wilder let the audience watch some of his scenes like a play. He lets the audience choose who to look at. It’s very exciting. And second of all: the two of them did it perfectly on the first take, so what you are seeing in the final version is the first take of the scene. Billy Wilder watched the whole thing unfold through the camera, Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine hitting all the right notes, in perfect succession, with no cut-aways, in one extraordinary take. Wilder called: “CUT! PRINT!” And that was that.<\/p>\n
— Shirley MacLaine and Lemmon would run through a scene. Wilder would say when they were done, “Okay, that was very good. Now do it again, only take out 13 and a half seconds.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Shirley MacLaine, during the seminar she gave at my school, talked a lot about The Apartment, directed by Wilder, and starring Jack Lemmon and Fred MacMurray. — In the final scene, where Miss Kubelik shows up at his apartment, and … Continue reading