Not a traditional romantic comedy, it replaces the giddiness and the big cheesy gestures with melancholy and sardonic sharpness. But even sixty years later, it is always a great comfort to watch The Apartment.

Our hero is C.C. Baxter, one of the thousand men employed in an enormous insurance company in New York City. Buddy, as his coworkers call him, is a reliable and hardworking man that seems to have decided that his job is the only thing he has.…