The colorful cinematic scoop on life in apartments

Apartments, and the ups-and-downs of living in close proximity with a crapshoot collection of other members of the human race, have made a choice subject for filmmakers.

Some of them have taken liberal cinematic license in portraying the goings-ons, but the movies still make for interesting viewing. Nostalgia buffs may not be able to forgo shedding a tear at some of the older films, providing a glimpse into supposedly simpler, easier times (but was it, ever, really that way?).

Here are summaries of some notable apartment films of the last 40 years, with grateful acknowledgement to The Time Out Film Guide for cast and crew credits and some trenchant assessments. But do not let some sniveling, jaundiced reviewer put you off seeing these films; if you can find them locally, rent them and judge for yourself.

The Apartment (Billy Wilder, 1960, U.S.). Starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley Maclaine, Fred MacMurray, Ray Walston, Jack Kruschen, Edie Adams. Black and white, 125 minutes.

Insurance clerk Lemmon makes his way up the ranks at work by lending his apartment out to senior executives for trysts. His mercenary game plan for advancement is scuttled when he falls for one of the women, played by a very young and impish Maclaine.

Time Out called it "diamond-sharp satire ... even the cop-out ending (boy forgives girl and all's well) is rather moving given the delicate skill which Lemmon and Maclaine commute between comedy and pathos". Wilder won the best director Oscar, and both Maclaine and Lemmon were nominated for Academy Awards.

The L-Shaped Room (Bryan Forbes, 1962, UK). Starring Leslie Caron, Tom Bell, Brock Peters, Cicely Courneidge, Bernard Lee, Patricia Phoenix, Emlyn Williams. Black and white, 142 minutes.

Pregnant Frenchwoman Caron, for some inexplicable reason, decides to take a dingy little apartment in Notting Hill, long before the London suburb became a haven for yuppies where Julia Roberts could bump into Hugh Grant. No fireworks in the plot, but the grainy realism means that her neighbors are little symbols of shocking humanity.

Heaven forbid that Caron, herself a fallen woman, must rub shoulders with a prostitute, a lesbian and a gay black man. Yes, they conform to the pat stereotypes (the whore-with-a-heart-of- gold, etc.) but remember it was ground-breaking stuff at the time; it would still be five years before the Wolfenden report deemed it a bit inhumane to lock up the local hairdresser because he was a poofter. Caron may be almost barefoot and pregnant, but she also stumbles upon love (no, not with the gay black man). Sob, sob.

Barefoot in the Park (Gene Saks, 1967, U.S.). Starring Jane Fonda, Robert Redford, Mildred Natwick, Charles Boyer. Color, 105 minutes.

Granted, it's not Shakespeare, or even Neil Simon, but it is light, refreshing fun. A few years before Barbarella and long before she started exhorting tubbies across America to feel the burn, Jane Fonda was a fresh-faced, beautiful young thing. And she is more than matched in the prettiness department by the unpardonably cute Redford as her newlywed husband (the man really grew into his face, sun damage and all).

Although there is surprisingly little chemistry between the picture-perfect couple as they settle into their apartment in Greenwich Village, the story moves briskly along, helped in good measure by the nervous-Nellie Natwick whose heart is set all aflutter by the oh-so suave Boyer, the French matinee idol of the 1930s. Not to be missed is Natwick slip-sliding down the front steps and the Japanese food segment.

The Odd Couple (Gene Saks, 1967, U.S.). Starring Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, John Fiedler, Herbert Edelman, Monica Evans, Carole Shelley. Color, 105 minutes.

The famed Lemmon-Matthau comic turn, adapted from the Neil Simon play, as two middle-aged divorced men move in together, the one a confirmed slob, the other a neat freak. Hilarity ensues as the two try to learn to live together, with the prissy Lemmon turning up his nose as a set-in-his-ways Matthau trashes the apartment. The movie led to the highly popular television spinoff with Jack Klugman and Tony Randall. Time Out said: "Saks takes Neil Simon's play pretty much as it comes, but with Lemmon and Matthau to watch, and a generous quota of one-liners, who needs direction?"

The Tenant (Roman Polanski, 1976, France). Starring Polanski, Isabelle Adjani, Shelley Winters, Melvyn Douglas, Jo Van Fleet, Bernard Fresson, Lila Kedrova, Claude Dauphin, Claude Pieplu.

A weird, unnerving movie from the weird, unnerving Polanski, who has a thing for apartments. It kind of picks up from his earlier Repulsion, in which timid Catherine Deneuve was haunted by demons and things that go bump in her head in her London flat, and Rosemary's Baby, his exploration of witchcraft and devilish doings in the Dakota Apartments in New York.

It's heavy with foreboding as Polanski moves into an apartment in which the previous owner committed suicide. Before you can say "gender-bender by gad", he starts to act strangely and takes on the behavior of the deceased tenant, which is a tad complicated because it was a woman. Pleasing on the eyes is Adjani, all bee- stung lips and porcelain skin, but the real eye-opener is Polanski prancing around in drag with a gash of red lipstick. In European cinema it is perhaps only matched for sexual outlandishness by the image of Helmut Berger, doing his best Marlene Dietrich impression in fishnets and bowler hat, in Visconti's The Damned. Not for the squeamish or shut-ins.

The Goodbye Girl (Herbert Ross, 1977, U.S). Starring Richard Dreyfuss, Marsha Mason, Quinn Cummings, Paul Benedict, Barbara Rhoades. Color, 110 minutes.

Adapted from Neil Simon's Broadway hit, it tells of a hard-up New Yorker (Mason, Simon's then wife) who is forced to take in a difficult, temperamental actor (Dreyfuss, who won an Oscar) as her roommate. She assumes he is not interested in the fairer sex because he is starring in a gay Off-Broadway version of Richard III.

Acclaimed for the snappy repartee between the two leads and Dreyfuss' intense, prickly characterization; his snippety laying of the ground rules to a flabbergasted Mason ("I sleep in the nuuuuuude") is priceless, and may have single-handedly won him the Oscar.

Single White Female (Barbet Schroeder, 1992, U.S.) Bridget Fonda, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Steven Weber, Peter Friedman. Color, 108 minutes.

Give this film a wide berth if you are planning on taking out a classified for a new roomie. Fonda innocently advertises for someone to share her apartment, and ends up with prime psycho material who is given to wearing her clothes, running after her old boyfriends and generally being just plain mean. Look past Fonda's trademark mannered performance and watch as Jason Leigh, one of the most underrated of young Hollywood actresses, chews up the scenery. Bette Davis could not have done better (Bruce Emond).