"One thing I dislike more than being taken too lightly is being taken too seriously," Billy Wilder reportedly said. So let us say that The Apartment is a comedy of a ridiculous man, with cynical, noirish overtones. Jack Lemmon's midnight cowboy is an insurance-company drone whose only hope of picking his way out of the rat-maze is to give over his apartment for the sexual trysts of his superiors in the hope of being promoted. It's a different take on New York's housing problem (Grand Hotel plays on the apartment t.v.), and also a sexual time-capsule for 1960. Shirley MacLaine's Miss Kubelick, the elevator operator, has her own marvelous brand of gay tragedy; she, too, takes it on the chin, and anywhere she can get it, from boss Fred MacMurray, until she simply wearies of life as a dust-speck. The behemoth company headquarters whose lay-out presages that of Brazil; the office party laced with Christmas jeer (and a grotesque Santa in a smoky bar); some satiric jabs at contemporary corporate language, all are elements of Wilder's very precise angle on our new boys in uniform: the gray flannel suits.