The film made double its $3 million budget at the US and Canadian box office in 1960.[10][11][12] Critics were split on The Apartment.[10][13] Time and Newsweek praised it,[11] as did The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther, who called the film "gleeful, tender, and even sentimental" and Wilder's direction "ingenious".[14] Esquire critic Dwight Macdonald gave the film a poor review,[13] calling it "a paradigm of corny avantgardism".[15] Others took issue with the film's controversial depictions of infidelity and adultery,[13] with critic Hollis Alpert of the Saturday Review dismissing it as "a dirty fairy tale".[10]
MacMurray, having generally played guileless characters, related that after the film's release he was accosted by women in the street who berated him for making a "dirty filthy movie", and one of them hit him with her purse.[6] In 2001, Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert gave the film four stars out of four, and added it to his Great Movies list.[16] The film critic Clarisse Loughrey has identified it as one of her two favorite movies, along with the 2010 film Boy.[17] The film holds a 93% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 103 reviews with an average rating of 8.8/10; the site's consensus states that "Director Billy Wilder's customary cynicism is leavened here by tender humor, romance, and genuine pathos".[18] On Metacritic, the film has a score of 94 out of 100 based on 21 reviews, and was awarded the "Must-See" badge.[19]
