MARK COUSINS: “Often the best movies are about loneliness and solitude. I’m thinking of Billy Wilder’s film, The Apartment. Towards the end, Shirley MacLaine is at a New Year’s party and she realises that this man who’s been in her life — Jack Lemmon’s character — loves her.
And Billy Wilder, and his cinematographer and his editor, cut from that realisation to her running down the street at night in New York, and she’s running so fast the wind is pushing her coat, and the music is playing ‘dee-dee-dah-dee’, and she’s just running to her man. That kind of run, the run to something euphoric, is superb in the film — and generally in life I think we should run to something euphoric.”