In 'The Apartment' (1960), what is the name of the insurance company where C.C. Baxter works?

The story behind the answer

In “The Apartment” (1960), C.C. Baxter works for the insurance company Consolidated Life.

Baxter, played by Jack Lemmon, is a low-level accounting clerk in the company’s enormous Manhattan headquarters. He works in the Ordinary Policy Department, Premium Accounting Division, at desk number 861 on the nineteenth floor. The film’s opening narration emphasizes the scale and impersonality of this corporate world.

Baxter hopes to advance at Consolidated Life, so he lends his Upper West Side apartment to senior executives for their extramarital affairs. His arrangement brings him promotions and favors, but it also leaves him homeless on many evenings and entangles him in the personal life of personnel director Jeff Sheldrake.

The company is fictional, but its structure reflects the postwar rise of the “organization man”: a white-collar employee working inside a vast bureaucracy. Billy Wilder’s comedy uses Consolidated Life to satirize ambition, office hierarchy, adultery, and the moral compromises hidden behind respectable corporate routines.

Source: Wikipedia · fact-checked Aug. 2026

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