Avanti! ***** (1972, Jack Lemmon, Juliet Mills, Clive Reville, Edward Andrews) – Classic Movie Review 3668

The neglected and underrated 1972 comedy film Avanti! is one of the great director Billy Wilder’s wittiest comedies, with one of Jack Lemmon’s funniest performances as a successful but stuffy Baltimore businessman Wendell Armbruster Jr, who goes to Italy to arrange for the return to America of his tycoon father’s body. But first he discovers that his father died with his longtime mistress, and then he falls in love with her daughter!

He meets free-spirited London shop girl Pamela Piggott (Juliet Mills) on the resort island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples, where they have arrived to pick up the bodies of her mother and his father, killed in an car accident after a ten-year summertime affair. Despite, or because of all that Italy can chuck in their way, Wendell and Pamela pick up where their parents left off…

Juliet Mills turns in a surprisingly charming and affecting performance and there is superb star character acting backup from New Zealand-born Clive Reville, as an Italian hotel manager, Carlo Carlucci, and Edward Andrews as J J Blodgett.

Despite the long running time of 143 minutes and the script’s theatre origins in a 1968 Broadway stage play by Samuel A Taylor, this is a beguiling, often undervalued movie achievement, wittily written by Wilder and I A L Diamond. It is warm and wise, romantic and funny.

Wilder designed the part of Carlucci for Marcello Mastroianni and hoped to get Walter Matthau to play Blodgett. Wilder approached Lynn Redgrave to play Pamela Piggott, but she refused to put on weight for the part. Mills gained 25 pounds in six weeks for the role. Wilder admired Mills in the TV sitcom Nanny and the Professor and personally offered her the role. Mills recalled: ‘I loved Billy Wilder just calling me and asking me to be in his film. No lawyer or agent, his voice, not asking for an audition or a screen test.’

Ischia is a volcanic island in the Tyrrhenian Sea at the northern end of the Gulf of Naples, about 19 miles from Naples.

Avanti! premiered on 17 December 1972 in the US.

Lemmon won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy. The film was nominated for five Golden Globe Awards, including Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy, Best Director, Best Actress – Motion Picture Comedy or Musical, and Best Screenplay.

It cost $2.75 million and earned $1,500,000 in cinema rentals, so it was not a hit. Wilder’s career was unfairly in decline. The play as not a hit either, running just 21 performances. Talent agent Charles Feldman, who had interested Wilder in filming The Seven Year Itch, bought the screen rights and offered it to Wilder.

Some exterior scenes were shot on Ischia but most of them were filmed in Sorrento, on Capri, and along the Amalfi Coast. Interiors were filmed on Italian production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti’s sets at Safa Palatino Studios in Rome after the location shooting in summer 1972.

The cast are Jack Lemmon as Wendell Armbruster Jr, Juliet Mills as Pamela Piggott, Clive Revill as Carlo Carlucci, Edward Andrews as J J Blodgett, Gianfranco Barra as Bruno the valet, Franco Angrisano as Arnoldo Trotta, Franco Acampora as Armando Trotta, Giselda Castrini as Anna the maid, Pippo Franco as Matarazzo, Giacomo Rizzo as the Barman, Antonino Faà di Bruno as the Concierge, Yanti Somer as Nurse, Janet Agren as Nurse, Raffaele Mottola as Passport Officer, Harry Ray as Dr Fleischmann, Ty Hardin as Helicopter Pilot, and Sergio Bruni as Himself.

Wilder said he was disappointed with the film: ‘Maybe we went overboard with some of the comic relief because Avanti! is not a comedy. If this film had worked the way we wanted it to, it would have had more of the quality of The Apartment. I went much farther with forbidden themes than I had with Kiss Me, Stupid but nobody cared. Audiences thought it was too long and too bland. I guess they would have liked it better if it turned out the father was having the affair with one of the bellboys at the hotel.’

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3668

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