It came as a shock to me when a friend actually wanted to watch Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard with me. What was even more funny was after it all was over and that said friend said that she thought the movie was “cute”. Sunset Boulevard, one of the greatest films ever made, is many things -- but “cute”? I don’t know. But then again, this girl was pretty unusual! In a good way, of course.

Avanti!, a film from 1972, is much closer to the cute Billy Wilder movie that she thought she saw.

Jack Lemmon is Wendall Armbruster, whose family owns a huge corporation. He has just found out while on the golf course that his father died in a traffic accident while staying in Italy. Wendall has to scramble to get a ticket to Rome -- he can’t even get a change of clothes, and has to ask the guy sitting next to him on the plane to switch clothes with him, resulting in a mix-up with the passports at the Rome airport.

When he reaches the hotel, he discovers that his father was much loved and missed. He has been staying at this same hotel for the last ten summers that he has vacationed here, so everyone at the hotel knew him well. Wendell also discovers that Italian life is far more easy-going and laid-back than the cutthroat rhythm of the American capitalist business world. For example, Wendell finds out to his dismay that the funeral home is closed until four for lunch! The manager of the hotel helpfully tells him that in Italy, we don’t just pick up a snack, we cook our pasta, we make our love, etc.

He is aware of a woman who seems to follow him wherever he goes. She is a British woman, Pamela, played by Juliet Mills. Actually, she’s not following him -- she and he actually are going to the same place. You see, it turns out that there was a lot more to the accident than Wendall was led to believe. There was two people who died in the accident; both Wendall’s father and Pamela’s mother. And the two were having a clandestine affair for the past decade. All these years that Wendall’s dad was supposedly out to relax and rest, he actually was carrying on an affair with this British woman, but was left a secret to all but the people who work at the hotel.

Wendall is not too impressed. I’m thinking that this movie is sneering at American prudishness, because Wendall seems to be the only guy who is offended at the fact that his dad was having an extramarital affair. The Italians are depicted as carefree people who are permissive and tolerant about pretty much everything, and Pamela herself is more sympathetic to the romance and idealism of the relationship -- after all, they set aside a special time, one month per year, to have this affair away from the public eye, away from their real lives back home. Wendall, on the other hand, just can’t stop feeling bitter that his dad, who is supposed to be a great and moral man, a pillar of the business community, was a philanderer who cheated on his family with some strange European woman.

What emerges is both a farce and an unusual form of romance. The farce comes in the red tape that Wendall and Pamela must go through in order to be able to take home the bodies of their parents. This plays into the laid-back nature of Italian life -- Wendall needs three forms to be able to get the body out of the country, and that involves the hotel manager trying to get a hold of a bunch of the appropriate people. But that’s not so easy, as the bureaucracy moves so slowly. But the hotel manager seems to know all sorts of people that could help him pull some strings to make the process move a little faster -- such as the cousin and the judge who each have the same mistress!

More comedy ensues when the bodies are stolen! They are taken by the owners of the grape plantation where the accident happened. The brothers want compensation for the damaged property -- but American dollars aren’t good enough for them, apparently!

The romance is rather unusual. Pamela wants to honor the memory of the deceased couple’s romance by basically finishing their holiday for them, and doing the things they used to do. Like going to their favorite restaurant, having the same meal and drinks .... and skinny-dipping in the river at sunrise! Wendall sort of goes along with the whole thing, and his neurotic behavior around this more free-spirited gal gives this movie a cuteness that doesn’t descend into sappiness. Soon, Wendall loosens up a little bit -- well, not too much, but enough to understand that he doesn’t need to be so uptight all the time anymore.

Avanti! is one of Billy Wilder’s later films, and was made at a time, so goes the general consensus, when this sort of film was going out of style. Despite the R rating (for fairly mild bad language, and nudity during the skinny-dipping scene), Avanti! would probably be the sort of movie that would have been more popular in the 50’s or 60’s than in the early 70’s. The filmmaking is fairly old-fashioned, and is nothing like some of the strangeness that came out of Hollywood studios during the early 70’s. By chance, I watched Bob Rafelson’s The King of Marvin Gardens a few days later -- this was a film also released in 72, but is avant-garde, gritty, surreal, the sort of thing that was “in” during these times.

Seen in 2004, I thought that Avanti! was a pretty cute comedy. It doesn’t have the bite of The Apartment or Sunset Boulevard, of course -- Avanti! is closer to the sophisticated romantic comedy, cute but not too cute, romantic but not sappy, with an equal helping of laughs to go with its love story. Avanti! suffers from the overlength that seemed to be common in Wilder’s later films (even Some Like It Hot was more than two hours, and both Avanti! and Irma La Douce run well past 140 minutes, very long for fluffy comedies), but even with the overlength, Avanti! is pleasant. Jack Lemmon is great, as he was in all of the Wilder films he appeared in (Some Like it Hot, The Apartment, Irma La Douce, The Fortune Cookie). Juliet Mills is cute -- and I suppose another quibble I’d have is the fact that her character complains about being overweight, even though there’s no evidence to suggest that she ought to worry about anything. Actually, the skinny dipping scene gives us ample evidence that she’s just fine the way she is! And overall, while this isn’t Wilder’s best, Avanti! is certainly enjoyable fun!

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good Date Movie