Avanti! (1972) is one of the best late-career films from writer/producer/director Billy Wilder, though he personally professed not to be terribly fond of it. Jack Lemmon plays a straight-laced, middle-aged American businessman who travels to Italy to collect the body of his father, who has died in a car accident. He soon meets an English woman (Juliet Mills) who has arrived to claim the body of her own dead mother. The two figure out that their parents had been carrying on an affair for ten years, meeting secretly in Italy every summer. When Lemmon and Mills encounter continuous bureaucratic red tape in trying to ship the bodies out of Italy, Mills suggests burying the bodies right there in the land that brought them so much happiness. The two meanwhile begin their own affair despite themselves, deciding to carry on their parents' tradition of meeting in Italy every year.

This strange mixture of the poignant and the macabre is oddly appealing and even lyrical, and Avanti! is a movie that not only gets better as it goes along but which improves on successive viewings. Wilder never really saw it that way, telling Cameron Crowe in their book-length series of interviews: "Maybe we went a little 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 [1960]."

There are indeed similarities to The Apartment here, with Lemmon's character functioning as something of a variation on his "C.C. Baxter" in the latter film. There are also shades of Gary Cooper from Wilder's Love in the Afternoon (1957). Cameron Crowe, for his part, described Avanti! as "a melancholy classic steeped in the feelings of a man a long way from home, entering the third act of his life."

Avanti! is based on a play by Samuel Taylor, whose earlier play Sabrina Fair Wilder had adapted into the movie Sabrina (1954). Unlike Sabrina Fair, however, Avanti! was not a Broadway success, closing after just 21 performances in 1968. When Wilder's regular writing partner I.A.L. Diamond was unavailable to work on the screenplay, Wilder turned to other collaborators: Julius Epstein, Norman Krasna and Italian writer Luciano Vincenzoni (Seduced and Abandoned [1964]; The Good, the Bad and the Ugly [1966]) all took cracks at the script, but Wilder was unsatisfied. Finally Diamond became available, and the duo knocked out a script that worked. It was easy enough for them - they had already worked together eight times (and would do so again on three further films). Wilder recalled of his work with Diamond: "We changed the emphasis from a dialogue on American versus Italian values to a bittersweet love story, a little like Brief Encounter [1945], which I always admired."

Wilder shot Avanti! entirely in Italy in the summer of 1972, working mainly on the Amalfi coast with some studio work in Rome. He used an Italian crew who were awed by Wilder's friendly atmosphere on the set and by his accomplishment in bringing the film in $100,000 under budget. They also admired his exacting approach. Charlotte Chandler, for instance, has written that production designer Alessandro von Normann "described how Wilder had the hotel sets designed to accommodate the dialogue, timing how long it would take to speak lines while moving from one spot to another. 'He was so precise. To ask a production designer about this was unusual. He wanted to be sure the lines covered the movement.'"

As for the cast, Avanti! marked the fifth time Wilder and Lemmon worked together. Two more films would follow (The Front Page [1974] & Buddy Buddy [1981]). Wilder said that playing romance was perhaps Lemmon's only weakness as an actor but that in Avanti!, "we made him as romantic as possible."

For the leading lady, Wilder recalled how he searched and searched for an appropriate overweight actress. She had to be fat, he said, "so that you don't feel sorry for him because he goes back to his wife... She had to have some defect. I did not want her to limp [but to] just [be] a girl that if she wanted to, she could lose twenty pounds." After not finding an overweight actress who was right for the role, Wilder hired Juliet Mills, "and though she tried to gain the weight, she ate and ate and mysteriously couldn't gain a pound." Other sources, however, claim that Mills actually did gain 25-30 pounds for the part. Even Mills herself told author Charlotte Chandler, "It was more fun gaining it than losing it."

Lemmon and Mills have a nude scene together, the first to appear in any Billy Wilder film. Mills later said, "If one must do a nude scene, Jack Lemmon is the perfect partner. I think he was more nervous than I, but he was acting funny to help me through it."

"Avanti" is Italian for "advance," as in saying "come in" when someone knocks on the door. In 1975, playwright Samuel Taylor revised Avanti! and changed the title to A Touch of Spring for a run on London's West End. That production fared much better than the original Broadway version.

Producer: Billy Wilder
Director: Billy Wilder
Screenplay: I.A.L. Diamond, Billy Wilder, based on the play by Samuel A. Taylor
Cinematography: Luigi Kuveiller
Art Direction: Ferdinando Scarfiotti
Music: Carlo Rustichelli, Gianfranco Plenizio
Film Editing: Ralph E. Winters
Cast: Jack Lemmon (Wendell Armbruster, Jr.), Juliet Mills (Pamela Piggott), Clive Revill (Carlo Carlucci), Edward Andrews (J. J. Blodgett), Gianfranco Barra (Bruno), Franco Angrisano (Arnold Trotta), Pippo Franco (Mattarazzo).
C-144m. Letterboxed.

by Jeremy Arnold

Sources:
Charlotte Chandler, Nobody's Perfect
Cameron Crowe, Conversations With Wilder
Bernard F. Dick, Billy Wilder
Don Widener, Lemmon
Maurice Zolotow, Billy Wilder in Hollywood