Avanti! on 35mm
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Director: Billy Wilder Run Time: 144 min. Format: 35mm Film Release Year: 1972
Starring: Clive Revill, Edward Andrews, Gianfranco Barra, Jack Lemmon, Juliet Mills
Screenwriters: Billy Wilder, I.A.L. Diamond from the play by Samuel Taylor
Producer: Billy Wilder
We’re spending the afternoon with film historian, author, podcaster, and Founding Member Karina Longworth and two utterly charming Billy Wilder classics, tying into her ongoing series on the hit podcast You Must Remember This – The Old Man is Still Alive.
Jack Lemmon and Juliet Mills star in this delightful late-era Billy Wilder romantic comedy. Wilder drags a befuddled and irascibly “groovy” Jack Lemmon to Naples in Avanti!, the fifth collaboration between actor and auteur. Playing—get this—an overworked, fuddy-duddy businessman, Lemmon heads to Italy to claim his father’s body after the old man was found dead with a mysterious mistress. The situation opens the door to a romance with the mistress’ daughter, Pamela Piggott (Juliet Mills), and a farcical mystery punctuated by Wilder’s reliable satire, Lemmon’s impeccable wit, and a host of mustachioed bellhops and valets to make his life miserable. A Billy Wilder and Jack Lemmon vacation sex comedy? Sì, grazie.
The Old Man is Still Alive tells the story of 14 directors — including Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, John Huston and more — whose careers began in the early decades of Hollywood, who were still making movies in the 60s and 70s and even 80s. In many cases, these directors, many of them Oscar winners or the men behind undeniable classics like It’s a Wonderful Life, My Fair Lady, Sunset Boulevard, Gigi and Psycho, attempted – or were forced – to engage with massive changes in technology; sudden-seeming shifts in attitudes towards race and gender; and a new generation of studio executives and audiences who could be skeptical that an old man had anything to offer in a world obsessed with burning down the past and starting fresh. Some railed against the new “degenerate” cinema made by, in Billy Wilder’s phrase, “the kids with beards” and tried to keep doing what they had been doing for 30 years; others were quick to try to get with the times by making films that confronted the generation gap and a transformed society (even dropping acid as “research”); others fell somewhere in between.
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