Word: avanti
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...Avanti' is no bomb: it's simply a minor comedy by a man who, despite his past triumphs, looks more and more like a minor director. The film spits out gags incessantly, with a slight but consistent miscalculation that makes them less than uproarious. Jack Lemmon plays Wendell Armbruster Jr., a harried cliche of an executive, a Baltimoron whose morals are romantically updated in the course of the film. Armbruster flies to Italy to claim the body of his father the conglomerate chief, who had driven off a cliff during his annual convalescence at a resort south of Naples...
...film's limitations. Most scenes are funny only if she is in them: when Lemmon plays against the terribly typed Italians the film degenerates into a patronzing travesty of Italian inefficiency and hurrsucracy. Such jokes must build on one another to be successful, until one caps the sequence, but Avanti! lacks the pacing needed to make a scene more than a succession of little jokes. Only near the end, when Edward Andrew enters as J.J. Blodgett of the State Department, does the film hit its stride...
...landing gear, the mortuary, and the like. He hopes on establish ambiance based on the incongruity of Italy the jet set vacation spot and the "real" Italy--a country he feebly represents with fetching shots of nuns, priests, hungry boys, and a breast-feeding woman. The incongruity is, in Avanti!, only a clumsy attempt to create an ironic background for ironic romance...
...more important problem: Wilder cannot, when working in a place that is real, create a picture that seems real. His great environments of past films--the Hollywood of Sunset Boulevard (1950), or speak easy Chicago in Some Like it Hot (1959)--were made from studio sets, and even in Avanti' the best creations are the hotel bedrooms, which are not Italian...
...Italy is not a country, it is an emotion," someone says, and the strolling musicians play on: The viewer of Avanti' is treated to the spectacle of romantic Italy transforming the morals of the executive, allowing him to feel truly in love. But no real change in the man occurs. At first he has a sense of propriety, if not of morality, telling him philandering may be excused but romance may not. In the end, it seems, he has discovered the essence of love. He has taken up with the empathetic Miss Piggott, allowed his father's burial in Italy...