Word: juliets
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...PLAY'S chief interest, however, lies in the characters of Angelo, the novitiate Isabella, and her brother Claudio. The ironically named Angelo condemns Claudio to death for impregnating his fiancee Juliet, Isabella pleads for her brother's life: and Angelo, his lust aroused, promises to spare Claudio only if she will sleep with him. Despite Claudio's imploring, Isabella refuses to surrender her chastity, but goes along with the trick of letting Angelo's long-ago-jilted fiancee Mariana take her place...
RUDOLF NUREYEV has been a highly photogenic figure during his career, both onstage and off: from the filmed ballet, Romco and Juliet, to the television tape of The Sleeping Beauty ballet; from his early exploits in Haight-Ashbury, to tales of his explosive temperament--most recently one about his slapping a clumsy ballerina in the face during a performance. Rudolf Nureyev: I Am a Dancer, is the most comprehensive footage on the man and his work to date, but the film offers little insight into its subject's flamboyant personality. Instead, it tiptoes around the man as though too much...
Worst of all, the show seems to be dating badly. Maybe the idea of rewriting Romeo and Juliet as a plea for ethnic tolerance seemed more startling in the '50s than it does now. Maybe putting a gang of Puerto Ricans and a gang of non-Puerto Ricans on the stage and letting them slug it out in a ballet had more impact then. (Maybe Jerome Robbins's choreography was better than this production's, I suppose.) In any event, as a showstopping obscenity, "mother-loving" just doesn't make it any more...
Armbruster says of Pamela, "Little girl! She's built like a Japanese wrestler." His quip fails, it hardly describes Juliet Mills. Not even plump, despite the insistence of the script, she single-handedly rescues the film from the early indulgence it grants Lemmon, allowing him to rant and rave and make monologue about the "grey haired son of a bitch." "Love is for filing clerk's, but not for the head of a conglomerate," he argues...
...Juliet Mills, in her first lead role, shows talent despite the 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...