Word: lemmons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
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...
Actor Jack Lemmon will make an appearance today-at the "pre-premiere" of Bill Wilder's latest film Avanti! One hundred free tickets for the film will be available at Hilles this noon; the movie will begin at 12:30 p.m. in the Hilles Library Cinema...
WINTHROP HOUSE. Fri. Sat. 8 and 10 p.m., EMERSON 210. $1. West European Studies and Dudley Films are co-sponsoring a preview screening of Avanti, a new Billy Wilder film. Jack Lemmon will discuss the film after the screening at the HILLES LIBRARY CINEMA. Fri., 12.30 discussion app. 2:30, 100 free tickets will be distributed, first-come, first-serve beginning noon Friday...