Word: lemmons
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...Jack Lemmon) flies from Baltimore to the Italian island of Ischia to retrieve the body of vacationing Wendell Armbruster Sr., who has died in an auto wreck. Hardly a promising premise for light romantic comedy, but then Billy Wilder is a director who makes a specialty of unconventional rendezvous...
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...
...Lemmon like his role in Avanti' because, he says, "there've been damn few romantic comedies in recent years." Romantic, indeed, as he and she had down and muse over their desire to remain together, his love all the stronger because he will face anti-trust action when he goes home. No wonder he clings to his lass; no wonder such sentiment at the heliport farewell. The most striking leature of Avanti' is not that it strives no hard to be romantic but that it does include amusing incongruities and cute lines in spite of its quest. Few people would...