Avanti! (1972) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

Scoop's notes in white:

When you think of screen nudity, the names "Jack Lemmon" and "Juliet Mills" probably don't pop into your head. Perhaps they should, just based on this film. They went skinny dipping, Lemmon took a bath onscreen, and they had an apres-sex scene. By the time the film was over, everything had been exposed except Lemmon's willie.

I'm sure you all know who Jack Lemmon is. For you younger people, Juliet Mills was the sister of Hayley Mills. They were a couple of English actresses who started their careers as child stars, and had syrupy sweet Disneyesque images. I guess you might compare them to the Olsens today, sorta. As an adult, Juliet had starred in a sappy North American TV series called Nanny and the Professor. After that fizzled, she wanted to give her career more depth and to demonstrate she could handle a mature role, so Avanti! was the role that was to change her career around, breaking her away from her lily-white image.

The petite, diminutive Mills even gained 25 pounds in six weeks (under orders from Billy Wilder) in order to play the plump Pamela Piggott.

I can't say that it really helped her career. Two years later, she was offered the lead in an insane Eurocrap movie in which she played the mother of Satan's child, ala Rosemary's Baby, and then she basically headed back to television for the rest of her life, except for occasional bit parts in obscure movies.

Mr. Lemmon did fine after the film, as you probably know. People promptly forgot the sight of his wrinkly butt, and his popularity continued unabated.

Avanti! is a Billy Wilder comedy. Billy Wilder is one of the greatest writers and directors in Hollywood history. There are six films in the IMDb Top 250 which were directed by Wilder in which he also receives a writing credit. That includes three of the Top 50!

1. (8.59) - Double Indemnity (1944)
2. (8.59) - Sunset Blvd. (1950)
3. (8.50) - Some Like It Hot (1959)
4. (8.39) - Apartment, The (1960)
5. (8.29) - Stalag 17 (1953)
6. (8.28) - Witness for the Prosecution (1957)

Most of the great Wilder movies were made in the 50's and early 60's. Wilder and his favorite star, Jack Lemmon, still had some energy in the 1972 anti-establishment era, but they were still making the same kind of 50s movies, and the world had passed them by. By then this style really seemed quaint compared to Robert Altman's M.A.S.H. and some of the other new filmmakers of the time. Given the passage of thirty more years, the humor is badly dated now. You may not find it very funny at all, unless you are trapped in a time-warp and still like the style of comedies written by people like Neil Simon.

You know what? That didn't bother me much at all.

Even though I didn't think it was very funny, I still liked the movie. Even though it was old-fashioned even in its own time, and is therefore quite dated now, it is a sweeter comedy than Wilder's usual fare, and the characters are real and vulnerable enough to make the film retain its charm. To tell you the truth, it is an old-fashioned style of moviemaking that I miss. Wilder took a spectacular locale, placed three essentially nice human beings in that locale with a story conflict, and really explored those three characters in depth, spicing the stew with colorful local characters and customs. While Avanti! is not up to the level of Wilder's Jack Lemmon comedy classics, "Some Like it Hot" and "Irma La Douce", it isn't so bad either.

Lemmon plays a harried American businessman who is in Italy to arrange for his father's body to be transported back to the states. Mills is there for a virtually identical reason, except that in her case the deceased is her mother. It turns out that Lemmon's father and Mills's mother were lovers who had spent 10 years visiting the remote Italian resort for exactly one month each year. Mills was aware of her mother's fling, but Lemmon is now in shock because he thought his father, a powerful CEO, was a devoted husband and a pillar of abstemious puritan virtues. The dramatic/romantic arc of the film is for Lemmon to accept what his father was, then to lose some of his own pompous moral rectitude. It is the duty of Ms Mills to loosen up Lemmon's uptight corporate ass.

The sub-plots generate most of the humor in the film, and basically involve the buttoned-down and efficient corporate American trying to get the laid-back and bureaucratic Italians to snap to attention as if they were his employees back in Maryland. He wants his father's body back in Baltimore for a magnificent funeral which will be attended by every important person in America, including Henry Kissinger, and he wants everything processed within a time frame that is ludicrous by Italian standards. The locals resist his bullying, and go about their normal process of filling out meaningless paperwork, taking all-day lunches, doing nothing on weekends, and scamming off every dollar they can scam from him. The director of the local hotel, who is the third main character in the film, uses his local knowledge and personal contacts to navigate the Italian culture and bribe the right judges.

Avanti! is not one of Wilder's best (he was 66 at the time it was made), but mediocre Wilder is still a pretty easy watch. I found it a very pleasant way to pass two hours.

And it must hold Wilder's personal record for the most nudity in one of his films.

It's a must-own for film buffs, and it is a must-watch for film nudity buffs, since it is the only screen flesh from Mills.