Rent Avanti! (1972)

well cast rom com delights - Avanti! review by AW

Jack Lemmon is just as you'd expect and Juliet Mills is wonderfully cast as the perfect foil. A bizarre link brings them together in Ischia, and Italian magic happens. A feel-good movie that hasn't dated.

Lesser Wilder. - Avanti! review by Steve

Disappointing later Billy Wilder comedy which takes an already slender premise and stretches it over 144 minutes. Jack Lemmon plays a wealthy US business executive who travels to Italy to claim his father’s body for burial. And discovers that he was conducting a long affair with a lower class English woman, whose corpse is collected by Juliet Mills.

Essentially it’s the familiar story of an uptight wage slave liberated by the beauty and culture of Italy. And the more pastoral way of life. Which always works, except this time. While the location shoot around Naples is alluring, there are multiple problems. Jack Lemmon is usually so reliable at giving unlikable characters just enough charm to be sympathetic….

But his irascible corporate entitlement is too maddening. The American abroad comedy is incredibly patronising towards the foreign stereotypes. Apparently, they can’t make decent coffee in Italy! Also the 66 year old director feels prurient and old fashioned in his use of nudity and swearing.

It isn’t a disaster. There is some decent topical humour; which is even mildly subversive. Clive Revill is convivial as another of the director’s wily finaglers. Unfortunately, though the source Broadway play is opened out skilfully, Wilder develops some scenarios purely because the relaxed censorship of the 1970s now permits. And in doing so, exposes a lack of taste.