•
Rating: Why did you bring me on top of Posillipo if you don't love me anymore?
Clinging to a tree precariously…
Swept away by an unusual destiny…
What happened between my father and your mother?
This is the Italian title (of_shit) of a delightful '72 film by Billy Wilder shot entirely in Italy. To think that the original title is Avanti! (you already have the Italian title… why complicate things?) Oh well.
Wendell Armbruster Jr. (Jack Lemmon), heir to a Baltimore magnate with interests in industry and extraction, arrives in Ischia on a Saturday to retrieve his father’s body after he died in a car accident. The father, known at home for his impeccable reputation, had spent four weeks a year in Ischia for over a decade, secretly having a relationship with an English woman who also died in the accident. Armbruster Jr. meets Pamela Piggott (Juliet Mills), daughter of the father's lover, also in Ischia for her mother's funeral…
This is the start of this river-comedy (140 minutes!) full of inventions, gags, characters, situations, unexpected events, plot twists, and the devil may take it. A dream natural setting: Ischia, the sea, Vesuvius, the Hotel Excelsior, Italy of the early 70s shown through its characters, overly caricatured, exaggerated, but intentionally so, an exaggeration designed for easy laughs, sometimes coarse, and here we see the influence of Italian comedy that inevitably contaminated this stars/stripes film, if only for the imposing array of supporting characters who give color and structure to a film with a frenetic and syncopated rhythm.
There are many elements that characterize the film (i.e. stuff you find from chock-full of onwards a few lines above). Like the Trotta family’s white Fiat 500, speeding frantically around Ischia’s hairpin turns. The 17 types of pasta, the orchestra, Jack Lemmon's socks, the Italian romance, land of love, good food, music, and sunshine… these details capture my attention because they represent the essence of a film certainly well interpreted by an extraordinary Jack Lemmon as usual and a great Juliet Mills, here at her peak. However, in brief, the setting is up to par with the main dish and perhaps even better. Extravagant and over-the-top characters, sometimes unforgettable, above all a young Pippo Franco (yes, you’ve got it right) as Matarazzo, a funereal municipal employee. The sequence of signing the forms to repatriate the corpses is anthology material, belly-laugh inducing, leaving you impressed by the talent of the young Pippo, a natural-born comedian.
Then there’s Antonio Faà di Bruno the duke-count of Fantozzi at the casino (stop touching my ass!) who here is the hotel concierge; it’s odd seeing a duc-count-lupmann-son-of-a-bitch in the role of a subordinate but there you go. The director Carlo Carlucci (Clive Revill) left me puzzled. In the film, he plays an Italian but he isn’t Italian, and when he speaks Italian his British accent is evident. For Italians, this is certainly disorientating, jarring, out of place but Wilder decided so; it seems that for the director’s role Mastroianni was proposed, then Nino Manfredi and Romolo Valli were considered but they were rejected fearing their Italian accent would have been too strong for the American audience… this doesn’t sit well… in my imagination I like to think Nino (my god of actors) was rejected because otherwise, he would have overshadowed Lemmon or at least often would have "gone above" him. No, I'm not kidding… ah then there’s the blackmailing waiter Bruno, Gianfranco Barra, one of the greatest character actors ever, check out his resume. Then there’s Senza Fine by Gino Paoli, the central theme of the film. What else to say? Consider I haven’t even spoiled half of what you’ll find in this very-long movie. Ah, it's also strange to see Mills’ full nudity in a Wilder film but we’re in ‘72 during the push towards freedom in customs. Luckily 50 years later we've returned to new-middle ages, censorship, finally!
May I come in?
Avanti!
Loading comments slowly
