Avanti!

Avanti!

Each year for the past decade, US millionaire Walter Armbruster, Sr., has spent Aug 15 to Sept. 15 at the Grand Hotel Excelsior in Ischia, where he says the radioactive mud baths are good for arthritis, sour stomachs, gout and potency. They must be. Because every one of those years he’s been secretly meeting his mistress who is British.

This becomes apparent only after Walter Armbruster Jr. (Jack Lemmon) shows up at the Italian resort to claim his father’s body. The elder Armbruster took a curve too quickly, alas, and his Fiat plunged 200 yards into a vineyard. His girlfriend was killed too. Her daughter (Juliet Mills) arrives to claim the body; it isn’t love at first sight for the kids.

That Billy Wilder’s “Avanti!” begins with this premise should communicate that it constructs an amiable civilized comedy from such raw materials as trouble with Italian customs, difficulty locating zinc-lined coffins and long lunch hours when nothing can be arranged. And then there is another wrinkle: The enraged Trotta family has stolen their bodies from the morgue and is demanding $2 million for damage to their grape vines.

Wilder compounds these difficulties with several other stories that somehow intersect with the Armbruster saga. There is Bruno the valet, for example, who wants to escape to America away from his pregnant Sicilian girlfriend’s wrath. There are J.J. Blodgett (Edward Andrews), U.S. Ambassador to Italy, and his wife Mrs. Feldman (Elizabeth Dietrichsen),who was Ambassador Armbruster Sr.’s secretary; Blodgett would like to posthumously appoint him so he could send the body back by diplomatic pouch: and there is that Jack Lemmon and Juliet Mills find themselves falling in love just as their parents did.

It happens that no one is better than the Italians at conspiring to help a romance along especially an autumnal romance among old-timers who meet every August. Everybody in the hotel (and particularly the benign manager, played by Clive Revill) conspires; everybody is determined that the kids shall remember their parents properly. The same meals are served, the same songs played and, of course, Lemmon and Miss Mills find themselves luxuriating on the same rock in the same altogether.

“Avanti!” isn’t a laugh-a-minute movie, and it’s about half an hour too long. It’s not what you’d call suspenseful either; we generally figure everything out several minutes before Jack Lemmon does. But it’s good-hearted and some of that goodness wafts in with the location filming; there is also in most of Wilder’s movies with Lemmon a sort of cheerful insouciance as if life were best approached with a wry but puzzled smile.

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