Late, Funny, Sexy Billy Wilder
SPOILERS
Like a few others of his generation, Billy Wilder rather peaked in the late fifties and early sixties as a filmmaker: the dynamic duo of "Some Like It Hot" (1959) and "The Apartment" (1960) fit their era like gloves. These were funny movies with a sexual frankness that the JFK generation wanted to enjoy in their censored movies, just a few years before the hippies, the sexual revolution and the "R"-rated movie would break all the barriers.
"Some Like It Hot" was monumentally funny and complex in its study of cross-dressing males on the run from the mob with Marilyn Monroe in the vicinity. "The Apartment" had an extra dose of drama and heart that won it the Best Picture Oscar and Wilder the Best Director and Best Screenplay Oscars. Oscar Presenter Moss Hart whispered: "Time to quit, Billy" as he picked up his third Oscar of the night.
But Billy didn't quit. One big hit lay ahead -- the overtly sexy "Irma La Douce" of 1963 -- but for the most part, Billy Wilder's post-"Apartment" period was indeed, a time of decline and downfall, as various of his movies flopped in a decade when the movies were changing fast: "One Two Three", "Kiss Me Stupid," "The Fortune Cookie" -- none of them made big money. And Wilders' surprisingly sumptuous and sad 1970 "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes" was cut down to size by the studio and flopped, too.
Like his contemporary Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder elected to stay in the fight as the 70's hit. With the new freedom of the screen allowing the "R" rating, Hitchcock and Wilder in 1972 each elected to put some nudity, sex and cusswords in their new movies.
Hitchcock's 1972 R-rated movie was a grim thriller about a sex maniac called "Frenzy." Wilder's R-rated 1972 movie was a saucy, melancholy comedy about an adult affair called "Avanti." Both films were artistic comebacks for their makers -- but Wilder's, alas, drew no audience. Unlike Hitchcock, Wilder couldn't rely on suspense and horror to draw customers. Hitchcock got a comeback hit; Wilder just got a comeback.
Hitchcock couldn't attract any stars to work in "Frenzy." He worked with unknowns. Billy Wilder had a good friend in a star from an earlier era grown old, Jack Lemmon, who starred in "Avanti" less than a year before appearing in his Oscar-winning role as a middle-aged man in crisis in "Save the Tiger."
"Avanti" carries echoes of "The Apartment" before it (in the film's mix of the sad and the hilarious, the sexy and the cynical), and "Save the Tiger" after it (Jack Lemmon, the bubbly young man of the 50's and 60's, would now become the neurotic, worn-out middle-aged American male of the 70's and beyond.)
Whereas most of Billy Wilder's comedies of the sixties had been in rather grim black-and-white, with the romance practically squeezed out of them (particularly in "One Two Three" and "The Fortune Cookie"), "Avanti" follows the romantic lead of "Sherlock Holmes" one film before it: Billy Wilder films in gorgeous color here, and takes a romantic view of adultery with just the right amount of bile.
The plot is elsewhere on this website but capsulized: middle-aged Baltimore business magnate Jack Lemmon flies alone to the coast of Italy to retrieve the body of his father, the company President who died in a car crash on his annual vacation alone. Lemmon soon learns several things: (1) A woman died in the car with his father; (2) his father had been meeting this woman, his mistress, for a yearly vacation affair at the same Italian hotel and (3) the mistress has a daughter who has come for her MOTHER's body.
This is a "complications farce" that combines classic Billy Wilder (cynical one-liners, saucy innuendo, sentiment at the end) with some "new age" Wilder (gorgeous outdoor Italian coast locations, nudity.)
One suspects that Wilder enjoyed this one opportunity, after years of censorship, to "let it all hang out," nudity-wise. But he never did so again in the three movies to follow. "Avanti" is rather a creature of the somewhat raunchy early seventies at the movies. The nudity consists, in equal measure, of brave middle-aged Jack Lemmon (in good enough shape for all men of a similar age to feel motivated to work out), and ostensibly "chubby" Juliet Mills, who, coming off of a sacharine TV show called "Nanny and the Professor," made a few eyeballs pop out that much more when she showed off her wonderfully supple body (and breasts) in a key sequence on an ocean rock.
The nudity was new for Billy Wilder, but what one likes most about "Avanti" is its charm, with one scene dovetailing neatly into the next, and complications ensuing with the sure writing skill of Wilder and his writing partner IAL Diamond at their near-best.
The Italian characters are wonderful, too, chiefly Clive Revell as the resourceful hotel manager who got things done for Lemmon's father and gets things done now for the son. The Trotti Family of Italian wine-growers look like a combination of Mafiosi and circus freaks (Lemmon notes, "That's a lotta Trottis.") The blackmailing hotel valet and his moustachioed maid girlfriend are a funny pair. But single-scene-honors go to the actor playing the official whose ritual to stamp the paperwork for body disposal is a ballet of hand-eye-coordination and musical timing.
Given that the parents of Lemmon and Mills were lovers, and that Lemmon is currently married as his father was up til his death, "Avanti" follows a rather tricky path: we find ourselves rooting for the son and daughter to rekindle their late parents' adulterous romance. And we get our wish.
What intrigues me about this is that 12 years before -- an eternity in movie history -- Billy Wilder had set up an adulterous businessman as the conniving VILLAIN of "The Apartment": Fred MacMurray as the very-married insurance company executive who strings Shirley MacLaine along about divorcing his wife while wanting her "just for kicks."
Billy Wilder here demonstrates that with a certain care and preparation, the villain of "The Apartment" can become the romantic lover of "Avanti." Part of the deal, interestingly enough, is to keep Jack Lemmon's business mogul a fairly irritable and arrogant guy all the way through "Avanti" -- he's a tough and uncaring character to start with, and this affair may actually send him back home a better man with the wife and kids.
For her part, Juliet Mills spends the movie being called "fat" (when she's actually rather shapely) and gets our immediate sympathy. We want her to find a little happiness, and if its in recreating her mother's affair with this irrasicible business exec, so be it. (Mills gets a great bit when, in a happy solo tourist tour of the coast, she spots three little Italian boys waiting hopefully by an ice cream vendor. Mills buys four ice cream cones -- and eats them all herself, leaving the boys in vast disappointment.)
Unlike Hitchcock, who studiously avoided contemporary references in his movies to keep them "timeless," Billy Wilder loved to discuss current events in his movies. Hence "Avanti" comes with references to such Nixon-era figures as Henry Kissinger and Ralph Nader, and features a Nixonesque American diplomat (played by classic bespectacled 60's character guy Edward Andrews, in one of his later roles) who is as boorish as the Italian officials are courtly.
In "The Apartment," Billy Wilder famously kept his story tough til almost the end, and then revelled in lovely sentiment right at the end. "Avanti" rekindles this feeling, but Wilder's even more romantic in this movie. His key emotional nudge is a beautiful Italain instrumental heard all over 60's radio and in "The Flight of the Phoenix" (1965.) This one tune keeps "Avanti" a lovely movie right up until its bittersweet end: the lovers must part, but Lemmon, it is suggested, will return "same time, next year" (hey, sounds like another movie) to rejoin his chubby lover.
"Avanti" wasn't a hit in 1972 with audiences. Billy Wilder's type of movie was heading well out of style in an era focussed on sex and violence and special effects spectacle. But it was, in its own special way, a triumph and an artistic comeback for Wilder. His next three and final films would not find its lush, romantic, racy tone. It's a late era gem. Almost rather like a film by Wilder's muse of the 30's, Ernst Lubitsch.
What's great, of course, is that however it flopped in 1972, "Avanti" lives on now with new generations ready to welcome it and enjoy it on DVD and cable. It speaks to a time lost, and to a writer-director who was pretty damn good almost to the end: Billy Wilder, the cynic with a heart of gold.