Avanti (1972 Billy Wilder)

We just can't leave it alone. Every time we go to or come back from Italy...

Notes:

Lemmon as roses. Clive Revill brilliant as Carlucci: "When do you sleep?" "In the winter."

The film seems full of Lubitsch touches. Like Hitchcock making Frenzy (basically a return to his old London films) Wilder is going against the grain of the American New Wave in 1972 making an old-time comedy (though it's full of up-to-the-minute pot-shots at the US, Italy and England).

Pippo Franco is the meticulous pathologist. "He always lunches well. He knows all the widows."

A great character actor, Franco joins the ranks of brilliant supporting players like Walter Hampden and Marcel Hillaire in Sabrina.

"Let's have what they would have had."

This surely is from where the Airplane! joke is derived.

"This 'dame' is my niece. She was raised by the Carvelline Sisters!" (Whoever they may be.) Can Juliet Mills look any more angelic? (Compare to So Well Remembered.) She is perfect in this film.

Note Juliet's restless feet in the scene where they're having breakfast in bed together.

Earlier Avanti