Avanti!

Avanti! (Billy Wilder, 1972) Based on a play by Samuel A. Taylor (who wrote Vertigo and Sabrina), Avanti! has been updated to the Nixon 70's by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, as a slightly smutty comedy of manners, where a business-stiff, Wendell Armbruster, Jr. (Wilder muse Jack Lemmon) travels to Ischia, Italy to identify and claim the body of his father (Wendell Armbruster, Sr.). Turns out the son is stiffer than the dead father. He is shocked...shocked!...to find that dear old Dad, who supposedly went to Ischia for the therapeutic baths, was carrying on an torrid affair with a British mistress. This produces a prolonged hissy-fit—Lemmon excelled at these—where everything and everyone seems to be in a conspiracy to make claiming his father's body an unpleasant experience. The idea!

It's a clever idea, actually: Armbruster is such a stifled, constipated American with such a large stick wedged that he can't think of any way but his way in which to do things. And he's in Italy...heck, he's in Europe...which operates on a different clock, and respects things that Americans dismiss nowadays. Like Sundays.
 

And people. 

 

What a "backwards" place.

Before long, if you're anything like me, you start to hate everything American, and want to take an extended vacation...anywhere but in this movie..with this guy! And there's only so much one can take. For gung-ho Americans, it's an extended dig at the Motherland, and for self-loathing liberals, it's preaching to the choir. Either way, it's not an awful lot of fun to watch.

There has always been this quality to the later Wilder films—even The Apartment has it to an extent—a superior attitude that hammers points home far beyond the level of the wood, a decidedly cruel streak given to the characters not yet clued in to their own cluelessness. No empathy. No affection for the character. There's a decided lack of charm imprinted on the Armbruster character (and this from Taylor and Wilder?*) And if I can carry the carpentry metaphor a little further, it makes what could have been an elegant finish look pretty banged up.

What saves the film—setting aside the forward progress of the story and the character of Armbruster—are the performances of Clive Revill as the flusterily accommodating concierge of The Grand Hotel Excelsior, and by Juliet Mills, who plays the mistress' daughter, who has also made the journey to claim her mother's body.

You probably already know what happens, even before you see the film. And that may be why audiences didn't go to see it. That, and it takes so long to get there.  You may have some spark of affection for a retch, but you may not give them too much time, either.

The reason Wilder did this one? Producer-agent Charles Feldman saw it as a play (it ran 28 performances) and bought it for Wilder to make. Feldman, who'd made the disastrous 1967 James Bond spoof Casino Royale, passed away soon after, and Wilder, perhaps out of loyalty and affection for the man who'd given him The Seven Year Itch years earlier, saw it through to the screen. If only more of that grace and affection could have made it into the movie it inspired.

 

* In retrospect, those same charm-less qualities are given to Linus Larabee in Sabrina and the distraught "Scottie" Ferguson in Vertigo.  At points, they are hateful characters, displaying attitudes that challenge an audience.  

These Wilder Years

These Wilder Years (Roy Rowland, 1956) James Cagney plays Steve Bradford, an executive who, for once, takes time off for himself to take care of some unfinished business. He leaves his board of directors in charge and makes it known that if there's an emergency, he can't be reached and somebody else will have to handle it. He's got important business of his own. He doesn't know long it will take, but until it's taken care of, he can't be reached.

He goes back to his hometown and seeks out an orphanage run by Ann Dempster (Barbara Stanwyck), whom he he had contacted previously. She repeats that what he is asking for is quite impossible—she cannot give out the information he seeks. There are rules. That's not the kind of answer Bradford like to hear. He's a captain of industry, a Master of the Universe. He's used to getting what he wants, and if he can't get it one way, he'll find another way to do it—the ends justify the means.

What he's looking for is his son, given up for adoption twenty years previously when he was less successful and less capable of the responsibility. Now, he wants to make amends and be the father he never thought he could be in the past. 

The film was made in 1957 and the subject of unwed mothers was something that was rarely discussed, let alone put on movie screens. If it was, it was slapped with a "Not recommended for General Audiences" label (the kiddies would have to wait for the rating system 11 years in the future). But, this movie had the social conscience—and the business-savvy knowing that the story would never be shown on people's new television sets (where Lucy and Desi had to sleep in separate beds on "I Love Lucy").

So, it makes for an interesting subject to see in a movie from that era; they're not very clinical about it, and don't even use the terms "pregnant" or "unwed mother," and emphasize that these are young girls in a fix and someone has to deal with it and protect all the parties involved. The young men involved in the process are never mentioned—perhaps because you'd have to mention sex—and the only evidence that this might be a shared responsibility is in the character of Bradford who owns up to it twenty years too late.

The reason I was drawn to These Wilder Years was to see old pro's like James Cagney and Barbara Stanwyck playing off each other—in the only time in their careers. The two are a couple of my favorite thesp's and they are not sentimental in their portrayals, playing subtle combatants over the information Cagney's Bradford wants. Bradford is so single-minded and so used to getting his own way that he takes legal action against the orphanage to get what he wants, using his company lawyer Rayburn (Walter Pidgeon, playing with a cynical practicality) to sue Dempster in order to release the information to him...and presumably every other prodigal father.

Stanwyck has the more sympathetic role here, and she plays it with a functionary's stern patience. And Cagney, as always, is a revelation. He has a scene where, quite to his surprise, he finds what he's looking for, and his reactions are a study in complexity, going from realization to surprise to fear to shame to regret without pause or revealing of technique. There's no acting, but considered reacting. It's another example—in a long-running career—of why Cagney is considered THE actor's actor and an artist of the highest caliber.