Avanti! (Wilder, 1972): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 2.40pm
This great, late Billy Wilder film is part of the 'You Must Remember This presents: The Old Man is Still Alive' season at BFI Southbank. Many great directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age, from the 1930 to ’50s, radically changed course in the later years of their career – a theme that runs through the new season of the podcast You Must Remember This and this BFI season. The men behind undeniable classics like It’s a Wonderful Life, My Fair Lady, Sunset Boulevard, Gigi and Psycho, attempted – or were forced – to engage with massive changes in technology; shifts in attitudes towards race and gender, and a new generation of studio executives and audiences who could be sceptical that an ‘old man’ had anything to offer in a world obsessed with burning down the past and starting fresh. Some railed against the new ‘degenerate’ cinema made by, in Billy Wilder’s phrase, ‘the kids with beards’ and tried to preserve the status quo; others attempted to make films that confronted the generation gap and a transformed society.
The 35mm presentation also screens on April 23rd. Full details of the season can be found here.
Chicago Reader review:
This 1972 release is the most underrated of all Billy Wilder comedies
and arguably the one that comes closest to the sweet mastery and lilting
grace of his mentor, Ernst Lubitsch. Jack Lemmon arrives at a small
resort in Italy to claim the body of his late father, who’s perished in a
car accident; there he meets Juliet Mills, whose mother has died in the
same accident and, as it turns out, had been having an affair with the
father. The development of Mills and Lemmon’s own romance over various
bureaucratic complications is gradual and leisurely paced; at 144
minutes, this is an experience to roll around on your tongue. Wilder and
I.A.L. Diamond adapted a relatively obscure play by Samuel A. Taylor,
and the lovely music is by Carlo Rustichelli; with Clive Revill and
Edward Andrews.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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