Avanti! (1972)
I'm working my way through the many Billy Wilder films I hadn't seen, and watched this last night.
I was astonished by how good it was, since it's rarely spoken of. I was also surprised to find no thread for it here.
From the coverart on the BD, and from what little I knew of it, I was expecting a madcap farce. Instead I got a beautiful, low-key romance that reminded me a lot of the brilliant Before Trilogy.
I'm really surprised this isn't spoken of among Wilder's best films. I can see the arguments that it might be a wee bit long, and that some of the comic bits could go, but 99% of it is so beautifully observed and brilliantly performed, that none of that matters.
I just watched Irma La Douce, Kiss Me Stupid, The Fortune Cookie and The Front Page, and I was beginning to wonder if Wilder made any genuinely good movies after The Apartment, as I didn't like any of those, but this one truly blew me away.
I will say I also found things to like in Fedora, which I also just watched, but it felt like it had MANY more elements that didn't work than Avanti does.
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