Avanti! (1972)

[James Luckard]

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.