WasAnnon Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

CommentsXp Best movie ever!

Glimmerubro It is not deep, but it is fun to watch. It does have a bit more of an edge to it than other similar films.

Aneesa Wardle The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

blaberma Not Billy Wilders best but at times funny and an absolutely beautiful movie to look at.Hard to choose which is more beautiful,the Italian Riviera or Juliet Mills in the altogether.This was the Nanny and the Professor that everyone of us who was in love with Juliet Mills wanted to see.The hardest part of the movie to believe is that it takes Jack Lemmon so long to fall in love with her.If you see this movie is on one of your cable channels it is a definite must see for the laughs,the scenery and the loveliness of Italy and Juliet Mills Alpine curves and exquisite English beauty.Edward Andrews and Clive Revill both have a field day with their character roles and were never better.

krautR-930-608582 Well,what shall I write about this movie.It's my favourite movie from my favourite film-maker,Billy Wilder,with my favourite actor,Jack Lemmon.I liked Billy Wilder's movies already as a young boy and nothing has changed since then.As usual I don't want to write much about the movie's story because others have done that already sufficiently-thanks to them. All characters in this movie-really ALL-are played excellently.Billy Wilder obviously had the talent to choose the right actors and to make them give their best. Among all these excellent performances I nevertheless want to mention the outstanding performance of Clive Revill as hotel director Carlo Carlucci.If I had to choose the best five performances in all the movies I ever watched his performance surely would be among them.I also want to mention the performance of Edward Andrews as the bull in a Chinese shop-diplomat J.J. Plodgett.This character is an obvious allusion to Henry Kissinger and it is timeless,as a recently leaked telephone call between two U.S. diplomats shows... I always wondered why the German title of this movie is "Avanti,avanti!" and not,like in the U.S. and nearly everywhere else,only "Avanti!" I think I now found out the reason. "Avanti!" means not only "forward!",but it's also the name of Italy's most important socialist newspaper of the 20ieth century...and the editor-in-chief exactly hundred years ago was nobody else but-Benito Mussolini! So the movie's title "Avanti!" turns out to be an obvious allusion to that all.But don't forget that at that time there was the cold war.So the movie was released in Italy with quite a different title (you can check it) in order to avoid advertising for a socialist newspaper...In Spain the movie also was released with a different title-at that time Franco was still living.And in Germany,where at the time the movie was released there was already living half a million Italian immigrants,the movie was given the name "Avanti,avanti!" also to avoid advertising for a socialist newspaper and to show that "Avanti!" means "forward!" and nothing else...What concerns the chambermaid's moustache-I suppose it wasn't only an unfunny joke.It makes Anna look more or less like a man and gives her affair with Bruno a homosexual undertone-an undertone the changing clothes scene in the plane obviously had.Don't forget the many political (and other) undertones in Billy Wilders movies,not only in "Avanti!" And don't forget that Billy Wilder thought about letting Wendell Armbruster Sr. have on Ischia not an affair with a woman,but-with a man...Some viewers complained about the adultery and the nudity shown in this movie.But nobody complained about the homicide also shown in this movie. Very remarkable.Isn't that exactly the bigotry Billy Wilder wanted to parody with "Avanti!"? By the way,at the time the movie was made there was a referendum in preparation in Italy which intended to abolish the divorce law passed two years ago.Billy Wilder's movie "Avanti!" obviously also had the intention to influence it,portraying Italian men as notoriously adulterous.The referendum failed two years later,by the way.

Kieran Green The incomparable Jack Lemmon is wealthy industrialist Wendell Armbruster who at the last minute travels to the Italien resort of Ischia to pick up the corpse of his father who was killed in an automobile accident. Lemmon crosses paths with free-spirited London shop girl Pamela Piggott Juliet Mills who is revealed to be the daughter of Lemmon's Mistress who have been secretly having a ten-year summertime affair. Straitlaced Wendell tries to avoid a scandal After some confusion with the bodies and a blackmail attempt by unscrupulous locals, Wendell and Pamela extend their parent's affair into the next generation. 'Avanti' is an underrated classic

DavidL360 (1)The reviewer who titled his review in part "a morally suspect film" was right on target: the film gives tacit approval to cheating on a spouse, the latter who in the film, from snippets of phone conversations from Lemmon's end, seems to be a helpful, loyal wife. (2)No realistic motive underlies the romantic relationship of the two main characters. (3) The film assumes a woman would be happy to be alone 11 months of the year, all for the sake of one annual month with a married man, with no prospect of permanent union. (4)The film relies on cheap gags which in turn depend on totally suspending reality. Some examples: (a) at the time the movie was set in the early 1970s (by its own cultural and political references), passport control at Leonardo da Vinci did not stamp most foreign passports; (b) an American official addressing a corpse in a coffin, swearing it in for duty, is not at all credible; (c) who would believe that a man would calmly substitute the corpse of a stranger for his own father and fly that corpse to the U.S. for a large funeral, while consigning his father's corpse to an Italian cemetery with a headstone bearing a false name--all this, to keep his new-found lover happy? For those reviewers who raved about the musical theme: what theme? There was none. There were varying bits of Italian folk music. At the beginning of the film, in Rome and then in Ischia, I heard some bars which I believe came from the Neopolitan comedic folk piece "Io, Tua Madre e Te" repeated a few times, but that was it. It is no surprise that the play the movie was based on had a very short run on Broadway and that the movie version didn't make a splash. The ONLY realistic descriptions of the Italian mentality were the acceptance of marital infidelity, the tangled bureaucracy, and the willingness to use personal connections to help a friend or a friend or relative of a friend. Everything else supposedly typically Italian was a gross exaggeration. (For whatever it's worth, I have no Italian ancestry, but I lived and worked independently in Italy and have some understanding of a country with many mentalities, depending on the region and on the city and town. The only American film about Italy that I've seen that, to me, had any flavor of accuracy was "A Bell for Adano." All other American films set in Italy are fantasies. If one wants to see a film with some realistic depictions of segments of Italian society, one should see those that are those made by Italians. Not all Italian directors, of course - Cinecittà produces lots of bombs too.)