Avanti! (1972)

          It seems fair to call Avanti! not only the best of Billy Wilder’s four ’70s features, but also his last truly satisfying movie—although such remarks may strike readers as damning with faint praise, since Wilder’s late-career output is unquestionably inferior to the classics he made in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s. Indeed, Avanti! pales next to, say, Some Like It Hot (1959), but, quite frankly, what comedy doesn’t? That said, Avanti! compensates for significant shortcomings with copious amounts of charm, cleverness, and wit. Although the picture never scales comic heights, instead generating mild amusement from start to finish, it puts across a farcical love story with credibility and sensitivity. Just as importantly, Avanti! reteams Wilder with his most frequent leading man, Jack Lemmon, the perfect interpreter for Wilder’s brand of male angst.

          The story takes place in Italy, where American businessman Wendell Armbruster Jr. (Lemmon) travels to collect the remains of his father, recently killed in a car crash. Before long, Wendell realizes that his father died alongside a female companion, whose daughter, Pamela Piggott (Juliet Mills), travels to Italy to claim her mother’s body. Myriad complications prevent Wendell from achieving his simple goal. Pamela agitates to have the bodies buried in Italy, because that’s where her mother and Wendell Sr. met for annual trysts over the course of a decade. Italian bureaucrats smother Wendell with paperwork. Gangsters steal the corpses in order to extort money. Meanwhile, Wendell slowly evolves from being a fussbudget preoccupied with propriety into an emotional being vulnerable to Pamela’s appeal, echoing the way Wendell Sr. changed during his visits to Italy. Everything in the story is contrived and schematic, of course, but it works. Or, to place a finer point on the matter, it works well enough.

          Adapting a play by Samuel A. Taylor, Wilder and frequent writing partner I.A.L. Diamond expertly coordinate a slew of running gags, weaving comedy and romance together with grace and style. What their adaptation sorely lacks, however, is economy—Avanti! runs a preposterous 140 minutes, with myriad scenes that could easily have been omitted or at least trimmed. The movie is never boring for more than a moment or two, but the narrative bloat diminishes the overall impact. So, too, does the fixation on Pamela’s weight, which, to modern sensibilities, seems as Neanderthal as the film’s overt statements to the effect that all successful men are entitled to mistresses. As always in Wilder’s films, adultery is a joke instead of a cruel betrayal. Still, Lemmon and Mills come off remarkably well, as does Clive Revill, an Englishman dubiously cast as an Italian hotel manager; for a film suffused with authentic local flavor, thanks to alluring location photography and lovely Italian music, Revill’s casting is a false note, albeit an inoffensive one.

Avanti!: GROOVY

Fedora (1978)

          After cresting with the acclaimed one-two punch of Some Like It Hot (1959) and The Apartment (1960), Billy Wilder’s monumental film career began a slow decline, despite a brief return to form with The Fortune Cookie (1966). And though Fedora was not actually Wilder’s last film—he persuaded Fortune Cookie costars Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau to reteam for the pointless Buddy Buddy (1981)—Fedora is in many ways the nail in Wilder’s creative coffin. Everything in the movie is an echo of something Wilder did better earlier in his career. In fact, Fedora is so painfully old-fashioned that except for some coarse language and a brief nude scene, the movie feels as if it was made in the 1940s.

          Frequent Wilder leading man William Holden plays Berry “Dutch” Detweiler, an independent movie producer whose career has hit the skids. Berry travels to Greece in order to contact reclusive movie star Fedora, with whom he had a brief affair in the 1940s. Although she’s unofficially retired from acting after abandoning her last movie midway through production, Fedora is as a legend from Hollywood’s Golden Age who, incredibly, still has her looks. Upon arriving in Greece, Berry discovers that Fedora is a virtual prisoner inside her estate on a private island, and that the people around her will use any means necessary to repel intruders. Nonetheless, desperation coupled with growing concern for Fedora’s welfare compels Berry to solve the mystery of her circumstances.

          Fedora hinges on a massive plot twist that appears mid-movie, but the “twist” is obvious and predictable. Furthermore, the disastrous second half of Fedora comprises a lengthy series of dialogue scenes that trigger explanatory flashbacks. Alas, neither the dialogue scenes nor the flashbacks add much in the way of believability or dimension. Given the great heights to which Wilder and frequent writing partner I.A.L. Diamond had soared in previous films, the clumsiness that pervades their script for Fedora is shocking. So, too, is Wilder’s lack of directorial taste.

          Excepting a pithy running gag involving an obsequious hotel manager, most scenes drag on at torturous length. The casting of the Fedora role is calamitous, with leading lady Marthe Keller stuck doing an anemic Dietrich/Garbo imitation. The score by Miklós Rózsa is musty and oppressive. And the hard-boiled voiceover delivered by Holden serves virtually no purpose, since most of the information contained in the voiceover gets repeated during regular scenes. Worst of all, the basic storyline—about a vain movie star who ruins peoples’ lives in order to fight the aging process—is a sickly cousin to the plot of Wilder’s behind-the-scenes masterpiece Sunset Blvd. (1950). Therefore, despite sleek production values and an enjoyably cynical performance from Holden, the experience of watching Wilder struggle to reclaim past cinematic glory is just sad.

Fedora: FUNKY

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)

          One of Hollywood’s most glorious careers began a steady downward slide with this intelligent but overwrought riff on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s beloved fictional detective. Billy Wilder, who directed and produced the film in addition to co-writing the script (with longtime collaborator I.A.L. Diamond), was probably the wrong person to make a Holmes movie, simply because Wilder’s career was filled with so many brilliantly original stories and witty adaptations. In other words, making a new iteration of a familiar character was beneath his talents. Further confounding expectations is the misleading title, since The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is more of a mystery than a character piece. (The 1976 Holmes film The Seven-Per-Cent Solution dug far deeper into the detective’s psychological makeup.) Another caveat regarding The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is that the movie is far too long given its trifling narrative. Released at 125 minutes but originally envisioned as being even longer, the picture represents a tendency toward cinematic bloat that troubled Wilder throughout the last decade, give or take, of his career.

          Taking these disclaimers into consideration, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is perhaps best characterized as frustrating but rewarding for viewers who are willing to accept narrative detours.

          The clever story begins with a long preamble about Holmes’ amusing meeting with a Russian ballerina, which leads to an elaborate mistaken-sexuality joke at the expense of Holmes’ best friend, Dr. Watson. Wilder stages these farcical scenes beautifully, and the prologue introduces viewers to the enchanting world of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, courtesy of Christopher Challis’ painterly cinematography and Miklós Rósca’s resplendent music. Nonetheless, the whole sequence is superfluous. After the prologue, Wilder unveils his main story, a larky caper involving a beautiful Belgian amnesiac; ancient Scottish castles; nefarious monks; clandestine operations of the British government; Holmes’ secret-agent brother, Mycroft; and, after a fashion, the Loch Ness Monster. Had Wilder simply filmed this surprising story, without the prologue, and given the piece a less ponderous title, the public reception of this movie might have been much different. (Changed, too, might have been the studio’s attitude toward the project, since MGM reportedly ordered the removal of large sections from Wilder’s first cut.)

          Yet another problematic aspect of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is the casting. To be clear, British stage actor Robert Stephens does a fine job as Holmes, filling his characterization with erudite bitchiness that feels like a logical extension of Basil Rathbone’s classic take on the role. Similarly, Colin Blakely is wonderful as Watson, dependable in a pinch but flummoxed by Holmes’ wilder schemes and occasionally, for comic relief, prone to buffoonery. Furthermore, French actress Geneviève Page’s beauty and poise define her character as a formidable companion for Holmes, which pays off nicely at the end of the movie, and it’s a kick to see horror star Christopher Lee in one of his straightest roles, as Mycroft. Clearly, Wilder cast without taking the U.S. box office into consideration. (American ticketbuyers responded in kind, avoiding the film in droves.) Viewed as a career move, Wilder’s choice to eschew Hollywood stars was reckless, but viewed from the perspective of cinematic artistry, it was prudent—especially given the dexterity with which Wilder’s actors tackle his wonderfully intricate dialogue.

          In sum, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is not for everyone, but it’s an interesting museum piece that overflows with sophistication on many levels.

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes: GROOVY

The Front Page (1974)

          Item No. 1: Vienna-born writer-director Billy Wilder made his name co-writing delightful screwball comedies such as 1941’s Ball of Fire. Item No. 2: Adapted from the 1928 Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur stage play The Front Page, Howard Hawks’ 1940 film His Girl Friday is one of the unassailable classics of the screwball-comedy era. Item No. 3: If anyone had the qualifications to remake His Girl Friday, it was Wilder.

          Well, qualified or not, Wilder botched the job.

          One of the key elements of His Girl Friday (and great screwball comedies in general) was the clever use of euphemisms to slip outré material past censors. Wilder’s remake of The Front Page dumps the subtle approach in favor of tiresome vulgarity. Worse, Wilder’s remake ditches the best contrivance of His Girl Friday—Hawks’ movie flipped the gender of one of the play’s leading characters, transforming the original Hecht-MacArthur story about feuding frenemies into a crackling love story. Sure, Wilder had at his disposal two leading men with whom he’d achieved great results before, Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, but dropping the battle-of-the-sexes angle was a bad call.

          As in the original play (Wilder’s movie retains the Hecht-MacArthur setting of the late ’20s), the story concerns gruff newspaper editor Walter Burns (Matthau), who wants his star reporter, Hildy Johnson (Lemmon), to cover the impending execution of a political revolutionary. Alas, Hildy has picked this day to quit the journalism business and get married, so Walter unscrupulously manipulates events to keep Hildy working. Meanwhile, the revolutionary escapes and seeks refuge in the courthouse newsroom, so Hildy shifts from covering a story to hiding a fugitive.

          In any incarnation, the Hecht-MacArthur script is filled with wonderful zingers, but Wilder and frequent collaborator I.A.L. Diamond dilute their adaptation with pointlessly crude additions. For instance, journalists remind a hooker (Carol Burnett, miscast and terrible) that if she hits the streets for money, doing so will cause “a lotta wear and tear on your ass.” She replies with equal sophistication, calling them “shitheels.” Elsewhere, Hildy excoriates Walter by saying, “The only time you get it up is when you put the paper to bed,” and Walter says that if Hildy takes a job writing ad copy, he’ll be a “faggot.”

          One cannot impugn the film’s technical execution, since Wilder uses limited sets effectively and cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth gives the picture a fine polish; similarly, the Lemmon/Matthau bickering-buddies routine was among the smoothest in the business. But so what? All of this good effort was put in the service of a poorly conceived and totally unnecessary retread of material that, in at least two previous incarnations (the original stage play and the Hawks film), was already considered classic.

The Front Page: FUNKY