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How others will see it. Fans of Wilder and Lemmon will likely enjoy this comedy, although they will readily admit its not as good as The Apartment, or as funny as Some Like It Hot. (After all, those movies are famous.) Lemmon is more likeable in the The Apartment, but in Avanti!, his character eventually does soften from an Ugly American to a sly seducer, all the while maintaining his usual everyman persona.
How I felt about it. Is the movie funny? I didn't think so, not even in a black comedy fashion. The plot involves the recent tragic deaths of parents, a murder, blackmail, infidelity, and corpse kidnapping. The inventors of the Hollywood production code would be spinning in their graves.
Admittedly, offending Puritans ranks low on the list of crimes against art. Making light of amoral, criminal, and tragic events is, after all, the point of Dr. Strangelove. The problem is that Avanti! is mildly offensive without being funny. It is watchable, however, because some of the charm of its setting, Italy, rubs off on the movie. This charm is epitomized when Ugly American J.J. Blodgett (Edward Andrews) gets a ride from the heliport by identifying the weakness of the last surviving Mussolini fan in Italy.
The key to the movie is Lemmon's character change. He's in nearly every scene, so his transformation is critical to Avanti!'s message. Lemmon begins as an insufferable, self-involved, moralist jerk. Courtesy of the charms of Italy and Juliet Mills, by film's end he is a gracious courter of her attentions, and seems destined to an annual monthly liason with her in Italy while his unseen wife is fed a series of lies for cover.
Trouble is, we've seen Lemmon's changes in other Wilder films. In Some Like It Hot, he changes from a scared musician into an eager but unconvincing transvestite. In The Apartment, he changes from an ambitious company man into the champion of Shirley MacLaine's integrity. These transformations, from moral to amoral or vice versa, are unconvincing because people don't change their basic nature because they feel sorry for someone. Or, in the case of Some Like It Hot, because the director thought it would be a riot.
P.S. to the casting director. While the character of Miss Piggott is twenty pounds overweight, the actress that plays her, Juliet Mills, is not.