Avanti! is a 1972 American/Italian international co-production comedy film produced and directed by Billy Wilder, and starring Jack Lemmon and Juliet Mills. The screenplay by Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond is based on Samuel A. Taylor's play, which had a short run for the 1968 Broadway season. The film follows a businessman attempting to deliver the body of his father from Italy. It premiered on December 17, 1972. Lemmon won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy. The film was nominated for five Golden Globe Awards, including Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy, Best Director, Best Actress – Motion Picture Comedy or Musical, and Best Screenplay.
Plot
For the last decade, Baltimore industrialist Wendell Armbruster Sr. has annually spent a month at the Grand Hotel Excelsior on the resort island of Ischia on the Bay of Naples, allegedly to soak in the therapeutic mud baths. During his last visit he died in an automobile accident, and his straitlaced son Wendell Armbruster Jr. travels to Ischia to claim the body. He meets Pamela Piggott, a London traveler, who has come to claim the body of her mother. Wendell discovers his father had an affair with Pamela's mother for every one of those ten years, despite his having had a wife in Baltimore. Pamela knows of their parents' clandestine annual meeting. Hotel manager Carlo Carlucci plans a funeral and the delivery of Wendell Senior's remains in three days time so Wendell Junior can take his father's body back to the family home for a funeral to be viewed on television by all the workers in his father's factories. They are delayed at every turn due to the twin Italian traditions of bureaucracy and short working hours.
Pamela asks Wendell to bury their parents together on their beloved Ischia. When the bodies vanish from the morgue, Wendell suspects Pamela. However, the bodies were stolen by the brothers of the Trotta family, whose vineyard was damaged in the car accident. Wendell discovers another Italian tradition, extortion. The Trottas spirited the remains away from the morgue, holding them for a two million lire ransom. At the same time, hotel valet Bruno wants to return to America from which he had been deported since he is Italian. Bruno has compromising photos of Wendell's father and Pamela's mother and plans to use blackmail to make his dreams come true. As Wendell and Pamela swim naked, Bruno take a snapshot of them and tries to force Wendell to use his influence to get him an American visa. However, the maid, Anna - whom Bruno has impregnated and seeks to flee Italy to avoid marrying her - kills Bruno in Pamela's room while Pamela is away. Carlucci moves Pamela's property to Wendell's room to prevent her being involved in the incident, but Pamela believes that Wendell has surprised her and ordered the move so the pair can stay together as lovers. Meanwhile, back in the States, Wendell's wife uses her connections to send State Department Agent J.J. Blodgett from Paris to quickly expedite the matter. Wendell and Pamela at last fall in love and have their parents interred together in the Carlucci family cemetery, and place Bruno's remains in a coffin marked as Wendell Senior, granting Bruno's wish to return to the United States.
After enjoying himself in the mud baths, Blodgett appoints Wendell Senior to an embassy post, in the interest of Equal Opportunity Employment by not discriminating regardless of health. Blodgett then has Wendell Senior's coffin, which is carrying Bruno's remains, sent to America in a diplomatic pouch. Carlucci promises Pamela and Wendell to have a room ready for a month in a year's time just like he did for their parents. Wendell and Blodgett leave Ischia and head to the airport in Rome on a U.S. Navy helicopter.