I was curious to see how a bunch of empty-headed nitwits would conduct themselves.
—William Powell in the title role
of the film My Man Godfrey
Friendship, friendship!
What a perfect blendship!
When other friendships have been forgot
Ours will still be hot.
—Cole Porter, “Friendship”
In 1928 Billy Wilder was a reporter on a tabloid in Berlin that specialized in crime stories and sensational feature pieces, such as his first-person account of life as a gigolo. That same year, on August 14, playwrights Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur premiered their cynical farce about the newspaper racket, The Front Page, on Broadway.
The play later reminded Wilder of his years as a young reporter; he would get around to filming it some four decades later. “I loved the 1920s,” he recalled. “A reporter back then was a mixture of a private eye and a dramatist. If you were any good, you could improve on the story” by adding some spicy details. “Then there was the round-the-clock dedication—no family life for the lone wolf—and the camaraderie of the newsroom.”1
Like Wilder, Hecht always remembered fondly his years as a young reporter, in his case for the Chicago Daily News. He was only sixteen when he got his first job as a cub reporter, he recalled in a brief essay about The Front Page in his private papers. “I quit after sixteen years of chasing fires, killers, swindles, and scandals.”2 Hecht based many characters in The Front Page on real Chicago journalists. His street-smart reporter Hildy Johnson, for example, was modeled on Hilding Johnson, a reporter for the Chicago Herald-Examiner who was not above picking locks and clambering through transoms in pursuit of a news story. As Sherman Duffy, one of Hecht’s fellow reporters, put it, “Socially, a journalist fits somewhere between a whore and a bartender.”3 Walter Burns, the domineering managing editor in Hecht and MacArthur’s play, was inspired by Walter Howey, the managing editor of the Herald-Examiner. Hecht described Howey this way: “He smiled like a wide-eyed sightseer from the sticks. But he could plot like Cesare Borgia and strike like Gengis Khan.”4
Howard Hughes produced the first film version of the play in 1931. It was directed by Lewis Milestone (All Quiet on the Western Front). Pat O’Brien played Hildy, and Adolphe Menjou was Walter Burns. Wilder felt that Milestone’s version was “handicapped by the crude conditions of making early sound pictures.” In addition, it could not totally disguise its stage-bound origins.5
The second movie adaptation of The Front Page was titled His Girl Friday (1940). It was directed by Howard Hawks, with a screenplay by Charles Lederer, who had collaborated on the script of the 1931 movie. Hawks said that one day, after Cary Grant was set to play Walter Burns, “I had a secretary read through one of the scenes of The Front Page with me. I realized that Hildy Johnson’s lines were better when they were read by a woman. I called Hecht and he agreed, so the part of the reporter was rewritten for Rosalind Russell.”6 Wilder, who had coscripted Ball of Fire for Hawks, much admired him. But he did not agree with Hawks’s changing Hildy’s gender. In his opinion, it placed too much emphasis on Walter’s winning back his ex-wife, rather than his ace reporter. Hawks had also moved his film up to 1940. Hence his film was not The Front Page of Hecht and MacArthur, according to Wilder.7
When Jennings Lang, a vice president at Universal, by sheer coincidence inquired whether Wilder would like to direct a remake of The Front Page, Wilder accepted enthusiastically. (For the record, this was the same Jennings Lang whose affair with Joan Bennett some years earlier was one of the inspirations for The Apartment.) Wilder was drawn to the project in part because male friendship plays an important role in The Front Page, just as it does in The Fortune Cookie and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Furthermore, Wilder’s own experience as a journalist would be reflected in the movie. “I hope to show that I have a feeling for newspaper guys,” he told Lang. “I understand their problems and their hang-ups.”8
In September 1973, Wilder and Diamond set up shop at Universal, reworking one of the classic American comedies into a screenplay. Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau were cast as Hildy Johnson and Walter Burns before Wilder started on the script. Hence Wilder and his partner could write the screenplay with these two actors in mind. Wilder pointed out that Matthau was closer to the original conception of the gruff, surly Walter Burns in the play than the dapper Adolphe Menjou in Milestone’s version or the suave Cary Grant in Hawks’s film.
Wilder moved the setting of his film back to its original time frame. Wilder’s version of the play takes place in Chicago in 1929—in the same town, the same year, and the same zany world as Some Like It Hot. As a matter of fact, there is an implicit reference to Some Like It Hot in The Front Page: one of the reporters boasts that he scooped his fellow journalists in covering the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. There is also an allusion to The Spirit of St. Louis: Hildy recalls the hack reporters sitting around the press room, waiting for Lindbergh to land in Paris. What’s more, Wilder lifted a line spoken by Chuck Tatum in Ace in the Hole for Hildy to repeat in the present film. Tatum says that a reporter is proud of his front page story today, and the next day somebody wraps the front page around a dead fish. Even Ben Hecht is mentioned as having made Walter Burns furious by forsaking the newspaper game to go to Hollywood to write scripts. Hecht had to be smuggled out of Chicago to escape the wrath of Walter Burns. In addition, Hildy does an impersonation of James Cagney as a tough guy—which is a bit premature, since this film is set in 1929, and Cagney went to Hollywood in 1930.
Wilder and Diamond rewrote about 60 percent of the play’s dialogue, much to the dismay of Helen Hayes, the widow of Charles MacArthur and one of the great actresses of the theater. Nevertheless, Wilder said that he regarded the screenplay as a faithful opening out of the play for the screen, and he said so to Hayes. He conceded, however, “We did much more opening out of the story than we did on Stalag 17, for instance. . . . Certain plays call for being opened out more than others. Indeed, the playwright himself might have opened up the play more had he not been straitjacketed by the format of the stage.”
Whereas the play was set entirely in the press room, “the film ranges more naturally over Chicago,” including a new scene in the Balaban and Katz State Theatre (actually the State-Lake), where Peggy Grant, Hildy’s fiancée, plays the organ during intermission.9 Barney Balaban, who was president of Paramount during Wilder’s tenure there, co-owned a chain of Chicago movie theaters before going to Hollywood. (The feature announced on the State’s marquee is The Phantom of the Opera, a 1925 silent picture with Lon Chaney—a curious choice, since The Front Page is set well after the advent of sound pictures.)
Walter, carrying out one of his crafty ruses to sabotage the marriage of Hildy and Peggy, visits Peggy backstage and presents himself as Hildy’s probation officer. He solemnly informs Peggy that Hildy is a convicted flasher. But Hildy gets wind of what Walter is up to and exposes his nefarious plot to Peggy over the phone. The description of Walter in the screenplay is one of those satirical asides that make a Wilder screenplay almost as entertaining to read as to see performed. As the scene with Peggy shows, Walter “operates in the great tradition of Machiavelli, Rasputin, and Count Dracula: No ethics, no scruples, and no private life—a fanatic, oblivious of ulcers and lack of sleep, in his constant pursuit of tomorrow’s headlines.”10
Wilder added two characters to the scenario who do not appear in the play. One of them, Dr. Eggelhofer (Martin Gabel), is a balmy Freudian psychiatrist from Vienna. Eggelhofer, who is only referred to in the play, is to provide a second opinion about the sanity of Earl Williams (Austin Pendleton), a befuddled anarchist who claims that he shot a policeman quite by accident. When Eggelhofer interprets a gun as a phallic symbol, Earl complains to the sheriff, “If he’s going to talk dirty . . .” Eggelhofer asks Earl to reenact how he shot the cop, and the sheriff obligingly lends Earl his revolver for the demonstration. Earl uses the gun to escape and, in the ensuing scuffle, accidentally shoots Eggelhofer in the groin. Eggelhofer is carted off to the hospital, hollering, “Fruitcake!”—his assessment of Earl’s sanity.
The other character that Wilder introduced into the picture is Rudy Keppler (Jon Korkes), a callow cub reporter who becomes the object of the affections of journalist Roy Bensinger (David Wayne). With the Bensinger character, Wilder picks up on the topic of homosexuality he had broached in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Roy is high-strung and effeminate in the play, but Wilder presents him clearly as a mincing homosexual. Gerd Gemünden calls Bensinger “Wilder’s most stereotypical portrait” of a homosexual.11 Some of the reporters derisively term Rudy “a snot-nosed kid” because he gets so excited about Earl’s escape that he wets his pants. Roy defends Rudy, insisting that the other reporters are “beastly” to him. Rudy seems to be regressing to childhood, with Roy as his father figure. Hildy warns Rudy, “Never get caught in the can with Bensinger!” Later on Roy caresses Rudy’s shoulder like a lover. We subsequently see Roy and Rudy exiting the men’s room together; Rudy has disregarded Hildy’s advice. In fact, Wilder obviously intended the relationship of Roy and Rudy as a contrast to the male bonding of Hildy and Walter, which does not have sexual intent.
By mid-February 1974, Wilder and Diamond had completed the first draft of the script; by mid-March, the shooting script was ready. Lemmon and Matthau were appearing in their second Wilder film, eight years after he had teamed them in The Fortune Cookie. In rounding out the cast during preproduction, Wilder chose Carol Burnett to play Mollie Malloy, a harlot who befriends Earl. Molly is another hooker with a heart of gold, recalling Gloria from The Lost Weekend and, of course, Irma la Douce. Carol Burnett, like Arlene Francis, who appeared in One, Two, Three, was a popular television personality. So she gave the picture additional marquee value. By contrast, Wilder selected the young film actress Susan Sarandon to play Peggy. The Front Page was only her third picture as a supporting player.
For production designer, Wilder picked Universal’s Henry Bumstead. He had won Academy Awards for To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and, more recently, The Sting (1973), for that film’s “meticulous recreation of 1920s cafés, bookie joints, and train interiors.”12 Hence Bumstead was an ideal choice for The Front Page. Wilder also snagged a top-notch film editor, Ralph Winters, who was likewise a two-time Oscar winner, as editor of King Solomon’s Mines (1950) and coeditor of Ben Hur (1959).
Principal photography was scheduled to start on April 3, the day after the Academy Award ceremony at which Lemmon won an Oscar for Save the Tiger (1973), his second Academy Award. At the Oscar party afterward, Wilder said to Lemmon with tongue in cheek, “Congratulations! But don’t be late for work tomorrow.”13
Some exteriors were shot on location around Chicago, but the bulk of The Front Page was filmed at Universal in Hollywood. The citywide manhunt for Earl Williams was shot on Chicago streets, conjuring up the opening scene of Some Like it Hot.
The film’s principal set is the press room of the Cook County criminal court building, where the reporters gather to wait for the latest developments in the Earl Williams case. Bumstead constructed the press room on stage 24 in all its “pristine squalor”: There is a half-empty mustard jar nestled among the ragged playing cards, cigar butts, and an ancient Remington typewriter on the long center table, plus “a propeller fan revolving slowly overhead.” Joseph McBride, who visited the set, describes Wilder as “a perpetual motion machine, his language as salty and sarcastic as the reporters in the story, his thick Viennese accent filtered through a mouthful of gum,” now that his doctor had taken him off cigarettes.14
In general, the dialogue proceeds at “a rapid-fire pace,” and the “machine-gun delivery of the lines” recalls the staccato pace of the dialogue in One, Two, Three.15 But Wilder had learned when One, Two, Three was released that audiences simply could not keep up with the hectic tempo of the dialogue. He therefore decided, while making The Front Page, to give the audience a breather by having the dialogue of some scenes spoken at a more leisurely pace.
Matthau commented that he liked working with Wilder because “he is from the old school, where every shot is preplanned. He doesn’t waste time covering a scene from multiple angles.” Matthau explained, “Most directors don’t know what they want, so they have a lot of takes. Wilder cuts the cloth as he sees it.” Wilder concurred: “When the script is finished,” he said, he knew “roughly how it will look on film.” Lemmon also found Wilder pleasant to work with. “The kind of rapport that comes from making several films with a director is invaluable,” he said. “It’s like shorthand, he doesn’t have to get more than one sentence out before I know what he has in mind.”16
The picture wrapped in mid-June after a ten-week shoot. Since Wilder had planned with Winters how every scene would be cut, the editor did a preliminary edit of each scene right after it was filmed. As a result, Wilder and Winters put the finishing touches on the final cut less than a week after Wilder finished shooting.17
In 1974 Richard Heffner was appointed chief of CARA. “Wilder availed himself of the new freedom of speech” permitted by the revised code, “but just enough to stay within the boundaries of the PG rating.” Hence Wilder avoided the expletive fuck, “which in 1974 would have meant an automatic R rating.”18 The PG rating, Heffner said, “would make the film available to a wider, younger audience than the R rating would have allowed.”19 Consequently, when Hildy announces he is leaving Chicago to take a job in Philadelphia, he exclaims, “Am I glad to get out of this friggin’ town!”
The musical score for The Front Page was provided by Billy May, the music supervisor on the film. May stitched together melodies from popular songs of the Jazz Age, much as Matty Malneck had done for Some Like It Hot. He did so with the kibitzing of Wilder, the resident expert on jazz. For old times’ sake, Wilder included in the movie “Button Up Your Overcoat,” whose lyrics were cowritten by Buddy De Sylva, who had been a lyricist before he became production chief at Paramount during Wilder’s tenure there.
A blast of ragtime music, resonant of the Roaring Twenties, introduces the movie’s opening credits. The front page of the newspaper is shown being set in type: it is the morning edition of June 6, 1929. As the newspaper rolls off the presses, we see that the masthead declares, “Nothing but the Truth.” Below that, the headline proclaims, “Cop Killer Sane, Must Die!”
Walter Burns, the domineering and unscrupulous editor of the Chicago Examiner, is bent on keeping Hildy Johnson, his star reporter, from marrying Peggy Grant because she insists that Hildy renounce the newspaper game and take a job with an advertising firm in Philadelphia. Walter craftily talks Hildy into postponing his departure from the Examiner so that he can cover the execution of Earl Williams, an anarchist convicted of killing a cop. Walter is confident that Hildy subconsciously wants to be rescued from a dull marriage and a boring job in advertising. Hence he is betting that, once he gets Hildy to put off leaving the Examiner, he can manipulate him into abandoning his plans.
Of course, Burns’s subconscious motive is that he does not want to lose his best friend, any more than he wants to lose his ace reporter. Therefore The Front Page rightly belongs among those Wilder films that focus on a strong male relationship. George Morris comments that “the friendship between Hildy and Walter evolves obliquely” in the course of the picture. “They never express their mutual feelings in words,” only in gestures.20 For example, in the scene in which Hildy feverishly types out his article on Earl Williams, Walter intuits that Hildy wants a cigarette; he lights one and puts it in Hildy’s mouth. This gesture, of course, recalls the way that Walter Neff shows his regard for Barton Keyes in Double Indemnity by lighting Keyes’s cigar for him. It is a gesture of friendship that Keyes reciprocates at the end of that film by lighting Walter’s cigarette.
In the present film, Wilder beefed up the role of Mollie Malloy from the play. Mollie takes Earl in after he has been beaten by the police for handing out leftist leaflets on a street corner. She later accuses the reporters of writing trashy copy about her relationship with Earl. She resents their saying that she was willing to marry Earl on the gallows; they respond with verbal abuse. Morris comments, “Mollie may be a whore, but her impulses are among the more decent and honest in the film.”21
After Earl escapes because of the incompetence of Sheriff Hartman (Vincent Gardenia), the mayor (Harold Gould) organizes the manhunt for Earl. The mayor, in collusion with the sheriff, has connived all along to railroad Earl just before an election, in which the mayor and the sheriff are campaigning on a law-and-order ticket. Since the mayor wants Earl dead, he authorizes the police to shoot him on sight.
Meanwhile, Earl seeks sanctuary in the deserted press room. Hildy finds him there and conceals him in a rolltop desk. Convinced of Earl’s innocence, Hildy tells Walter that he plans to publish an exposé on the mayor and sheriff’s conspiracy to employ Earl as a scapegoat in their plans for reelection. But Earl is soon discovered, and Sheriff Hartman arrests Hildy and Walter for harboring a fugitive. Walter and Hildy turn the tables on the sheriff and the mayor by revealing the incriminating evidence they have about both of them. Walter announces in a solemn tone, “There is a Divine Providence that watches over the Examiner!”
As the picture nears its conclusion, it seems that Walter’s plot to hold on to Hildy has failed. Hildy and Peggy head for the depot to board the next train for Philadelphia. But Walter, as resilient and irrepressible as ever, has not yet played his last card. He shows up at the train terminal, ostensibly to wish Hildy a fond farewell. He even bestows his own watch on Hildy as a token of his abiding esteem for his favorite reporter. But once the train has left the station, Walter shows his true colors. He sends a wire posthaste to the police in Gary, Indiana, the train’s first stop. He demands that Hildy be arrested, explaining, “The son of a bitch stole my watch.”
Ever since the play opened on Broadway, the final line of dialogue has ranked among the most celebrated curtain lines in theater history. It was blipped in Milestone’s film and excluded from Hawks’s movie because of censorship restrictions on the use of profanity. But the censorship code had been revised by the time Wilder made his movie. When a columnist asked Wilder during filming whether he planned to delete the play’s closing line, he replied, “That would be like rewriting ‘To be or not to be,’ for God’s sake. It’s a classic.”22
Wilder pointed out to me that he added “a printed epilogue that tells what happened to the characters after the end of the story. We took that idea, of course, from the epilogue of American Graffiti [1973].” The audience is informed that Hildy Johnson eventually became managing editor of the Examiner; Walter Burns, after he retired, occasionally lectured at the University of Chicago on “the ethics of journalism”; Roy Bensinger and Rudy Keppler opened an antiques shop in Cape Cod; and Dr. Eggelhofer, after Earl shot him in the balls, wrote a best-seller, The Joys of Impotence. Bernard Dick writes that the epilogue “is rather like an alumni newsletter, only wittier.”23
The Front Page premiered on December 17, 1974, at the Century Plaza Theatre in Los Angeles. The reviews were a mixed bag. Pauline Kael delivered herself of her meanest notice of a Wilder picture since One, Two, Three. This time she said that Wilder had a “sharp-toothed, venomous wit. He’s debauching the Hecht and MacArthur play to produce a harsh, scrambling-for-laughs gag comedy. . . . It’s enjoyable on a very low level.”24 Joseph Morgenstern in Newsweek opined, “Wilder is out of touch with the temper of the times.”25
Perhaps in response to Morgenstern, Andrew Sarris noted that Wilder’s brand of cynicism “seems much more contemporary than it ever did.” He continued, “It is refreshing to see a director . . . who still believes in the spoken word as a vehicle of expression.”26 Sarris later wrote, “I must concede that I have greatly underrated Billy Wilder, perhaps more so than any other director. His twilight resurgence in the 1970s,” with films like The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes and The Front Page, “made me rethink Wilder.”27
Richard Armstrong states baldly that, when The Front Page was released, it “met neither box office success nor critical favor.”28 On the contrary, the movie had its champions from the outset, most notably Sarris. Moreover, it was a box office success, “earning $15 million against a cost of $4 million.” The Front Page was Wilder’s biggest commercial hit since Irma la Douce.29
The Front Page evokes the screwball comedies of the 1930s. It is laced with brittle humor and at times approximates the rough-and-tumble spirit of the golden age of screwball—as when the cop cars make a madcap dash through the streets of Chicago, dutifully following up one ridiculous false lead after another as to the whereabouts of Earl Williams.
Wilder made another film with Jack Lemmon around this time. In endeavoring to find a viable project, he followed his old practice: when in doubt, choose a Broadway play. This time he turned to Avanti! by Samuel Taylor, whose hit play Sabrina Fair Wilder had successfully adapted for the screen in 1954 as Sabrina. Avanti! had not been a success on Broadway in 1968—it ran for only twenty-one performances. Nevertheless, Wilder was confident that he could improve it in adapting it for film, just as he had done with Sabrina Fair and other plays.
Wilder was committed to one more film for the Mirisch Company, so he pitched the project to Walter Mirisch, who acted as executive producer on Wilder’s films for the Mirisch brothers. Although Wilder had made some flops in recent years, Mirisch’s regard for Wilder and his talents had not diminished, so he green-lighted the project.
Taylor’s play deals with the relationship between a couple who first become friends because of a common bond. Sandy, a straitlaced Baltimore industrialist, and Alison, a carefree London boutique clerk, cross paths when they come to Rome to claim the bodies of his father and her mother, who have been killed in an auto accident after a ten-year clandestine summertime romance. As the story gets going, Sandy and Alison become bosom buddies, not to say soul mates. Indeed, they are destined to become lovers and will consequently extend their parents’ love affair into the next generation.
In retooling Taylor’s play into a film script, Wilder decided to do a major overhaul on the source story. He even changed the names of the principals: Sandy became Wendell Armbruster Jr., and Alison became Pamela Piggott.
Wilder began work on the screenplay in the late fall of 1971. Diamond, who had scripted the movie version of Cactus Flower for Columbia, was called back by the studio to adapt 40 Carats, another Broadway hit, into a movie. Consequently, Wilder teamed with screenwriter Philip Epstein (Casablanca) on Avanti! “I started out with Billy Wilder and couldn’t do anything with it,” Epstein remembered. “It was not a fruitful collaboration.”30 Meanwhile, Diamond was getting nowhere with 40 Carats. So in January 1972, he returned to work with Wilder.
Taylor’s single-set play takes place in a hotel room in Rome. Wilder opened it out for the screen by relocating the action at a health resort on the Italian island of Ischia. What’s more, in reimagining the story for the screen, Wilder kept only Taylor’s premise (the deaths of the couple’s parents, which bring them to Italy) and the resolution (their adopting their parents’ annual romantic ritual). “It is a bittersweet love story,” said Wilder, “a little like Brief Encounter,” which had given Wilder the basic concept for The Apartment.31
Indeed, Wendell Armbruster Jr. is the same kind of corporate executive that Linus Larrabee is in Sabrina. “There are lots of them in America,” Wilder explained, “these young executives who drink a lot, drive Cadillacs, go to the club, play golf. They lead a luxurious life, have a telephone in the car”—one remembers Linus making phone calls in his limo. “Suddenly they discover that their existence is empty. They have no one to talk to and nothing to say on the telephone. And it wouldn’t make much difference if their stock rose or fell three points. That is the reevaluation of our materialistic values that this film addresses” by examining Wendell’s life.32
Wilder decided to drop Wendell’s dour wife, Emily, from the lists. In the play, she shows up in Rome to ascertain why Wendell has not come home to stage an elaborate funeral for his father, only to find Wendell bogged down in the red tape generated by the Italian bureaucracy. The screenplay replaces her with a more comic figure, a U.S. State Department official named Joseph J. Blodgett. In the film, rather than going to Italy herself, Emily Armbruster dispatches this bumbling duffer to expedite her husband’s return. Blodgett is described in the script as “a diplomat who has been working for the State Department as a trouble shooter. He has yet to be on target.”33 Running true to form, Blodgett will not be on target in coping with Wendell, who bamboozles him. “I painted Blodgett like a humorous character,” said Wilder. “Even though I exaggerated a bit, he still wasn’t very far from the people I knew at the State Department.”34
Wilder maintained a beach house near Malibu; his next-door neighbor happened to be Jack Lemmon. “I gave him, as a friend, the first half of the script to read, and he asked me for the role of Wendell Armbruster,” Wilder recalled. “At first I was thinking of casting someone in his thirties. So I had to adjust the character to fit his age,” which was forty-seven at the time. “Then I wrote the second half.”35
By the spring of 1972, Wilder and Diamond had completed the screenplay. It is salted with good-natured jokes at the Italians’ expense. There is, for example, the mountain of red tape that Wendell must cut through to arrange for the burial of his father’s remains back in the States. “That’s just the side dish,” Wilder said; “the meat is the affair between the American and the English girl, who is a little too fat, but who has a nice bust. It’s difficult to find a girl who is twenty pounds too heavy, who is teased for her weight, and who is nonetheless adorable, touching, and in the end erotic,” Wilder continued. “We were lucky to have found Juliet Mills, a miraculous actress.” Mills, the daughter of actor John Mills, had played in the Western The Rare Breed (1966), opposite James Stewart, and in other films. But she was chiefly known for her work on the London stage. Wilder sent her the script, and she phoned him soon after. “I want the role,” she said. “I’ll gain twenty pounds; give me eight weeks.” Wilder recalled that she ate night and day and became very chubby “on beer, pasta, and ice cream.” And she gave a superb performance as Pamela Piggott.36
For the role of Carlo Carlucci, the worldly and wily manager of the Grand Hotel Excelsior, Wilder considered Alberto Sordi, an Italian comic actor. He had come to prominence in Federico Fellini’s early films. “But Sordi did not possess a sufficient mastery of English, and would therefore have slowed down the action,” said Wilder. “He wouldn’t have hit the ball back fast enough to Lemmon on the other side of the net.” Wilder instead chose the British actor Clive Revill, “who could play an Italian like he played a Russian ballet master in Sherlock Holmes.”37 Carlucci is described in the screenplay as “a gentleman of the old school; he runs the hotel with discipline and aplomb, and with the precision of Toscanini conducting a symphony orchestra.”38 Both Revill and Edward Andrews, who played Blodgett, offer fine, broad characterizations.
Wilder had broken his resolution not to go to the expense of filming any more movies in Europe when he shot Sherlock Holmes in Great Britain. By the same token, he opted to make Avanti! entirely on location in Italy, because it was an Italian story that simply cried out to be made there. The exteriors were filmed along the Amalfi Coast and on the islands of Capri and Ischia; the interiors were shot in the Safra Palatinio Studios in Rome.
Production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti had just come off Death in Venice (1971). Surveying the sets Scarfiotti had designed for Avanti! on the soundstages in Rome, Wilder mused, “I couldn’t have shot this film anywhere but Italy. The air is Italian—even on the interior sets built in the studio. If I transported the bed, the couch, and the vase of flowers to a Hollywood studio, it wouldn’t have the same look.”39
Wilder shot the movie in the summer of 1972, with the cast and crew billeted in the Hotel Excelsior Victoria in Sorrento while on location. He selected Luigi Kuveiller as director of photography after viewing Elio Petri’s Un tranquillo posto di campagna (A Quiet Place in the Country, 1968). “I loved the lucidity, the lightness, and the precision of his photography,” said Wilder, and, of course, Kuveiller was an expert on local color.40
“Wilder was not above showing a bit of behind in the liberated 1970s,” Dick observes.41 He staged the first nude scene to be featured in a Wilder film for Avanti! Pamela coaxes Wendell into a rendezvous on the beach, but he is reluctant to accept her invitation to go skinny-dipping. “Where is your British reserve?” he inquires. Inevitably he gives in, and the couple swim naked in the Mediterranean Sea. When the sun comes up over Mount Vesuvius, they swim to a rock just offshore, where their parents used to sunbathe at dawn. Staggs denounces the nude swimming scene as “the least attractive scene in any movie”—from the rear, Lemmon looks like a potato. “Juliet Mills retains her dignity throughout”; Lemmon does not.42 Conversely, Crowe judges the nudity to be “delicately layered and purposeful,” since it represents the first genuine intimate moment that Wendell and Pamela share.43
Michel Ciment noted that Wilder had Ralph Winters come over to Italy to make the preliminary edit of each scene during shooting. As a result, Winters prepared the final cut in short order. “Although I liked it very much, at 144 minutes I thought it was far too long,” writes Walter Mirisch. “It’s difficult to sustain a comedy at that length. I felt it would play much better if it were shorter, but Billy disagreed.”44 Wilder pointed out that Avanti! had previewed better than Sherlock Holmes and that comments on the preview cards did not indicate conclusively that the picture warranted shortening. So Mirisch did not insist on deletions, as he had for Sherlock Holmes.
Wilder turned the film over to Carlo Rustichelli, who had just scored Alfredo, Alfredo (1971), an Italian comedy that was a vehicle for Dustin Hoffman. Rustichelli punctuated his score with themes from Italian popular songs like “Un’ora sola ti vorrei.” Since the film is set at the sunny Italian seashore, Rustichelli obliges with a lush, romantic Italian serenade, complete with mandolin, to accompany the opening credits.
Wendell Armbruster Jr. arrives at the Grand Hotel Excelsior, a health resort and spa on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples. He soon learns from Pamela Piggott of his father’s annual rendezvous with Pamela’s mother for the past decade. Shocked, Wendell blurts out, “You mean all the time we thought he was over here getting cured, he was getting laid? That dirty old man!”
“At its heart, it’s a story of love between a father and a son,” Wilder commented. “Wendell starts to understand a father whom he has never thought much about. He is closer to his father dead than when his father was living. That gives the story a certain bite.” Wilder continued, “He discovers his father’s past, and that gives the story its force. If I did not have that element in Avanti! I would have had the old story of the romance in Italy between Wendell and Pamela—a sort of Debbie Reynolds Goes to Italy.”45
Wendell Armbruster Sr. and Catherine Piggott, his inamorata, were killed when Wendell’s father accidentally drove his car off a high cliff. In a key sequence, Wendell and Pamela must go to the municipal morgue to officially identify their parents’ bodies. Scarfiotti discovered the location site for the morgue scene on the island of Ischia; it was actually a church situated high above the sea.46 In this scene, Wilder adroitly mingles comedy and pathos. Mattarazzo, the coroner, is played by the Italian comedian Pippo Franco. For Wilder, Mattarazzo is a typical Italian bureaucrat. He goes through an elaborate ritual of whipping out rubber stamps and stamp pads from his coat pockets with maniacal precision. He then dutifully stamps both sets of legal documents in triplicate. Afterwards he slyly pinches Pamela’s bottom.47
“Yet Wilder never trivializes the tragedy” that has brought Wendell and Pamela together, as Dick indicates. When they enter the morgue, Wilder captures the reverential hush “with a long shot that he holds until a shaft of sunlight comes through the circular window” and illuminates the mortuary.48 Kuveiller’s lighting of the morgue sequence gives it a haunting, wistful beauty. The sequence concludes with Pamela’s leaving a bouquet of daffodils on each corpse. One is reminded that, after all, this film is “a narrative triggered by human mortality.”49
Carlo Carlucci schemes to bring Wendell and Pamela together by recreating the romantic atmosphere experienced by their parents, and his plot succeeds. Wendell begins to wear his father’s jacket, and Pamela dons her mother’s dress. They even take to calling each other by the nicknames their parents had for each other, Willie and Kate. In short, “Wendell and Pamela are soon performing the same rituals as their parents did,” including skinny-dipping in the Mediterranean at dawn.50 Thus does Wilder depict the “growing love between Wendell and Pamela,” Dick notes.51 At one point Pamela explains to Wendell that, when the maid knocks and says, “Permisso” (Permission to enter), he should reply, “Avanti!” (Come ahead!) Accordingly, when Wendell wants to kiss Pamela, he says, “Permisso,” and she responds, “Avanti!”
There is a scene in Avanti! that recalls the first film that Wilder cowrote for Lubitsch, Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife. In that film, Nicole and Michael divide a pair of pajamas between them. In Avanti! when Wendell and Pamela are shown in bed together, he is wearing the pajama pants and she is wearing the tops. This is “an amusing Wilder touch,” like a painter’s signature on a canvas.52
Wendell eventually becomes exasperated by the mass of Italian governmental red tape he encounters while trying to arrange for his father’s corpse to be exported to Baltimore for the funeral at the local Presbyterian church on the following Tuesday. Carlucci points out that that would involve preparing the body for shipment on a Sunday, and “no one works on Sunday—this is a Catholic country!” Wendell answers, “I’ll get a dispensation from the pope.” Carlucci replies that papal dispensations “are not granted to Presbyterians!” Finally, at the behest of Wendell’s nagging wife, Emily, Joseph J. Blodgett, a pompous plutocrat representing the State Department, arrives to finalize the arrangements. Pamela intervenes and suggests to Wendell in private that they bury the deceased couple together in the local cemetery in Ischia, the island that was dear to them both.
At first, typically, Wendell rejects the notion out of hand. “Better yet, why not bury them in Venice like Romeo and Juliet?” (He means Verona.) Nevertheless, Wendell finally warms to her suggestion. He conspires with Carlucci to have an unclaimed body from the mortuary flown back to the United States as Wendell Armbruster Sr.—accompanied by Blodgett, who knows nothing of the scheme. The real Armbruster Sr. can thus be buried in Ischia with his mistress—in the Carlucci family plot, no less. Wendell and Pamela resolve to spend their annual summer holidays together in Ischia, “to continue the romantic tradition established by their parents.”53
Avanti! opened on December 17, 1972, to largely negative notices. It was called, among other things, “sour chianti” from the once-rich Wilder vineyard and a movie populated with “caricatures rather than characters.”54 Jay Cocks in Time wrote the picture off as a real snooze, calling it merely “passingly pleasant” and intermittently funny.55 Wilder responded by describing Time’s reviews as “impish and vinegary,” and Cocks in particular as seeing his films “with a jaundiced eye” and reviewing them “with karate chops.”56
One of the very few positive reviews came from Variety, which termed the movie “a topnotch comedy; it is the type of divertissement all too often lacking in today’s market, a whacky comedy which provides pleasurable entertainment.” Yet even Variety complained about the movie’s length.57 Indeed, the prevailing criticism in the notices was that the film clocked in at two hours and twenty-four minutes, way too long for a romantic comedy—just as Walter Mirisch had contended. It seems that, in opening out the play for the screen, Wilder and Diamond did their job unwisely and too well, for the film is too long and heavy with plot details. Avanti! would have been a better movie had the ending been placed closer to the beginning.
Avanti! was produced at a cost of $2.7 million and grossed only a modest $4.5 million. Not surprisingly, given its Italian setting and story, Avanti! earned bigger box office returns in Europe than in the United States. It received no Oscar nominations. (Wilder quipped that he agreed with Bob Hope: the Oscar ceremonies should be called Passover, as far as he was concerned.) Nevertheless, the picture received six Golden Globe nominations from the Foreign Press Association, for best comedy, director, actor, actress, supporting actor (Revill), and screenplay. Lemmon alone won a Golden Globe.
The critics’ gruff dismissal of Avanti! when it was released has softened over the years. It is now thought to be a more sophisticated and tasteful film than when it first appeared. Sarris, as mentioned, initiated the reconsideration of Wilder’s 1970s films, placing Avanti! next to Sherlock Holmes as a “mellow masterpiece” of Wilder’s later period.58 Similarly, Morris writes in his revisionist essay on Wilder’s later work, “In Avanti! Wilder accepts with equanimity the approach of age and the potential for happiness between a man and a woman. It is his most affirmative, hopeful film.”59 But at the time, Wilder was depressed by the critical and popular rejection of the movie. He later reflected that, like Sherlock Holmes, Avanti! was “too mild, too soft, too gentle. The picture was fifteen years too late.”60
In making The Front Page, Wilder said, he had tried to be “as subtle and elegant as possible,” directing it in a manner that recalled the films of his mentor, Ernst Lubitsch.61 Wilder still looked at the motto on his office wall whenever he made a creative decision: “How would Lubitsch do it?” A journalist inquired whether it was still possible to make successful movies in the Lubitsch style. Wilder’s reply was rueful, not to say bitter: “The time of Lubitsch is past. It’s just a loss of something marvelous, the loss of a style I aspired to.”62
In 1975 he explained, “Today we are dealing with an audience that is primarily under twenty-five and devoid of any literary tradition. They prefer mindless violence to solid plotting and character development; . . . four-letter words to intelligent dialogue. Nobody listens anymore. They just sit there waiting to be assaulted by a series of shocks and sensations.”63 A filmmaker now had to come at people with a sledgehammer, he continued. Audiences did not want to see a picture “unless Clint Eastwood has got a machine gun bigger than 140 penises,” or a handgun the size of a howitzer. A movie hero has to have a dirty jockstrap and a raincoat. There is a different set of values today. Something which is warm and gentle and funny and urbane and civilized hasn’t got a chance.”64
Avanti! was the last movie in Wilder’s contract with the Mirisch Company and its distributor, UA. Transamerica Corporation, a conglomerate that owned an insurance company and many other diverse business interests, had acquired UA in 1967. The present executives at UA, prompted by the administration of Transamerica, pressured the Mirisches not to renew the contracts of their directors.
For his part, Wilder was convinced that it was time to look for fresh challenges elsewhere. His relationship with the Mirisch Company had lasted fourteen years and yielded eight movies. He decided that freelancing was the order of the day. “Wilder was eager to move on,” Walter Mirisch writes, “and so without any animus whatsoever between us,” Wilder and the Mirisches went their separate ways.65 Having made The Front Page for Universal, Wilder wondered whether the studio would be interested in another project he had in mind. It was a story about an aging movie queen who is no more willing to face retirement from the screen than Norma Desmond is. As a matter of fact, this movie, to be titled Fedora, had several echoes of Wilder’s most acclaimed drama, Sunset Boulevard.