Avanti

In Avanti!, the subject is death, and the tendency to embalm permanently the memory along with the body, instead of allowing true feelings about the dear departed to emerge. Jack Lemmon plays a hyper-tense, ulcer-ridden, thoroughly American corporate executive who goes to Italy to claim the body of his father, a man who Lemmon thinks had been in a seaside resort, quietly living out his days as an old man should.

It soon develops, however, that the father had to the last been a vigorous, virile, un-neurotic philanderer. The Italians had accepted this as a quite natural condition, but it is a culture shock which proves to be too much for Lemmon. It requires a stout-hearted labor of love by the smitten Juliet Mills to bring Lemmon out of the death-in-life philosophy that he took with him from his homeland.

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