Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a 45th anniversary screening of AVANTI! (1972) followed by a Q&A with co-stars Juliet Mills and Clive Revill on Wednesday, March 29, at 7 PM at the Royal Theatre in West Los Angeles. Click here for tickets.
Six-time Oscar winner Billy Wilder made one of his most underrated movies, Avanti!, in 1972. The film’s stature has risen dramatically in recent years. In his 1999 book, Conversations with Wilder, Oscar-winning writer-director Cameron Crowe declared, “The prize of Wilder’s later-period work, Avanti! is a melancholy classic.”
To make the film, Wilder reteamed with his favorite actor, Jack Lemmon (the star of Some Like It Hot and The Apartment), and Crowe declared, “The picture was a new peak in the collaboration of Wilder and the actor most tuned to his nuances.”
Lemmon plays a crass businessman who travels to Italy to claim the body of his father, who was killed in an automobile accident while on vacation. There he learns that his father was carrying on a long extra-marital affair with an Englishwoman, who died with him in the accident. He meets the woman’s daughter, played by Juliet Mills, and it seems that history may repeat itself as Lemmon and Mills fall in love. As Crowe wrote, Mills “is a wonderful foil for Lemmon.”
The uproarious and poignant film represents a sly reworking of one of Wilder’s favorite themes, the encounter of an innocent American and more worldly Europeans. It was a subject that Wilder first explored in his Oscar-nominated screenplay for Hold Back the Dawn in 1941, and he revisited this terrain in such other films as A Foreign Affair, Sabrina, Love in the Afternoon, and One Two Three. Avanti! was filmed on glorious Italian locations that gave added richness to the director’s exploration of the innocent abroad.
Clive Revill and Edward Andrews co-star in the film, which was written by Wilder and his long-time collaborator, I.A.L. Diamond. Luigi Kuveiller was the cinematographer, and the production designer was Ferdinando Scarfiotti, the Oscar-winning designer of The Last Emperor, The Conformist, and Death in Venice. Leonard Maltin called Avanti! a “sadly underrated comedy… lovely scenery, wonderful performances by all.” The film was nominated for six Golden Globes.
Juliet Mills is a member of one of the most distinguished British acting families. Her father, John Mills, was an Oscar winner as well as a lion of the theater. Her younger sister, Hayley Mills, the star of Disney classics Pollyanna and The Parent Trap, has also enjoyed a long career. Juliet has distinguished herself on stage, on screen, and on television. She was nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance in Avanti! and for her role on the hit television series, Nanny and the Professor. She won an Emmy for her performance in the miniseries, QB VII, and she was nominated for a Tony for her performance in Peter Shaffer’s first Broadway play, Five Finger Exercise.
Clive Revill was nominated for a Golden Globe for his delightful performance as the beleaguered hotel manager in Avanti! He has also had a stellar career in film, theater, and television. He earned a Tony nomination for his performance as Fagin in the original Broadway production of Lionel Bart’s Oliver. He co-starred in another Billy Wilder movie, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, and also appeared in Modesty Blaise, The Assassination Bureau, and The Legend of Hell House. His television roles include the miniseries Centennial and such series as Columbo and Star Trek: The Next Generation.
For more about our Anniversary Classics Series, visit www.laemmle.com/ac and join our Facebook Group.
COTT TRIMBLE is a graduate of USC’s School of Cinema and Television where he focused on film history and criticism. He now creates psychological portraits in oil.
In the course of the last 4 years, the distinguished musicians of Street Symphony have presented nearly 200 free, live musical engagements with the Los Angeles community, presenting events in Skid Row, the greater Los Angeles Area and the LA County Jails. They bring jazz. They bring gypsy music. They bring the works of Schumann, Schubert and Mendelssohn. They bring music to lift up the brave stories and voices of people who, although living in an impoverished situation, are in no way impoverished in spirit.
Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a 50th anniversary screening of 
In adapting the book, Brooks (the Oscar-winning writer-director of such films as The Blackboard Jungle, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Elmer Gantry, and Sweet Bird of Youth) resolved to be as faithful as possible to Capote’s chronicle, even filming in many of the actual locations where the events took place. With Capote’s encouragement, Brooks cast unknown actors as the two killers, and the performances of Robert Blake as Smith and Scott Wilson as Hickok earned critical raves. More established actors John Forsythe, Paul Stewart, and Will Geer filled out the supporting cast. Brooks also bucked the industry practice and decided to shoot the film in black-and-white at a time when color cinematography had become virtually mandatory for big-studio films.
The results of Sunday’s Oscars were pretty ho-hum right up until somewhere around the 245th minute, when we all witnessed the most embarrassing accounting error of all time. Apparently the gentleman from PricewaterhouseCoopers was more focused on his star-struck tweeting than making sure he gave Warren Beatty the right envelope. However, let’s not let this snafu obscure the fact that the Academy surprised everyone and honored a genuinely marvelous film, 
The beautifully crafted film is adapted from a popular Danish novel by Martin Andersen Nexo, published in 1908. It tells the story of a widower and his young son who journey from Sweden to Denmark in the 1850s in search of work. There they encounter prejudice and harsh working conditions; the story clearly takes on renewed urgency in light of rising anti-immigrant bias in Europe as well as the United States. August cast newcomer Pelle Hvenegaard in the title role.
“The von Sydow performance is in a category by itself. It is another highlight in an already extraordinary career, and quite unlike anything that American audiences have seen him do to date.” – Vincent Canby, New York Times
Wednesday, April 19: 
Wednesday, June 21: