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Sweet and Sour:
Lubitsch and Wilder in Old Hollywood
Wilder’s ambivalence about both Europe and the US is held in exquisite balance in Avanti!, perhaps the least known but surely the most achieved of all his Lubitsch-style comedies, which over the years has gradually become my favorite of all his pictures. It describes the very brief romance that ensues between the aforementioned Armbruster and a working-class English woman named Pamela Piggott (Juliet Mills), when they meet at a health resort and luxury hotel not far from the Bay of Naples. They’ve arrived at this particular spot because his father and her mother, who’ve just died together in a car accident, had been carrying on a secret affair at this hotel for a month every summer over the past decade — something Piggott knew about that was completely unknown to Armbruster Jr. As they discover and essentially recapitulate various details about their parents’ amorous past at the same hotel, the quintessential German appreciation for Italian culture (equally apparent in such literary classics as Death in Venice), which also encompasses here a lot of satirical observation, becomes the main bill of fare. (Curiously, one reason why Wilder was himself disappointed with the way this film turned out was that he originally wanted Armbruster Sr.’s long-term affair to have been with a male hotel bellhop, until studio executives dissuaded him.)
Both Wendell Armbruster Jr. and Pamela Piggott are flawed individuals, to say the least: He’s brash and shallow, the ugliest of “ugly Americans” in confronting Italian customs, and she’s a neurotic obsessed with being overweight. Yet as with Cervantes’ pairing of Don Quixote with Sancho Panza, the pairing of their separate faults makes the two of them irresistible, and far greater than the sum of their parts. It’s characteristic of Wilder’s mastery of this romantic material — which he very freely adapted with Diamond from a play by Samuel A. Taylor, the author of Sabrina — that (a) a full two hours of the movie’s 144 minutes pass before the couple finally arrive at a kiss and that (b) it’s well worth the wait. (In the Taylor play — which I’ve read in its revised version, called A Touch of Spring — their affair happens in Rome and starts much earlier, and the characters are distinctly different. The English woman, for instance, is a sophisticated actress.) Thanks to Wilder and Diamond’s careful script construction, this kiss occurs at precisely the same moment that an American who’s even more boorish, insensitive and clueless than Armbruster suddenly arrives on the scene — a yahoo government bureaucrat named Blodgett, astutely played by Edward Andrews — who makes Armbruster seem like a civilized role model by comparison.
Is it possible to speak of a Wilder touch? I think so, especially if one thinks about the writer-director’s subtle and delicate way of charting the emotional lives of Sherlock Holmes and Wendell Armbruster Jr. in these late masterpieces. Come to think of it, I think even Lubitsch might have been envious.