Some Like It Wilder Page 45
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 t
he 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.
18
Twilight Years
Fedora and Buddy Buddy
There’s too much dirt under the carpet; it will come out sooner or later.
—Murray Hamilton as a gossip columnist
in the telefilm Death Casts a Spell
Clay Felker, the editor of New York magazine, phoned Wilder in the fall of 1975 to ask him to sit for a frank interview, and Wilder agreed. After Avanti! was lambasted by the critics and The Front Page received a mixed critical response, Wilder seemed to draw energy and resolve from disdain and financial adversity.
When Felker’s reporter, Jon Bradshaw, showed up for the interview, he seemed pleasantly surprised that Wilder’s spirit was not broken by his commercial failures. Wilder, annoyed, opened fire: “What did you expect to find when you came out here? A broken-down director? A wizened, myopic boob in his dotage? I guess you thought you’d find me playing with my old Oscars? In a wheelchair, maybe? Poor old Billy Wilder, the great director—God, you should see him now: a wreck, a ruin!” He continued, “Well, they told you wrong; I’m not just functioning in the Motion Picture Relief Home, I feel just as confident and virile as I did thirty years ago.”1 Bradshaw chose not to reply and instead wrote in his notebook that Wilder “looked younger than his sixty-nine years” and was casually dressed: slacks, a pullover, an open shirt, and loafers. He was also wearing a golf cap—when he was a journalist, reporters always wore hats indoors, and he had worn a hat in his office and on the set ever since. Wilder occupied the same office at Universal that he had when he was making The Front Page, and that was where he was now working on Fedora. His office had once been Lucille Ball’s dressing room, and his next-door neighbor was Alfred Hitchcock.
“Occasionally the vineyards produce a bad vintage,” said Wilder, a reference to the critic who called Avanti! a bottle of sour chianti. “But there will always be another harvest.” Still, “I’ve not hit a home run in a long time; Irma la Douce was a home run. By contrast, Avanti! was a strike-out; The Front Page was a nice hit and drove in a run or two, that was all. It was solid; but hell, I used to hit the solid stuff over the fences.” Yet he insisted that he was undismayed. “Next time up, I’m hitting for the fences.”2
Fedora (1979)
Now that Wilder was a freelancer, he considered himself a “visiting professor” at Universal. He had a contract to prepare one project for the studio. At present he and Diamond were collaborating on the screenplay for Fedora, the project that Wilder was hoping would put him back in the big leagues. It was derived from the first of four novellas about Hollywood in the book Crowned Heads by Thomas Tryon, an actor turned writer. Wilder said he and Diamond “had been kicking around a Hollywood picture, when along came the galleys of this book.”3 The story concerns a retired Hollywood actress living in Europe.
On March 16, 1976, Universal officially announced that Wilder would make Fedora for the studio. Wilder, sounding a bit like Norma Desmond, commented, “It’s particularly thrilling to make a comeback!”4 He submitted the first draft of the screenplay to the studio in September 1976. He vividly remembered discussing the script with a young Universal executive in the black tower, Universal’s executive office building. The studio official “could barely stay awake” because the scenario was not about “car crashes and space ships.”5
William Holden, who plays an embittered independent producer in Fedora, seems to be speaking for Wild
er when he proclaims, “The kids with the beards” are taking over the industry. The studios were being run by young people who had no regard for anyone’s record, Wilder told me. Fred Zinnemann said he remembered being asked by a young executive to name his accomplishments, and Zinnemann replied, “You first.”6 As it happened, Wilder learned later that the executives in the black tower were having second thoughts about Fedora. Two recent Universal films about Hollywood’s golden age had flopped: W. C. Fields and Me (1976) and Gable and Lombard (1976).
On November 19, 1976, Sidney Sheinberg, the president of Universal’s parent company, the Music Corporation of America, finally decided to scuttle Fedora. He asked Jennings Lang, who had produced The Front Page, to inform Wilder. Lang phoned Wilder and indicated that Sheinberg considered Fedora “uncommercial.”7 In the old days, Wilder reflected, “the moguls prided themselves on doing a few prestige pictures every year; if they spent $1.5 million on some deep-dish project, that was no big deal.” But with the collapse of the studio system in the 1960s, “the lights went out in Hollywood,” said Wilder. “The result is a terror of taking risks”; the majors became increasingly cautious about marketing a dark film to an audience glutted on placebo entertainment.8
Wilder walked off the Universal lot for good. While continuing to work with Diamond on the final draft of the screenplay of Fedora, he shopped the project around town. But he was unable to interest a major studio in it after Universal passed on it. He found himself catapulted back into the 1930s, “peddling a project nobody wanted to buy.”9
In the screenplay, Fedora continues her glamorous Hollywood career as a youthful-looking superstar well into middle age. When she retires from the screen after her face is disfigured by plastic surgery, “she trains her daughter Antonia to assume her legend,” pretending to be her. George Morris notes that “the audacity of this imposture would have made Norma Desmond green with envy.”10 Fedora herself assumes the identity of Countess Sobryanski and lives in seclusion on a remote Greek island. Fedora wanted “to go on forever,” Wilder commented. “She did not want to be seen shriveled in a wheelchair, in retirement.” Wilder observed that Fedora was something like Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which Dorian sells his soul to retain his youth and beauty. Wilder mused that the film should have been called “The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilder.”11 Foster Hirsch asserts that “the real-life model for Fedora was clearly Greta Garbo,” and Wilder never denied it.12 Not only has Fedora become a recluse like Garbo in her later years, but Wilder identifies one of Fedora’s greatest movies as Anna Karenina, in which Garbo starred in 1935.