On Sunset Boulevard

by Ed Sikov

  Wilder and Diamond describe their protagonist in the opening pages of their screenplay: “He went to Cornell, he’s a Young Republican, he occasionally plays a game of squash with S. Agnew. To him, W. Cronkite is a Maoist and R. Nader is a pain in the ass.” As Billy told Michel Ciment, “He starts to have doubts and finally his false beliefs can’t endure.” For Billy, Armbruster’s shifting beliefs have little to do with politics. Armbruster doesn’t change his cold, corporation-man demeanor through the course of the film. Avanti! appreciates, as few other films do, that middle-age transformations are actually very limited in scope. Wendell leaves the film close to the way he entered it—a calculating corporate crud, every inch his father’s son. The point of Avanti! is that Armbruster finally sleeps with someone he cares about, and it changes his life in a small but meaningful way.

  Wilder once made a telling (if fleeting) analysis of his central character: “He starts to understand a father whom he’d barely thought about…. He’s closer to his dead father than to the living one.” Billy then changed the subject entirely: “It’s a reevaluation of the Americans,” Billy continued, “of their errors, of what counts and what doesn’t count. But of course that sounds pompous, and it’s not how I pitched the film to get $3 million. All that is the sauce and the vegetables. The meat is an affair between an American and a girl who is a bit too fat but who has a nice chest.”

  Juliet Mills, whom Billy cast in the role of chubby Pamela Piggott, is naturally petite. Wilder first saw her onstage in London in the play Five Finger Exercise—she was about sixteen years old at the time—and he made it a point to come backstage after the show. He told her not only that he loved the performance, Mills recalls, but also that he had something in mind for her—an enticing carrot on a long, thin string: “One day I’m going to work with you,” he said. Making Avanti!, Mills says, was “the highlight of my life.” Wilder later told her that he and Diamond had written the part of Pamela Piggott with Mills in mind. She was living in Los Angeles after her TV sitcom, Nanny and the Professor, went off the air, and to her enormous surprise and pleasure Billy just called her up and asked her to do the part. There was no auditioning, no calls to and from an agent—just Billy Wilder picking up the phone and asking her to play the lead in his next film. He did tell her that there was just one catch—she had to gain thirty-five pounds. “We were lucky to find Juliet Mills, a miraculous actress,” Billy later said. “It’s difficult to find a girl who weighs too much—who’s teased about her weight but is still adorable, touching, and finally erotic. It’s an enormous risk, and I might have looked fifty years without meeting the right actress. Now it’s around her that the action turns. And she’s perfect.”

  Mills’s pedigree was impressive to Billy, if not her recent career: “She was raised in a family of actors. Her father is John Mills and her sister is Hayley Mills. She lived in California where she acted in a stupid television series called Nanny and the Professor.” In terms of her casting, Wilder remembered a slightly different sequence of events than Mills does, but the outcome is quite the same: “I had found an actress in London who had a nervous breakdown,” he notes. “Back in California, I met with an agent who spoke to me about one of his clients, Hayley Mills, as a great English actress. I asked him her weight, and he answered that she was skinny as a thread. I explained to him that the role demanded an actress twenty pounds overweight. When I said that (you know agents), he answered that she had a weight problem. Then I thought of her sister.” “I was looking at her photo when she entered the office,” Billy went on. “She was also thin, but she’s more petite yet has a slightly larger build. I gave her the script; she read it; and she called me, saying, ‘I want the role, I’m going to gain twenty pounds, give me eight weeks.’ She showed such a desire to play the part, such an enthusiasm, that I believed in her. She ate day and night, was very disciplined, became very plump, and gave a superb performance.” The script describes Pamela more succinctly: “Lovely, touching, warm, and let’s face it, overweight. Pity, that.”

  Nino Manfredi returned, on the drawing board at least, for a supporting role—that of the gracious, worldly hotel manager who orchestrates Armbruster Jr.’s redemption. Billy considered two other Italian comedians, Alberto Sordi and Romolo Valli, as well, but their English was a problem—they spoke it, but not well enough. As Billy put it, “They wouldn’t have returned the ball quick enough to Lemmon on the other side of the net. I would have had to post-dub them.” At the time, Billy wouldn’t consider such a drastic, half-baked solution—it would have looked and sounded terrible—so he chose someone whose speaking voice was as precise as his comedy style: Clive Revill. Judging purely by the evidence on-screen, Wilder adored Revill’s performance in Sherlock Holmes, and his performance in Avanti! is so exquisitely wrought that one gets the sense that Billy wrote the role expressly for him.

  Vincenzoni reappeared to help Wilder and Diamond with the Italian dialogue. Billy also took Vincenzoni’s advice about Italian customs. “He’s a very good friend,” Billy reported, “and he was a bit of an expert for me in local color.” To shoot Avanti!, Wilder’s first deliriously colorful film after The Emperor Waltz, Billy picked another Italian, cinematographer Luigi Kuveiller. “I looked at the work of a dozen Italian directors of photography, all excellent,” he said. But one particular film struck Wilder’s fancy—A Quiet Place in the Country, by Elio Petri from a script by Vincenzoni. “I loved the lucidity, the lightness, the precision of his photography,” Billy said admiringly. “I like him a lot, and not only does he direct lighting, he also directs the camera.… I was seduced by his work, and I love his charm and his personality which are very positive on a set.”

  Despite the troubled tedium of the Sherlock Holmes shoot in England, Billy was eager to return to Europe to shoot. His resistance to shooting on location was no match for the pull of European culture, especially as he approached his old age. “It’s unconscious,” he said, but maybe not. Wilder continued: “Maybe it comes from a deep desire to return here from time to time—to change my eating habits, to see the place I come from.” The place he came from, of course, was pure fantasy, Ischia bearing little resemblence to Kraków, but it was a compelling reverie nonetheless, rooted as it was in a refugee’s enduring sense of lack. With Avanti!, Billy Wilder was obliquely trying to come to terms with what he lost—the father he hadn’t adored, the continental culture he abandoned in favor of Los Angeles.

  Under Wilder’s instructions, Kuveiller shot Avanti! in an aspect ratio of 1:85:1—the first time since Some Like It Hot. He filmed everything else in extrawide Panavision, all the better to keep his characters at a little distance from each other, but as George Morris notes, the comparatively tighter framing of Avanti! reflects the intimacy Wilder strives to create. More vitally, to capture the fresh, supersaturated colors and heart-speedingly romantic drama of the western Italian coast, Wilder had to go there. It wasn’t something he could mimic on a Hollywood lot. He filmed Avanti! in Ischia itself, as well as Amalfi, Naples, and Portofino, with interiors shot in a studio in Rome. Even for studio work, the Safra Palatino complex in Rome offered something no well-equipped Los Angeles soundstage could: “The air is Italian. And if I moved the bed, the sofa, the vase of flowers to a Hollywood studio, they wouldn’t have the same look.” As always, he wanted to show his friends what Europe had over Southern California. On a fine, blistering day he escorted Audrey, Jack, Felicia, and Juliet to Pompeii. It was unbearably hot, Mills remembers, but “Billy was really in his element—the art, the history, the heat. It was like walking around with one of the emperors himself.”

  Having spent almost forty years in the United States, Billy still reveled in his foreign nature. In a markedly anti-American way, he and Diamond utterly ignore the future of Armbruster’s marriage in the face of his budding affair with Pamela. “The play is very different,” Billy noted. “The second part, for example, is dedicated to the dilemma of a man who wonders if he’s going to stay in Europe with his lover or re
turn to his wife. He asks himself questions about his children, about whether he belongs to society, and so on. We suppressed all that.” As the critic Stephen Farber notes, “The film is something more than an escapist fantasy; it is about the importance of escape from the sterile, single-minded American workaday world—a tribute to the lazy, romantic holiday spirit that industrious Americans find immoral.”

  Pamela Piggott’s chubbiness is equally central to Wilder’s vision of Avanti!. “Ask fat-ass if she wants a ride,” Armbruster says none too discreetly to the concierge, Carlucci. “Little girl?!” he snaps at another point; “She’s built like a Japanese wrestler!” Beneath the cruelty of the dialogue, though, Wilder is on her side emotionally. The barbs sting because Pamela is the most lovingly written woman in all of Wilder’s films. Then again, as if to compensate, he calls her Piggott.

  Mills gained her weight by eating three huge, starchy, fat-laden meals a day—and a whole lot of Guinness, which she drank with her father. The regimen continued during the shoot, since Billy was afraid she’d start to slim down naturally. So much of the day was spent working, he knew, that there wasn’t nearly enough time to eat too much, so he ordered a snack bar to be brought onto the set around four in the afternoon, with loads of ice cream especially for Juliet. Billy commented once on the sense of sybaritic regeneration he meant to suggest in the scene in which Pamela wanders through the streets of Ischia, amazed at how beautiful the world looks when self-indulgence is allowed to flourish: “It’s a montage where I tried to evoke the magic of a countryside inundated with sun, the way it touches a young woman who lived all her life in a humid and cold country. We are preparing for her evolution—but without transforming the sequence into ‘Debbie Reynolds Goes to Ischia,’ since it has a certain bite. It’s the girl who provides it when she buys four ice creams in front of three kids and she eats them all herself.”

  More bitingly, Armbruster Jr. begins his quest for his father’s corpse with no discernible affection for the old man. When he composes the eulogy on his Dictaphone machine, he might as well be drafting a speech for some irrelevent chamber of commerce luncheon in suburban Baltimore. At the epicurean seaside resort to which his father retreated every summer, Junior is shocked to discover that the staff adored him—a depth of feeling he himself never felt. The spa, managed by the avuncular Carlucci, is unapologetically geriatric—a lush paradise for the aged. Populated by guests ranging from chic women of a certain age to a Methuselah-like geezer pushed around in his wheelchair by two stacked blonde nurses, it’s a wellspring of rejuvenation meant for people past their prime. Wilder, finally allowing himself to film in blazing color again, clearly finds the whole place seductive. Avanti!’s narrative project is to teach Wendell Armbruster Jr. to appreciate it as well. “Sonofabitch!” Armbruster snarls upon discovering his father’s longtime affair. “Do you know how old he was?! Sixty-seven! A grandfather—with a bad back yet!” For Wilder, sixty-six at the time, advancing age was clearly no obstacle to pleasure.

  The disaster of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes didn’t stop Wilder from trying to work out close, intimate themes in Avanti!. Max Wilder was fifty-six when he died in Billy’s arms on the way to the hospital in 1928; he died a younger man than Billy was when he made Avanti!. Armbruster, like Billy, ends up burying his father in a foreign land, and to a great extent the whole film is a meditation on death—not the abstracted, comical morbidity of Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot, but real death, the mystifying absence of his parents, who cared about him.

  For the scene in which Armbruster and Pamela identify their parents’ bodies at the morgue, Wilder chose to film on location in a church high over the sea, a whitewashed chapel set against a clear blue sky. According to Mills, when she and Lemmon walked inside to begin shooting, there was a reverential hush to the place as natural light streamed through the windows, especially the roundel over what would have been the altar, where the sheet-covered bodies lie. And there was a song in the air. To enhance the mood, Billy had arranged for music to be softly piped in, the way silent film directors used to do—not to record, but simply to stir his actors’ hearts.

  Avanti! was widely slammed by American reviewers upon its release in December 1972. Most critics were unable to see beyond a failed attempt at political topicalism. Avanti!’s admirers surfaced later in film journals, but at the time, the film’s few current events jokes—references to Kissinger and Nader—were said to fall flat, as if Billy was aiming much higher. For Wilder, America in 1972 was itself flat and thudding, a pleasureless country administered by bureaucrats. That is why the film is set elsewhere—a gorgeous European spa. The United States is never seen in Avanti!—except as a colorless airport in the opening sequence.

  The film came in at about $2,750,000, grossed only $4,500,000 worldwide, and even after the sale of television rights Avanti! ended up losing about $700,000.

  Juliet Mills recalls that Billy was “very, very upset” by Avanti!’s failure. “It was close to his heart.” Billy concluded that Avanti! was “just too gentle. The way the picture would have aroused interest is that the son of the chairman of that enormous corporation goes to claim the body of the father and finds out that the father and a naked bellhop have been found dead in that car. The father was a fag. But it’s just a young girl. So who cares? So he got laid. So big fuckin’ deal, right?”

  The cinema he loved was dead, and it wasn’t likely to resurrect itself. “All of that is gone—Lubitsch, Leisen, Love in the Afternoon. It’s too soft, you know.” Ernst Lubitsch and Mitchell Leisen in the same breath? Billy Wilder must have been morose indeed.

  “Today you obviously have to come at people with a sledgehammer,” he told an interviewer. “You have to get to the point as fast as possible. People aren’t patient anymore. They’re not willing to sit and watch…. What bothers me is the fact that I’m a very strict critic of my own movies, and with this movie I expected more. I think it’s one of my better films. But obviously it’s too tame today, too contemplative. Audiences nowadays want something juicier. Today, when there are movies like Brando’s Last Tango in Paris, it’s obviously not perverted enough.”

  A more self-betraying set of remarks came spewing out when Billy spoke with the author Kenneth Geist the week after Avanti!’s seemingly successful preview in October 1972. The audience had enjoyed the film, but Wilder knew it was doomed, and he wanted to explain why, as much to himself as to everyone else. Geist was interviewing Wilder on the subject of Joseph Mankiewicz, but as usual, Billy kept straying. “Our ears have been dulled by the onslaught of television,” he mused. “This is not Noel Coward’s era now. They just kind of whack at you with television situation comedies. It is all more or less on the level of Lucille Ball.” Pressed on the subject of Joseph Mankiewicz, Wilder reacted personally. Mankiewicz had moved from Los Angeles to New York, and Billy had a few snide things to say about it: “He was one who kept some class in this wretched town. [But] he abandoned it.” Even with the wretchedness, moving from Hollywood to Manhattan didn’t make any sense to Billy: “What normal man except an Eskimo wants to live in the Arctic and have his balls frozen off?” On his own career, he was blunt: “It’s so tiny, minuscule in comparison to Lubitsch.” People were not being kind to him, he said: “‘You think that you are in the mold of Lubitsch,’” Wilder claims he was being told, “‘but you’re really in the mold of Stroheim’—meaning ambitious.” And he was feeling very out-of-date: “They are not dancing this kind of gavotte anymore—they’re beyond the twist and the frug, or whatever the damn thing is. What the hell is the use of writing it if they aren’t going to come and dance? … For what? But then I say, what else? It’s not easy. Maybe the proper thing would be to abandon it altogther.”

  Why then did he keep working? Geist asked him. “If only to get away from the vacuum cleaner, I come and work the typewriter.” But he had to be more careful than ever about the projects he chose to work on, he said, “now that there are not so many bullets left in the
elderly gun. Even if you pointed me to a target, I’d still miss….

  “I will kill myself after this interview,” Billy declared. “I have just come to the conclusion that it is no use.”

  Adding insult to injury, Esquire dubbed him an “old director” even before Avanti! died at the box office. The writer Noel Berggren asked some of Hollywood’s elder statesmen what they thought of contemporary American cinema, and Wilder was only too happy to be rude. Recent trends bored him: “I certainly will not see pictures that deal once more with the colored question, once more with Woodstock youths, with motorcycles and heroin, all of that—unless, like in Taking Off, there is a new point of view.” A certain French straw man and his American cousin were trotted out for their daily whallop: “I’m looking back with great nostalgia to the well-made picture—not the Godard-type pictures which bore me totally, no matter how many Village Voice Andrew Sarrises tell me that this is indeed the new art form. I think it’s baloney.” (Billy may have been snarling, but John Ford was even more terse. Asked if he kept up with what was going on in the motion picture business, Ford answered, “No.” Asked if he saw any new movies, Ford answered, “No.” Asked if he had seen Midnight Cowboy, Ford replied, “No! Especially not that. I don’t like porn—these easy liberal movies. A lot of junk. I don’t know where they’re going. They don’t either.”)

  As Billy looked forward to seventy, the pull of the past grew stronger. He found himself dreaming of Germany as he grew old. “Of course I was bitter after the war,” he told a German interviewer in 1973, “but today it’s a closed chapter. I have buried my anger and my hate. The wounds are healed. It is absolutely, totally forgotten. I even miss Germany again today. I’m homesick for Berlin and the Kurfürstendamm.… I see with great pleasure that a new generation is growing up in Germany. It is, I believe, unthinkable that something like what happened in the 1930s will happen again in Germany.” The terrorist attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics disturbed him deeply. He felt particularly sorry for the host nation: “It was as if Germans were haunted by a curse. It affected me greatly.”