Avanti!

Wendell Armbruster Jr. is a Baltimore businessman who travels to Italy after his wealthy father dies there in a car accident. His plan is simple: collect the body and bring it home. What he learns on arrival upends that plan. His father did not die alone; he had been spending time on the island of Ischia year after year with a mistress, who died in the same crash. At the hotel, Wendell meets Pamela Piggott, the mistress's daughter, who has come for her own mother's remains. The two have little in common and clash at first, though the awkward circumstances and the island's relaxed atmosphere gradually change things between them. Complications involving the bodies and a hotel employee who sees an opportunity in the situation keep the arrangements from going smoothly.

Billy Wilder directed and produced the film and wrote the screenplay with his longtime collaborator I. A. L. Diamond. It was the nineteenth of the twenty-two features Wilder directed, arriving between The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes and The Front Page. Jack Lemmon, in the first of several roles for Wilder, plays Wendell, with Juliet Mills as Pamela and Clive Revill as Carlo Carlucci, the hotel manager. The credited cast runs to forty-five performers.

Made for about 3 million dollars, the film took in roughly the same amount worldwide. On TMDB it holds a 6.9 rating from 278 votes, the same figure as the critics' score drawn from 24 reviews, so audiences and reviewers have judged it similarly.