Avanti!

Avanti! (1972) is a Billy Wilder romantic comedy you can watch online on iFILM, shot on location in Italy. Wendell Armbruster, a brisk Baltimore businessman, flies to Sardinia to collect his father's body after a car accident. What he finds there: his father had been making the same trip every summer for a decade, to the same island, for the same woman. And died with her.

That woman's daughter, Pamela Piggott (Juliet Mills), has arrived on the same errand. The two of them end up tangled in a chain of Italian bureaucracy — customs, protocols, hotel management, a slippery local fixer played by Clive Revill — while Jack Lemmon slowly lets Wendell's defences come down.

Wilder was coming off a run of sharper comedies, but Avanti! is a different register: unhurried at 138 minutes, faintly melancholy, and quietly interested in what sons and daughters might accidentally inherit from their parents' hidden lives. Stream Avanti! online on iFILM.