A ruminative late master work, Avanti! offers a delightfully unsentimental portrait of an American executive (Lemmon) thrown into mid-life crisis by the premature death of his father in far away Italy. Wilder and Diamond’s script is a delicate, often bittersweet study of Americans abroad and the blossoming of illicit romance in the twilight years. Set against the sun-drenched Mediterranean, Avanti! brought a new relaxed pace and spontaneity into Wilder’s cinema and marked a highpoint of his late films.