Avanti

media release: USA | 1972 | 35mm | 144 min.

Director: Billy Wilder

Cast: Jack Lemmon, Juliet Mills, Clive Revill

Be careful what you say when someone asks you ‘Permesso,?’” reads the poster tagline of Wilder’s Italian-set comedy. Wilder perennial Lemmon plays Wendell Armbruster, an uptight married American executive who turns up on the Mediterranean coast to claim the body of his dead father. Slowly, Armbruster falls in love with the daughter (the radiant Mills) of his father’s unknown-to-him mistress, discovering he has more in common with his old man than he thought.

Admission free for all screenings, seating limited. No admission 15 minutes after scheduled start times. Please visit our website for a complete listing of programs and descriptions.

2X: JOHN CARPENTER, BILLY WILDER, MICHAEL MANN, JACKIE CHAN

Our first 2023 calendar offers double doses (presented over two consecutive weeks) of four very different and highly idiosyncratic auteurs. The first two features of celebrated genre director John Carpenter provide a glimpse into Carpenter’s developing style (Dark Star) and a fully-realized embodiment of that style (Assault on Precinct 13). Six-time Academy Award winner Billy Wilder is represented by two wonderful but lesser-known comedies: one from his first decade of filmmaking (A Foreign Affair) and one from his last (Avanti!). Thief and Heat are two highly stylized and critically acclaimed crime films of Chicago-born Michael Mann, and both will be shown on 35mm prints! The amazing martial arts acrobatics of the legendary actor-producer Jackie Chan will be on full display when we screen one entry from each of the popular film series that definitively established his big screen persona: Drunken Master II and Police Story III: Supercop.