A successful businessman travels to Italy to arrange for the return of his tycoon father's body, only to learn that dear old dad died with his longtime mistress.
Writing
Wilder's last great screenplay—cynical, humane, brutally funny.
Acting
Mills matches Lemmon beat for beat; she's the film's soul.
Direction
Wilder at 66, still staging chaos with surgical precision.
Director
Billy Wilder
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Wilder and co-writer I.A.L. Diamond adapted this from a 1968 play by Samuel Taylor, keeping much of the stage dialogue verbatim.
This was Wilder's penultimate film and his last commercial success; critics dismissed it then, but it's now seen as a valentine to his own European exile and a meditation on aging gracefully into compromise.
US
