Michael Curtiz's The Strange Love of Molly Louvain and Billy Wilder's Avanti

One would normally not think of Billy Wilder and Michael Curtiz together, but both were from Austria-Hungary and had significant directing careers in the U.S.  Wilder is well-known for such caustic films as Double Indemnity (1944) and The Apartment (1960)and while one often hears of Casablanca (1942) as a favorite film not many people can tell you it was directed by Michael Curtiz, who had a long career  in Hollywood.  I recently watched The Strange Love of Molly Louvain (one of four films Curtiz directed in 1932) and Avanti (1972) and, though I am generally a "splitter" and not a "lumper" I did find interesting similarities in these films, made 40 years apart.  Both films deal with class and betrayal, common themes for both these directors. In the Curtiz film a shopgirl plans to marry a wealthy man, is abandoned by him and has his child out of wedlock, takes up with a gangster and ends up with a reporter, who had betrayed her by broadcasting a false report that her child was ill.  In Avanti a wealthy businessman comes to Ischia to recover his father's body and ends up having an affair with the shopgirl who came to recover her mother's body:  her mother and his father had been meeting for a month once a year for ten years and by the end of the film it looks as if the daughter and the son will be doing the same. Both films are shot mainly in interiors and emphasize the growing relationship of the lovers.

The Curtiz film is considered pre-Code, before the restrictions of the Production Code were enforced, with Ann Dvorak shown several times in her underwear.  Avanti is post-Code, with the nudity allowed after the Code was no longer enforced.  Curtiz's film stars the intense and effective Dvorak, who seldom received the roles she deserved (I first discovered her in the later Albert Lewin film, The Private Affairs of Bel Ami, 1947 , where she was intelligent and assertive) while the Wilder film stars Juliet Mills, who had a very limited film career. Strange Love ... is breezy and fast (72 minutes), in the pre-Code Warner Brothers style, while Avanti runs 2 hours and 24 minutes, both films taking the amount of time they need to tell their stories.  Avanti is an amusing comedy with melodramatic elements,a relatively mellow film very much in the tradition of Lubitsch, a continuation of Love in the Afternoon (1957); The Strange Love of Molly Louvain is a melodrama with comedic elements, especially in the reporter-The Front Page sections (one of Wilder's last films was The Front Page,1974)

One additional point about Avanti:  I watched it with my wife Susan and 16-year-old son Gideon and we all found things in it --sometimes the same things, sometimes different things -- to enjoy, even if in different ways.  This significant appeal of the classical cinema is practically extinct.