In Avanti!, the subject is death, and the tendency to embalm permanently the memory along with the body, instead of allowing true feelings about the dear departed to emerge. Jack Lemmon plays a hyper-tense, ulcer-ridden, thoroughly American corporate executive who goes to Italy to claim the body of his father, a man who Lemmon thinks had been in a seaside resort, quietly living out his days as an old man should.

It soon develops, however, that the father had to the last been a vigorous, virile, un-neurotic philanderer. The Italians had accepted this as a quite natural condition, but it is a culture shock which proves to be too much for Lemmon. It requires a stout-hearted labor of love by the smitten Juliet Mills to bring Lemmon out of the death-in-life philosophy that he took with him from his homeland.