The Jack Lemmon who impersonates Wendell Armbruster, Jr. is completely familiar for his cartooned American Tourist traits.

Snapshot of a weekend in Ischia: From beneath the airliner's silver belly, the landing gear retracts. stiffly like chickens' legs; and the plane's shadow, on the runway below. shrinks rapidly as the distance to the ground escalates. The heady trip continues over cottony clouds, straight at the sun, and after landing, it goes on by boat, by train, and by car along narrow serpentine roads, past sunny Mediterranean scenery and pastel, candy-colored buildings, pink, peach, white. The Italian local color and caricatures — fishermen, conmen, breastfeeders, Sicilians. and street urchins — are more "earthy," but they sail by too fast to snag the serene surface. The breeziest panorama is a horizontal landslide of street scenes along the route of a buggy drawn by a white-plumed horse. The territory covered, accompanied by a medley of pop-romantic Italian songs, is interchangeable with vistas that have, in the past, enchanted numberless screen starlets — Gidget and her relatives — and the dark young men who romanced them.

An itinerary of the sights along the route would strongly suggest that this movie is to be a whirlwind tour, a light and dizzying brew made of sun, sea, atmosphere, and tourist attractions. However, the trip does not skip along on beat with the sketchy daydreams attributed to schoolgirls.

The guide on this tour is Billy Wilder. He is not young. not in step. And his management of the scheduled route is so curious, so self-absorbed as to excite troubled muttering and sidelong glances in the majority of his passengers. H is behavior seems possessed by peculiarities. There is his general dawdling gait, and his detached wistful pauses, and his sudden caustic asides. He follows a personal procedure, so set and so indifferent to popular expectations, that it would be foolish to prod him. question him, or scold him.

It takes Wilder slightly more than two hours and twenty minutes to steer through Avanti's curlicued storyline. This would be a long time to surrender to twelve all-star actors depicting twenty-eight years in the lives of historic British nobles: and it seems extravagantly long to while away on so lightweight a three-character farce as this. It is one of Samuel Talor's self-sufficient, concounded Rube Goldberg plots. A repulsively rich American industrialist (named Wendell Armter. Jr. to add crust to his character) jets to a health spa in Ischia in order to collect the body of his suddenly deceased father. He finds a woman's body alongside his father's: finds that upright old man, under the excuse of treating his health in the mud baths, had been romancing the same British lady every July 15th to August 15th for ten years running, and finds himself reliving his father's romance with the British lady's plump daughter (named Pamela Piggott to punctuate the plumpness, which would otherwise pass unnoticed in the entirely winsome actress). Complications are ushered in unscrupulously — the finagling for export licenses and zinc-lined coffins, the negotiating with body snatchers and blackmailers. Dispatched with the discreet hustle and heroism of the hotel manager (who is played off-key by Clive Revill, in the tiresome Wilder tradition of obnoxious second bananas, such as Ray Walston and Walter Matthau), the farcical complications might still have kept a quick tempo. Except Wilder keeps veering off onto sidestreets, for unscheduled, lugubrious pauses that deflate the bounce. In the first such delay. the Piggott character works in an oblivious, near-standstill rhythm - counter to the coroner's funny, snappy, mechanical routine of rubber-stamping the official papers — as she rests bouquets of daffodils delicately over the dead lovers' bodies, and takes an immovably long time peering under the sheet to identify her mother. This kind of sudden pause, a brake on the screwball rolling along of the plot, happens every now and then, insistently. These pauses are mulish suspensions of play, as each nicker of sentimentality is seized and inflated with a commemorative moment of silence.

The precious beginning or Wilder's last outing, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, conjured up staunch sentimentality, similarly. In an atmosphere dense with secrecy and reverance, a small chest of Holmes' relics is unlocked and the contents inspected - the fabled pipe, the cap, and so on. The solemn nostalgia of the scene calls on responses that are not engaged by the quaint objects alone, untouched by insider's insight. Avant; also rings up emotional responses that lay beneath the surface — the snarling and scurrying inside the enormous Broadway-ish hotel-room set. More than anywhere else, Wilder backs the main action with a ghostly, echoic undercurrent deceased, in a gesture to their when the son and daughter of the parents and the sentimental hotel stuff play out one evening exactly as their parents would have. The same clothes. same cocktails, same table. same ravioli, the same orchestral serenade - "their song." The entire ritual, every step, is transposed over an unseen past tense, a ghostly departed generation.

Wilder's obligatory, namedropping topical gags have never seemed as sour as in this impregnable, idyllic setting. Ralph Nader ("Who asked him?"), Dr. Christian Barnard. J. Edgar Hoover, Northern Ireland. Polaroid Instamatics, the Baltimore Orioles — all are sounded with a fatigued irritation. Faced with unending front-page problems and family responsibilities, the temptation is to hide beneath the bed covers and imagine what life would be like in Ischia, away from it all. So Wilder's weekend tour turns out to look like not so much a vacationland as a pastureland. Not so much a brief respite as a final retreat.

Wilder's movie is distinct from the other proclaimed "comeback" efforts last year, by ancient Hollywood directors — Frenzy by Hitchcock, Fat City by Huston — because here the director's lifeline appears to be still sturdy, and unbroken, and in his own hands. Hitchcock mingles ridiculous, headless nude stand-ins with routine repetitions of pet themes and gimmicks: Huston leans on the conformist devices and obvious moods of car-seat sexual tussles and Kris Kristofferson's background music. In these two. the director's return to action is marked by uncertainty, and eagerness to please. In the Wilder movie, what is on exhibit is obstinacy, and standing off. As the gap widens between the clustered activity at the center of fashion and the quaint, private puttering Wilder practices on an aloof hillside, the emotional tones in his work — once razor-sharp and usually razor-thin as well — seem to multiply, spread out, and resonate.

The Jack Lemmon who impersonates Wendell Armbruster, Jr. is completely familiar for his cartooned American Tourist traits — the nervous impatience, the loudness, the overdrawn facial maps. He has the equipment to drown out any discussion at a raucous businessman's lunch. The less familiar character of Juliet Mills. who wafts dreamily after a Fluttery self-image composed of filmy, pastel clothing, large hats with droopy brims. and a dunce-y step. It is a large part of Wilder's stolid, unstylish independence that he promotes these two unlikely lovers, this unlikely hero and heroine — a loud American industrialist and an overweight London boutique clerk — and insists on their capacity for sublime sentiments. For them. Wilder constructs some incredibly anachronistic, corny contrivances in order to singularize their romance, to knot it to the vaporous setting and situation. For instance, to commemorate their first kiss: they move to the bathroom scales to make up for the height difference. move through the ping-pong verbal exchange of "avant!' and "permesso" that passes customarily through hotel room doors, and the mushy punchline is the toothbrush and toothpaste that tie up her hands. In this stretched-out and turned-around comedy, the jokes are far less aspiring than the sighs and silences in between.