USA, IT 1972 | Director: Billy Wilder | Script: I.A.L. Diamond, Billy Wilder | Cast: Jack Lemmon, Juliet Mills, Clive Reville | Production: Alberto Grimaldi, Jack Lemmon | Colour | 35mm | 140 min | amer./ital. OV | British Film Institute / Park Circus

Afternoon is set in the Paris Ritz, which Alexander Trauner replicates exactly in the studios of Boulogne; the Lubitsch aura of the film is underscored further by actors like Gary Cooper and Maurice Chevalier. While shooting outdoors for Some Like it Hot, Wilder drove to the Hotel del Coronado near San Diego, which went down in film history as the first fully electric building. Wilder shot Avanti! on the Amalfi coast. Jack Lemmon plays a stressed out industrialist from Baltimore who questions the good taste of his father when he catches sight of the hotel, in which the old man carried on a holiday liaison over years with a manicurist from the Savoy in London: “It sure doesn’t look like a Hilton.” (Frieda Grafe, “Film-Historical Hotel Guide”, 1990)