Avanti!
For the past ten years, Baltimore industrialist Wendell Armbruster, Sr. has been spending a month at the Grand Hotel Excelsior in the Island of Ischia on the Bay of Naples, in Italy allegedly to soak in the therapeutic mud baths for which the resort island is known. When he is killed in an automobile accident, his straitlaced son Wendell Armbruster, Jr. journeys to Italy to claim his father's body. Upon arrival he discovers his father was not alone in the Fiat he was driving; with him was his British mistress, whose daughter, free-spirited London shop girl Pamela Piggott, also is on the scene, though she clearly knew of their parents' clandestine romance beforehand. Hotel manager Carlo Carlucci attempts to smooth things over, taking on all the arrangements for the body to be taken back to Baltimore in time for burial in just three days time.
Complications arise when the bodies disappear from the morgue. Wendell suspects Pamela, who has expressed a wish that they be buried in Ischia; however, it is revealed that the actual bodysnatchers are the Trotta family, whose vineyard was damaged when the elder Armbruster's car drove into it during the fatal automobile accident. The Trotta brothers have stolen the bodies from the morgue, holding them for a two million lire ransom.
This is not Wendell's only problem. Bruno, the hotel valet, is determined to get back to America after being deported and has compromising photographs of Wendell's father and Pamela's mother swimming nude in the bay. As the Italian atmosphere begins to affect them both and animosity gives way to friendship, Bruno manages to get pictures of Wendell and Pamela swimming naked as well, and tries to blackmail his way to an American visa. This displeases the maid Anna, with whom Bruno was co-habiting, and in a fit of rage she lures Bruno to Pamela's room, kills him, and then runs off. Carlucci moves Pamela's belongings into Wendell's room to prevent an international incident, and the two are thrown together.
Appearing in a U.S. Navy helicopter to speed the repatriation is State Department official J.J. Blodgett who, by posthumously appointing the deceased man to an embassy post, allows the U.S. government to recover his body. Finally, Carlucci, Wendell and Pamela find the perfect solution - their parents are buried side by side in Ischia (in the Carlucci family plot) whilst Bruno takes his place in the repatriated coffin, finding his way back to America after all. Wendell and Pamela part, with a vow to return next year, just as their parents did.
murder