He directed the comedy film Avanti!, which follows a businessman (Lemmon) attempting to retrieve the body of his deceased father from Italy. Wilder received two Golden Globe Award nominations for Best Director and Best Screenplay, and a Writers Guild of America Award nomination. Wilder directed The Front Page based on the Broadway play of the same name. It was a significant financial success with low budget. His final films, Fedora and Buddy Buddy, failed to impress critics or the public, although Fedora has since been re-evaluated and is now considered favorably. Wilder had hoped to make Thomas Keneally's Schindler's Ark as his final film, saying "I wanted to do it as a kind of memorial to my mother and my grandmother and my stepfather," who had all been murdered in the Holocaust. He praised Steven Spielberg's adaptation, Schindler's List. To those who denied the Holocaust, Wilder wrote in a German newspaper, "If the concentration camps and the gas chambers were all imaginary, then please tell me—where is my mother?"
