Few movies contain so much talent and end up being as ridiculous as TWO WEEKS IN ANOTHER TOWN. Kirk Douglas, Edward G. Robinson, Claire Trevor, George Hamilton, and Cyd Charisse head the cast as decadent Hollywood types in Rome to make a movie. What that movie's about is anyone's guess, but the melodrama played out behind the scenes is an over-the-top train wreck directed by the great Vincente Minnelli. The out of control drive through the streets of Rome by Douglas and Charisse is priceless. Trevor, pulling out all the stops as Robinson's shrike of a wife, reprises her drunken blowser role from KEY LARGO. Hamilton plays an actor (a very real stretch that he does NOT pull off). James Gregory, George McCready, and Daliah Lavi are in it too. A camp classic.

Former movie star Jack Andrus (Kirk Douglas) is in a high class long term sanitarium. He receives a cable asking for two weeks' work in Italy from former mentor director Maurice Kruger (Edward G. Robinson) who hasn't talked to him in six years.

Apparently, this was butchered in the editing. I can't speak much about that. All I know is that there is a lack of intensity at the beginning. Kirk Douglas is surprisingly lacking to start. He is so desperate to show that Jack is no longer manic and psychotic that he becomes medicated. He does regain his power as he goes on but it's done in melodrama. I don't know if Douglas is this character. He needs to be damaged but he's too self-assured. He needs to be living in his inner self. Douglas is being Douglas. In a way, it's a cousin-film of director Vincente Minnelli's The Bad and the Beautiful ten years earlier which also featured Douglas. It tries to skewers Hollywood again but they're in Italy. I never got into Jack. I would suggest B&B instead.

Trying to repeat their success in The Bad and the Beautiful with the same studio MGM, director Vincent Minnelli and actor Kirk Douglas give another go at the fabulous world of film making. This time though MGM sprung for color and a location shooting in Rome, the other town the title is referring to.

If Tyrone Power were alive he might have sued MGM because I believe Kirk Douglas's character of Jack Andrus is based on him and the relationship he had with producer Darryl Zanuck and second wife Linda Christian. In her days Linda was quite the party animal, as much as Cyd Charisse portrays here.

The Zanuck character is a director named Maurice Krueger played by Edward G. Robinson. Changing him from a producer to a director probably saved a whole lot of legal fees.

Very simply the plot is that washed up film actor Douglas who is in a high priced alcoholic asylum as the film opens receives an offer from his former director Robinson to come to Rome to help him with a film that threatens to run behind schedule. Douglas comes to Rome and becomes quite indispensible to Robinson, especially after Robinson suffers a heart attack and Douglas has to finish the film.

His hedonistic ex-wife Charisse is also in Rome among many other temptations. It all works out for Douglas, but not quite in the way he would have thought.

Best performance in the film in my opinion is that of Claire Trevor who is Robinson's shrewish wife, based very much on Darryl Zanuck's wife Virginia.

According to the Films of Kirk Douglas, both Minnelli and Douglas were disappointed in how the film turned out. It certainly doesn't measure up to The Bad and the Beautiful. Douglas blamed it on a botched editing job. That maybe so, but my own opinion is that the Code was still in place in 1962 and maybe had this been done ten years later, certain things could have been made far more explicit to the audiences.

Two Weeks in Another Town is still quite a curiosity, catch it if you can.