Vincente Minnelli (1962)

The editing became an acrimonious battle between MGM and the producer, John Houseman; it seems the outcome pleased neither party.  The film was poorly received by critics and an expensive box-office failure.   The melodramatic plotting and playing make it often ridiculous.  Yet, as early as 1973, Two Weeks in Another Town was being described, by William Bayer in his book The Great Movies, as – in combination with the earlier Vincente Minnelli drama The Bad and the Beautiful – ‘unmatched in the entire history of the sub-genre [of Hollywood self-laceration], as well as in the history of the cinema of trash’.  It was fascinating to see Two Weeks in Another Town for the first time just a few days after seeing, also for the first time, Robert Mulligan’s Inside Daisy Clover – another example of the sub-genre which Bayer has in mind.  Jonathan Rosenbaum’s description of Two Weeks in Another Town (quoted in the BFI programme) as ‘one of [Minnelli’s] last great pictures’ is a foolish overstatement of the film’s merits but the flair of the direction and the luscious look of Two Weeks make it a much more interesting movie than Mulligan’s.  Although this may not be fully intentional, Two Weeks in Another Town is, in effect, an example of a film that seems both an example of trash and an exploration of it.

The protagonist of Two Weeks – with a screenplay by Charles Schnee, adapted from a novel by Irwin Shaw – is Jack Andrus (Kirk Douglas).  He’s a big-name Hollywood actor whom we first meet in the clinic that has been his home since the crack-up (broken marriage, alcohol problem, suicide attempt etc) that derailed his career.  Jack receives a telegram from Maurice Kruger (Edward G Robinson), an aging director with whom, over the years, he enjoyed a love-hate relationship and plenty of success.  Kruger wants Jack to join the cast for his latest film, which he’s shooting in Rome.  As usual with films-being-made-within-films, Kruger’s movie looks merely crap but the people Jack encounters on and off the set are more colourful clichés.  They include:  Davie Drew (George Hamilton), Kruger’s arrogant, petulant young male lead, who eventually learns from Jack lessons about acting and life; Jack’s glamorous, lethal ex-wife Carlotta (Cyd Charisse); and Kruger’s hysterically bitter other half Clara (Claire Trevor).  Hysterically bitter could describe Minnelli’s vision of Rome too.  The exaggerated opulence of the privileged lives on show functions virtually as a satire of La dolce vita, the excessively vivid cinematography by Milton R Krasner as a Hollywood attempt to top the elegant monochrome beauty achieved by Fellini and Otello Martelli.

In one of the most startling sequences of Two Weeks in Another Town, Maurice Kruger is showing to Jack Andrus and other members of the cast and crew of his new picture an example of the great art he used to make.  This is a clip from The Bad and the Beautiful – on which Vincente Minnelli, John Houseman, Kirk Douglas and Charles Schnee had worked together ten years earlier. For William Bayer, Minnelli’s ‘outrageous nerve to use clips from his first trash masterpiece film about film’ is the proof of Two Weeks’ own ‘trash masterpiece’ status.  While I don’t disagree, I think Minnelli shows nerve here in the sense of courage as well as cheek (even if this is inadvertent).  The excerpt from The Bad and the Beautiful implicates Minnelli and Kirk Douglas in Two Weeks in Another Town in a way that a mock-up movie clip couldn’t have done.  The power games, the urge to self-destruction, the morals of the story (don’t (a) trust anyone or (b) live in the past) and the upbeat ending are entirely predictable yet their predictability fortifies Two Week as an illustration of essential Hollywood.  It’s worth noting too that, while the stylised overacting of Cyd Charisse and Claire Trevor (especially) is entertaining, the charismatic yet disciplined performances of Kirk Douglas and Edward G Robinson give the story an intermittent connection with reality.  (Douglas is good in the clip from The Bad and the Beautiful too!)  The cast also includes Daliah Lavi as the beautiful young Italian antidote to Jack Andrus’s cynicism; Rosanna Schiaffino as the sex-bomb star of Maurice Kruger’s picture; and Joanna Roos, as Kruger’s sternly protective assistant, the well-named Janet Bark.

29 February 2016