Movie actor Jack Andrus (Kirk Douglas) is down on his luck. After his release from a genteel asylum where he has been taking the "cure" for alcoholism, he's been summoned to Rome by a famous director to appear in five short scenes in an upcoming production. Things go awry from the start -- at the airport, Jack encounters his former agent who denounces him in the most violent terms. (Jack punches the guy in the nose -- there is lots of nose-punching and slapping in this picture.) At Cinecitta, the film under production has run into trouble. Jack greets the director, Kruger (Edward G. Robinson imitating Otto Preminger but without the Viennese accent) by punching him in the face; Kruger reciprocates. The heroine in movie has just completed a love scene on a gondola in which both characters repeatedly slap one another in the face. Blithely, the actress peels off her garments and swims scanty-clad to the shore of the Cinecitta pool simulating the sea. Kruger is told by his producer that he must finish the picture or he will be ruined. As it turns out, the five scenes planned for Jack are scrapped, but Kruger urges Jack to stay in Rome to direct the post-synchronized dubbing of the film. Things are complicated by three factors: Jack is pursued by his x-wife Carlotta, who doesn't want him, but is using all of her considerable sexual wiles to wreak vengeance on him. Jack falls in love with Victoria, the girlfriend of the leading man in the film, Davy Drew (a cluesless George Hamilton) -- this is after Davy punches Victoria, his girlfriend, in the eye for no apparent reason. Davy Drew is understandably chagrined by Jack stealing his girlfriend and tries to stab him to death. Then, Kruger has a heart attack and can't complete the picture. Fortunately, Jack is standing by and he steps in for Kruger. Jack's relationship with Kruger is complicated by the fact that the director makes a sort of death-bed declaration that he slept with Carlotta, Jack's vengeful ex-wife. (She's dating a figure meant to represent Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipping magnate, but she's not content with her boyfriend's billions -- she has to ruin Jack as well.) Kruger is married to Claire, an embittered middle-aged woman who knows full well that Kruger has slept with every available woman in this Hollywood on the Tiber -- when she's not attempting suicide, she imperiously orders Kruger around. Kruger agrees to her demand to fire Jack from the movie that he's just completed in the director's stead (Kruger is apparently feeling better). Jack falls off the wagon, attends a sinister orgy managed by the evil Carlotta, and, then, returns home -- renouncing his love affair with the beautiful and innocent, Victoria, so that the girl can return to Davy Drew's arms. Somehow, this ending is supposed to be a happy one, but it's really more like the becalmed somnolence after an epileptic seizure. And it's wholly implausible that the beautiful Victoria would choose the callow and vicious Davy (a whimpering George Hamilton) over the manly, and belligerent Jack Andrus (Kirk Douglas).
Vincente Minnelli directed Two Weeks in Another Town (1962) from a cynical novel by Irwin Shaw. It's mostly a hack job. Minnelli is more interested in the color and the furnishings of the elaborate sets than the characters embroiled in this complicated melodrama. This is evident in the first scene in which Jack wanders around the asylum framed by florid-looking lilac blooms -- Minnelli clearly cares more about the lilacs than Kirk Douglas and, even, has Jack refer to them later in the film. The picture is shot in handsome Cinemascope but its mostly unimaginative and confusing. It's an adult film, nonetheless, in that the motives of all the principal characters are muddled and conflicted. The script never quite congeals and the female actors, in particular, are weirdly blurred -- we're not sure how we're supposed to view them, although this uncertainty introduces some interesting ambiguities into the film. Minnelli mostly restrains his famous sense for color, except for the climax and a scene in which three cardinals dressed in brilliant red suddenly appear on a night street to detonate the right of the big screen with a scarlet explosion. The bickering between the vicious Kruger and his aggrieved raging wife is startlingly raw and realistic -- there are some spectacular "public scenes" between husband and wife on the Via Venuto. There's a showy montage of shots of Bernini's Fountain of the Four River in the Piazza Navona, right outside the hotel room where Kruger reclines in bed in a bright red gown in a bright red-walled room like some kind of Roman Emperor -- but I have no idea what the montage is supposed to signify (possibly its some sort of artifact from Shaw's novel). Minnelli's trademark delirium is on view in only two linked sequences -- but they are doozies. Jack gets drunk and goes to a party orchestrated by the evil Carlotta where Leslie Uggams is singing some kind of depraved torch song. The party takes place in a weird vertically oriented tower replete with plush orgy-rooms full of oriental pillows and velvet curtains and grotesque lady-sphinxes: Jack looks about the decadent company and senses the presence of Carlotta and, then, a filmy green veil wafts down from one of the apartments above in this Edgar Allan Poe set, a bizarre vertical assembly of rooms like something from The Masque of the Red Death. Jack follows the descent of the veil, something like a motif that might trigger a ballet sequence in An American in Paris, and climbs up to the highest chamber in this sex tower where he finds Carlotta sprawled out amidst all the finery of Babylonian harem -- of course, Jack repeatedly slugs and slaps Carlotta and, then, somehow drags her out for a nightmare ride in his Maserati. Here, Minnelli abandons any semblance of reality -- the characters in the Maserati simply spin in vertiginous circles in a ray of yellow light, whirling around faster and faster while the engine roars and the music emotes until the pictures simply dissolve into color. It's a remarkable sequence but not enough to redeem this movie, which, simply put, is interesting but rather bad.
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