Two Weeks More Bad Than Beautiful?

Minnelli Tries a Spaghetti Melodrama

A truly cheerless and unhappy film, reflecting bitter awareness that old Hollywood was dead and not coming back. Two Weeks being a movie about movies, we know writing and direction will air grievance toward an industry that once fed well, but will not again. Joseph Mankiewicz spoke his peace similarly in The Barefoot Contessa some years before, only to step off the soapbox and find no one caring (Contessa lost money), and true to form, Two Weeks stayed short in theatres willing to play it at all (final loss a horrific $3.3 million). So what?, said most where pampered film stars/directors were concerned, a question glowing red in account books since movies began. You'd not profit with moviemaking as topic lest you made fun with it. Vincente Minnelli treats Hollywood like tragedy in transit to worse place that was Rome, where integrity gives way to "peddlers" who don't appreciate high standards US artisans maintain.

There were plenty in 1962 to dispute Minnelli's implication that Euro pix were money-driven junk. This, however, was the trend for film that would exclude studio men, of whom Minnelli and tinseled peers were typical (Billy Wilder, for example, always had snide words for off-shore art stuff). There is business in a projection room where Kirk Douglas and others washed out of H’wood look at The Bad and The Beautiful, exalted for greatness achieved ten years before when movies meant more. It's a sad scene for Two Weeks’ crew knowing their show wouldn't turn out so polished as the 1952 in-house melodrama done under Culver control. Further evidence of changed times and Minnelli not changing was re-staging of set pieces that drew notice to The Bad and The Beautiful, instance one an over-top car drive where Douglas and Cyd Charisse make Lana Turner fits of yore look like gentle mews. In the older show it worked, melodrama an accepted enough form of expression for Minnelli to crank up and still be effective, but by 1962 and excess of Two Weeks' reprise, it just looked strange.

There is an "orgy" Minnelli stages to go La Dolce Vita one better, but Two Weeks In Another Town had to wade through Code thicket to American release, so the portion is sliced and unappetizing. US films would need a few more years to shed inhibition and run even with Euro decadence. Two Weeks In Another Town was meant to reunite the creative team from The Bad and The Beautiful, getting cracked mirror result, as pointed out then and since. Years ago, I counted Two Weeks among favorites, but this time it played heavy. One’s own changing views of life should, I suppose, be factored into movie visits that are far apart. Two Weeks situations and dialogue are harsh and not a little cruel. It's said writer Charles Schnee used this for occasion to vent over bitter harvest from his own spent marriage. The Claire Trevor character is a shrieking ball-and-chain from presumed purgatory that was either Schnee's or most/all long-term biz marriages. By comparison, the Italians seem well-adjusted in their stereotyped jabber and face-slaps. To that representation, Two Weeks In Another Town must have seemed provincial to Euros seeing themselves portrayed as virtual cartoons (no more absurd instance of this than Rosanna Schiaffino as a no-talent firebrand of an Italian "actress").

Kirk Douglas is the comeback-seeking "washed up ham," and you wonder if KD deliberately played his guy as just that, the perf Gorshinesque at times. There is compliant earth-woman Daliah Lavi for Douglas to simpatico with, she the sort any damaged American could find solace in, pure male fantasy not common for a Minnelli film. Their relationship plays as unbelievably as the movie being made in Another Town. Edward G. Robinson's may be the best performance as a harried, and ultimately disloyal, director. He has to raise pitch, however, to overstated level of his co-stars, which makes for shrill exchange with Trevor, Douglas, George Hamilton, virtually everyone there for the Two Weeks.

The one element of the 1962 film not to suffer in comparison to The Bad and The Beautiful was David Raksin's score, the equal of any of this great composer's work, and happily available on CD. It's not fair being harsh on Two Weeks In Another Town for what Metro did in mutilating the film as submitted by Vincente Minnelli and producer John Houseman. Script problems the creative team was aware of from a beginning keeps Two Weeks from being any ruined masterpiece, but what might have been sounds better than what we got, based on footage known to have been dropped. I guess the only reassurance for having been involved was knowing it would be forgotten quickly or paved over by a next success, or repeated flop (like Mutiny On The Bounty three months later for MGM). Two Weeks In Another Town went to television, looked awful there thanks to cropping of its scope image, and to boot had no network primetime run, a reminder of how theatregoers rejected it. Now comes Blu-Ray to a rescue, and from that advantage, the picture looks and plays better than it has since being new.