TWO WEEKS IN ANOTHER TOWN: superior soap

TWO WEEKS IN ANOTHER TOWN is director Vicente Minnelli's 1962 sequel of sorts to his "The Bad and the Beautiful" made a decade earlier, and it suffers by comparison. Kirk Douglas played a film producer in that earlier expose of the seamier side of Hollywood, and he returns in the role of Jack Andrus, a washed up film star thrown a lifeline by his former friend, director Maurice Kruger (Edward G Robinson).
To explain away the fact that Douglas is now playing a different character, TWIAT includes a scene in a screening room with Andrus, Kruger and assorted hangers-on watching TBATB, and discussing it as a film that Andrus starred in when he was a star.
TWIAT is a fascinating time capsule reflecting a moment in Hollywood history when - for financial reasons - much of the action had shifted from southern California to Italy and Rome's famed Cinecitta film studio in particular.
Released just a year before the real-life Liz Taylor-Richard Burton soap opera played out at Cinecitta during the making of 'Cleopatra', the story centres around Kruger's efforts to shoot a drama at the studio pairing an American leading man (George Hamilton looking eerily like Anthony Perkins) with an Italian leading lady. The stars' inability to speak the same language will be resolved afterwards in the dubbing suite.
Fresh off a stint at a clinic to deal with his alcoholism and mental health issues Andrus is not in the best shape to cope with the bubbling cauldron of overheated emotions he's dunked straight into on arriving in Rome. There's the lingering animosity with Kruger over their previous professional partnership, the temptation of his ex-wife Carlotta (Cyd Charisse) who's all too willing to exploit the torch he still carries for her, and his burgeoning relationship with a beautiful young woman who is actually in love with Hamilton's character.

Claire Trevor's overblown performance as Kruger's vindictive wife only adds to the perception of all of this as a big budget soap opera. I've got nothing against soap operas if they're done well, but this one's a little too much talk and not enough action. TWIAT is a visually and emotionally bloated, lushly furnished melodrama which replaces the sharp edges and caustic dialogue of TBATB with a lot of petty sniping, trade chatter and a climactic scene so atrociously badly shot that it wouldn't even have made it into Kruger's fictional movie.