Monday, February 19 @ 7:00 PM / Music Box Theatre

Directed by Vincente Minnelli / 1962

Adapted from a free-standing novel by Irvin Shaw but effectively retrofitted by director Vincente Minnelli, screenwriter Charles Schnee, producer John Houseman, star Kirk Douglas, and composer David Raksin as a spiritual sequel to their own Oscar-winning Tinsel Town satire The Bad and the Beautiful, Two Weeks in Another Town is a mad melodrama that charts Hollywood's decline while frolicking in the detritus. Douglas stars as Jack Andrus, the Serious Actor discharged from a high-end sanitarium after a cablegram calls him to Rome for two weeks of work at Cinecitta under the direction of longtime collaborator Maurice Kruger (Edward G. Robinson). Upon his arrival, Andrus finds sun-dappled seaside rot: a runaway production that Kruger cannot control, dub-happy actors speaking past each other in different languages on the set, crass financiers who don't give a damn about showmanship. Like a Henry James story turned inside out, this Metrocolor debauchery circus plays American neuroses against European cynicism and everybody comes up plastered. Shot immediately after Minnelli's own deeply demoralizing experience on the international co-production The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Two Weeks in Another Town plays like a documentary that really wants to be a psychodrama instead, a craggly self-portrait rounded up to Greek tragedy. With supporting turns from Cyd Charisse, Claire Trevor, and George Hamilton. (KW)

107 minutes / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer / 35mm from Warner Bros.

Short: Production Featurette for The Cardinal (Otto Preminger, 1963) - 35mm Technicolor - 8 min