I first viewed this movie upon its initial release while I was in elementary school in a small West Virginia town where there was one theater and one drive-in meaning limited choices and frequent luck of the draw in terms of movie selection. This was probably the most boring film I ever saw in my youth although my parents also described the film as terrible and pondered the question of what it was even about. Decades passed, maturation happened along with some possible sophistication so I thought I would give this movie another shot, after all, what does a hick family from the hills know about cinema? The second viewing was more enlightening in making the movie appear dull, self indulgent, cheesy, melodramatic and essentially baffling in addition to my previous assessment of it as boring. Glossy slick color envelops the unlikable characters who spend most of their time bitch slapping and yelling at each other. Kirk Douglas and Edward G Robinson are apparently involved in some sort of love-hate relationship that merely seems schizophrenic as opposed to complex. While the story does show Kirk with a leave of absence from a nut house, he mostly seems angry rather than mental. He gets to go to Italy for a $10K per week paycheck ( in 1962 dollars ), a Maserati 3500 Spyder Vignale rag top ( which has a back story that's more interesting than this movie ) and then meets Daliah Lavi as a love interest and that's enough to make anyone mad. Hey, I wanted a stick, not an automatic dammit! Apparently much of the angst is sourced to Cyd Charisse who provided the only entertaining segment of the film when she's throws herself around like a bag of groceries while Kirk's eyes bug out behind the wheel in an ostensible moment of lunacy. Steering like a madman in front of a backdrop of a previously filmed gyrating landscape, the scene is intended to suggest frenzied, maniacal, out of control speed, yet comes off as laughable. I issued a spoiler alert although I'm not sure that's an applicable concept to a film that has no point to begin with. As far as movies are concerned, this flick had a really cool car.

TWIAT is about a has-been actor with the shakes who starts to rediscover his mojo as a director in Rome with the help of an Italian gamine (Dahlia Lavi), while everybody else around him manipulates and abuses him and one another. He's got to have been living in the world's most expensive sanatorium, by the way. He finally learns to rely on himself alone, not the people who have had their hooks in him - quite a contemporary message, if done in a very glib way, with a slight twist on 'Casablanca' at the end.There are two common threads with all the reviews here: George Hamilton's 'best' work was ahead of him substituting for Elvis in the Hank Williams story 'Your Cheatin' Heart', and while gorgeous to look at (eg Kirk's Maserati, the 60's Roman parties), and with performances that would go down a scream in pantomime/burlesque, the movie just drags - not too badly, but it does. (Though it picks up well with 9 minutes to go). The music is also very dated.The drag is because while the script expects us to invest our feelings in the post-suicidal Andrus (Douglas), it spends too much time and energy with the co-stars and their much worse neuroses and marriages from hell - and the sub-Fellini Italian traveloguery, while interesting of itself, is obtrusive. There's also a lot of casual violence against women which is not good.On the whole, it's worth watching if you don't have to pay for it and you'd like to see something halfway between Douglas Sirk and Martin Scorsese. Oh, and a bee-ootiful black Gibson archtop at about 1:39. Almost better than the Maserati ragtop, which ends up under a fountain.

Ten years after 'The Bad and the Beautiful', director Vincente Minnelli and star Kirk Douglas return to another expose of Tinseltown. This time, Douglas plays a washed-up film star who has been in a sanatorium but is now well enough to heed the summons of old 'friend' and director Kruger (Edward G Robinson) who is offering him a plum new role.But going back means meeting his former wife Carlotta (Cyd Charisse), and a younger version of himself (Davie Drew, played by George Hamilton), while squaring up to Kruger and his acerbic wife Clara (Claire Trevor) again to save his professional life.This film is in colour where 'The Bad and ...' was black and white, so it makes an interesting contrast as well as a companion piece. Douglas is excellent again, in a slightly more likable part than in the earlier film, while Robinson and Trevor have enough screen time on their own to make their characters fascinating. Charisse is a viper in fine furs - good to see what she moved into once she stopped dancing on screen.

What the heck were they thinking? Oh, I get it: Take the success of "La Dolce Vita", infuse it w/ the elements of a behind-the-scenes look into the tawdry goings on of a troubled Hollywood production and transplant it back to Rome (Say, "Cinecitta", boys and girls!). And for good measure, have a director w/ an Italian sounding name take responsibility for it.Trashy camp only begins to describe the little seen(and therefore intriguing to self-confessed cinephiles--we have TCM to thank) "Two Weeks In Another Town"(1962), but what a gloriously colorful bit of camp it is. Director Vincente Minnelli is an acknowledged master of color and---I don't know what else. The dialog has to be heard to be believed("Don't swallow all those pills! The doctor will have to come up and pump your stomach. You know how much that sickens me!"). Everybody spits, dribbles and sweats acid in this movie. Need it be said that everyone overacts? It's a wonder anything at all was left of the scenery after they chewed it up! And having pretty boy George Hamilton play a knife-wielding bad boy is a bit much, no? One exception is the young Daliah Lavi who left the bad acting to the two other women principals (Cyd Charisse and Claire Trevor)and just let her natural charms show through. She's even more fetching here because she looks to have more meat on her bones than in her subsequent roles( The Detainer in the OTHER Casino Royale).Kirk Douglas as the main character who gets to do the thankless job of saving a movie in trouble after its director(Edward G. Robinson) suffers a heart attack tries to do the same thing w/ this movie and barely succeeds. A plus, though, is that he tools around in(and gets to trash) a cool-looking Maserati convertible. Watching that car alone is worth it. As for the rest of the movie, it's like bad tabloid reportage. We know it's trash, but we can't keep our eyes off it!