Burl reviews Two Weeks in Another Town! (1962)

Hello friends, it’s Burl here, saying goodbye to one of the old guard! Yes, Kirk Douglas has left us at the age of 103, so it seemed the time was ripe for me to watch a Kirk picture I’d never seen before! The one I settled on, because it was sitting on a shelf in my basement, was Two Weeks in Another Town!

Of course we know Kirk well from Eddie Macon’s Run, and here he plays Jack Andrus, a once-famous actor recuperating quietly in a Home For The Extremely Nervous! One day a cable arrives from Rome: ha ha, it’s his old director, Maurice Kruger, played by Edward G. Robinson from such great pictures as Double Indemnity and Key Largo! He’s offering Jack a job in his latest picture, and not just a job, but a last chance for some kind of career redemption!

But when Jack arrives in Rome, he finds it’s Last Chance City and the very air is permeated with desperation! Kruger himself is an old philanderer whose wife hates him, and this picture, his first in several years, represents a comeback opportunity and a last chance, as European movies so often did for Hollywood types in those days! The picture’s star, George Hamilton from The Long Ride Home, is young and handsome but insanely mercurial, and if he mucks this one up he’s likely to be a has-been! Ha ha!

Jack finds the job is not to act in the picture but to supervise the dubbing, and he’s not pleased! Nor is he happy to find his old flame Carlotta still on the prowl for him; and meanwhile his relationship with Kruger waxes and wanes, while Kruger himself, under tremendous pressure to finish the movie on time and under budget, seems to be losing it, dissolving into tears late at night in his hotel room! Jack is buoyed by a burgeoning romance with a lovely Roman girl and the discovery that he’s a natural film director! But this discovery leads to a bitter break with Kruger, a drunken spree, and one of the most out-of-control scenes of crazy-driving ever committed to film!

That there is an object of obsession called Carlotta and a lot of driving around (with process shots that make you feel you’re playing the old proto video game F-1), the picture feels at times a cousin to Vertigo! But, ha ha, never for long: it mostly seems as if director Vincente Minnelli was asked to show us what it would be like if Douglas Sirk had popped some amphetamines and directed Day For Night! And of course it has a relationship to The Bad and the Beautiful, the Hollywood melodrama Minnelli made a decade earlier with Kirk playing a hard-hearted producer, and which the characters here screen at one point, reliving their past triumphs!

It’s a pretty over-the-top movie, with Kirk’s performance oscillating between brooding slow-burn and that particular hammy overplaying he excelled at in pictures like Ace in the Hole! On balance I thought he did a terrific job conveying the live-wire desperation of his character, ha ha! It’s a melodrama’s melodrama, about melodramatic characters making a melodrama, and it’s melodramatic even for that! Plus it’s a nice look at the state of the industry circa 1962! I give Two Weeks in Another Town three kicks in the bum!