Remarkably, many great or excellent directors have done their best work making movies about making movies or about Hollywood: Billy Wilder (Sunset Boulevard), Robert Aldrich (Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? The Big Knife, The Legend of Lylah Clare), Robert Altman (The Player), Jerry Lewis (The Errand Boy), Richard Rush (The Stuntman), Barry Sonnenfeld (Get Shorty), Quentin Tarantino (Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood), Blake Edwards (S. O. B.), and, in Europe, Fellini (8 and a Half), Truffaut (Day for Night) and Godard (Contempt). Vincente Minelli mines the world explored earlier in "The Bad And The Beautiful," with many of the same collaborators: Kirk Douglas, John Houseman, Charles Schnee and David Raksin, this time with less sentimentality and much harder edges. His use of visual symbolism may only have been exceeded by Erich von Stroheim, whose son is the A. D. and has his largest and final role in this movie, an apt inclusion for a movie about a city without a heart. It begins with Douglas as Jack Andrus, an actor with a scar on his face from an auto accident, a mental patient speaking with his pipe-smoking psychiatrist; in the next scene, he slaps the pipe out of the mouth of an actor, George Macready, with a real scar from a real auto accident. Andrus's barely controlled rage and self-loathing forms the core of the character, but his journey toward liberation sweeps others along. The portrayal of the marriage between Edward G. Robinson and Claire Trevor is vivid and amusing, especially when he discourages her from killing herself, an act committed by screenwriter Charles Schnee's wife a few months before this film's release. The script is beautifully structured and the exposition is introduced brilliantly. The practical problems of making a movie are accurately presented. This is easily the finest melodrama of Minelli's career.
Review of Two Weeks in Another Town
