There isn’t much difference between Kirk Douglas and Cyd Charisse‘s mad sports-car drive in Two Weeks In Another Town (’62) and Lana Turner‘s mad, careening drive through the Hollywood hills in The Bad and the Beautiful (’52). The bond, of course, is that both sequences were directed by Vincente Minnelli, and both films starred Kirk Douglas as a jaded film-industry pro with an occasional tendency to suffer over-the-top emotional fits.
A Warner Archives Bluray of Two Weeks in Another Town pops on 6.19. It’s not a great film — it’s actually strained and overwrought — but it captures Rome at an interesting period, the end of the heyday of a city known in the ’50s and early ’60s as the capital of La Dolce Vita — swinging, top-down, martini-inhaling, Ray-ban hedonism.
