Film on Film: A Minnelli double feature anniversary

 " I thought, ' What the hell am I doing if my work is as bad as all this? ' I didn't want to do another film. I thought, ' I'll do something else '. I went travelling round the world and I didn't make a film for fourteen years. I thought, ' What's the point?' " -  Director David Lean reflecting on the disastrous reviews of 1970's Ryan's Daughter

" When a picture is finished and there is nothing more you can do about it, it is like falling out of love. Making a picture is all work and worry and fear and panic. But not making a picture is worse. There is no happiness in this business " - Carol Reed, director [The Third Man, Oliver!, Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol]

 " You know, for me working on a picture is like romancing a girl.You see her, you want her, you go after her. The big moment! Then the let down, every time every picture, the after picture blues " - Jonathan Shields in The Bad & The Beautiful, 1952

 

Opening credit

   One of my favorite films about Hollywood and movie making would have to be 1952's The Bad & The Beautiful from MGM. Directed with ease and assurance by the great Vincente Minnelli and starring Kirk Douglas [the Bad], Lana Turner [the Beautiful], and Walter Pidgeon, Dick Powell, Barry Sullivan and Gloria Grahame in an Oscar winning role. Nominated for six Academy Awards and winning five, it holds a record for a movie winning the most Oscars without being nominated for Best Picture [although it should have]. Winning for Best Supporting Actress [Gloria Grahame], Art Direction/Set Decoration-Black & White, Cinematography-Black & White, Costume Design-Black & White and Screenplay. Only Douglas' dominate Jonathan Shields failed to win the top prize, losing to Gary Cooper for High Noon.

Minnelli on the left, producer Houseman on the right. Not sure who's in the middle, but they seem to be trying hard to state their case for something. This kind of passion is one of the things lacking in today's cinema.

    The film is a roman-a-clef of various Hollywood types, some based on fact, others mere caricatures. Douglas' character, the ruthless producer Jonathan Shields, is part producer David O.Selznick [Gone With The Wind, Rebecca, A Star is Born {1937}, Duel in the Sun] part B-movie producer Val Lewton [the original Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, The Seventh Victim], with perhaps a bit of Minnelli on the side. Turner's Georgia Lorrison is a distinct riff on Diana Barrymore, John's young daughter, who drinks too much, worships her dead father and falls in love too easily, but with the help of Shields becomes a star instead of a slut. Other types who inhabit this Hollywood make believe is Walter Pidgeon as Harry Pebbel, Shields long suffering associate [MGM's Harry Rapf ?] who is the first to give Shields a job in the dog-eat-dog world of the movies. Former crooner Dick Powell plays James Lee Bartlow, a Fitzgerald/Faulkner-esque novelist who comes to Hollywood with his nympho wife Rosemary [Zelda ?], played with sass by Gloria Grahame. There is Barry Sullivan's movie director who befriends Shields early on in the movie, but, like anyone close to Shields, ends up betrayed by him. One of the most enjoyable performers is Gilbert Roland as 'Gaucho', Victor Rivera. Gaucho is all rumba's, fast cars, and women and a good friend to Shields but is the one person who doesn't live to regret it. One thing about this film is that it plays fast and loose with the times it portrays: The movie opens in the early 1930's but the fashions are pretty much 1950's chic. And Gaucho is touted as a " 'Latin Lover', the whole town is crying for 'Latin Lovers' ", however with the coming of sound in the late 20's Latin Lovers were pretty much out of vogue by the 1930's.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

Gaucho

"Miss Lorrison will hold herself like Miss Lorrison. Miss Lorrison happens to be an actress"- Jonathan Shields to wardrobe mistress.

Shields coaching Georgia

The rundown Lorrison mansion that Jonathan and Fred visit after the preview of their movie ' The Doom of the Cat Men'.

But this is quibbling. The pitch perfect perfs of Douglas' ferocity as Shields and the romanticism of Turner's Georgia to the opprotunistic starlet of Elaine Stewart and the kittenish appeal of Grahame's Rosemary to the stoicism of Powell's Bartlow, all these people live & breathe under Minnelli's inspired direction and the finely etched Oscar winning screenplay of Charles Schnee.                                                                                                                                                                                    Without using one true star name or a real movie title to tell the tale, Bad & The Beautiful is a wonderfully detailed portrait of the type of filmmaking long since past. From the costume fittings to the "sneak" previews to the ballyhooed opening nights, Bad & The Beautiful is infused with the knowledge and awareness that the town they knew and the movies they made are rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Much like Sunset Boulevard and In a Lonely Place, both from 1950, Bad has a bittersweet aftertaste, a love/hate relationship for the town, the work and the people who dwell there.

Kruger, with Oscar, trying to convince Andrus he really needs him

  1962's Two Weeks in Another Town doesn't carry the same weight as Bad does. Made in Rome and released by MGM, with the same creative team behind and in front of the cameras: Minnelli directing, Houseman producing and a screenplay by Schnee. Again starring Kirk Douglas, Two Weeks deals with a different kind of tinsel. This is the Rome of La Dolce Vita, the Via Veneto-one of the most famous and expensive streets in Italy-and runaway film productions. It is not as successful as Bad in presenting the lives and inner workings of movie people run amok but it is still an endlessly fascinating artifact. Douglas plays former actor Jack Andrus, fresh out of an asylum for alcoholism after suffering an emotional breakdown. Edward G.Robinson's Kruger is an on-the-skids director, who, having taken a job for hire in Rome, employs Andrus with the promise of a small part in the picture, which would've been Andrus' first acting job in seven years. When Andrus gets to Rome, Kruger is forced by a "fine Italian contract" to do the dubbing of his picture in two weeks, which Kruger finds clearly impossible as he is still in the midst of shooting his film. Subsequently, Kruger asks Andrus to supervise the dubbing and give it the "real Kruger sound" [ a dig at Orson Welles ?] Andrus, with no prospects and little money, accepts.         

Screening room. Do you know what movie they are viewing??

                               

Two Weeks poster art.

                                                                                                                                 Along the way Douglas' Andrus meets a beautiful Italian girl, Veronica, who turns out to be the sometime girlfriend of Davey Drew, played by George Hamilton, the star of Kruger's epic. Andrus also is loathe to discover his sluttish ex-wife Carlotta, played by Cyd Charisse, has remarried and is currently living in Rome and who we find out is the root of all Andrus' problems. Kruger ends up having a heart attack [ironic, as this is one character whose heart would be hard to find, let alone attack], is hospitalized and asks Andrus to finish filming the picture for him.  Andrus comes through this baptism of fire but not before coming face to face with his demons during a night of partying and drinking and  finding himself at some kind of bizarre orgy where the guests all look zonked out on something or other. One of Two Weeks' fault's is that it does not detail certain aspects of the plot so that one is left somewhat puzzled by the characters motivations, presumably due to the cutting that was forced on Minnelli in post-production.                                                                                                                                                                      What the movie does provide is a fascinating look into what movie people in Rome where up against in the 1960's. Far away from Hollywood and essentially out of their comfort zone, these American's are all unhappily flailing around without the slightest idea of what they are doing or why. As Kruger says late one night to his wife "how can a man go wrong and not know why", it may be a question but it's a rhetorical one. Kruger appears to be a director of somewhat high esteem who has fallen on hard times in the 'New' Hollywood. He couldn't get a job anywhere in the states so he took the only one that was offered to him in Rome. Andrus is obviously in a quandary about his life anywhere. Trying to fit in, still hooked on his ex-wife Carlotta, dealing with a mental condition that is precarious at best and suffering from an occasional shaky hand [ from his alcoholism? ], Andrus seems unlikely to survive his two week stay, yet he not only survives it, but by the film's end, appears to be able to learn from it and move on.                                           

Two Weeks in Another Town flopped badly when it was released on August 17, 1962. One can only speculate on how personal a film it was to make for it's creators. Being a top box office name, Kirk Douglas had by 1962, made many films in Europe. From the early 50's with films like The Juggler, Act of Love and Ulysses, Douglas was a semi-familiar face in Rome, Paris and other major cities of Europe. He had just finished his epic Spartacus and still had a few more years as a top flight star [In Harm's Way, Seven Days in May], but his best films were behind him. As for Minnelli, this was to be his second European-based flop in a row, coming fast on the heels of Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse made in France in 1961 and released in February 1962, Four Horsemen, even more than Two Weeks, was lamblasted by most critics in America and audiences stayed away in droves, it's only real acceptance coming from the French critics. Though no masterpiece, Two Weeks like Four Horsemen, has seen it's reputation grow slightly in the ensuing 50 years since it's release. But at the time, Minnelli's reputation among the critical elite was dimming. The late fifties brought possibly his high watermark as a director: Lust For Life in 1956,  Some Came Running and the Oscar winning Gigi both in 1958 and  Home from the Hill  which brought star Robert Mitchum the New York Critics Circle award for Best Actor of 1960 were all critically or financially successful or both. But just a few years later his status, especially in the states, was on the decline and though some of his subsequent work had merit and are worth seeing [ 1970's On A Clear Day You Can See Forever is particularly intriguing] he would never have a completely satisfying film again. In fact his last film, 1976's A Matter of Time, was probably his worst. More than any other film director Vincente Minnelli tried to bring beauty to every frame of his films. Whether he was filming a family in St. Louis, Madame Bovary in France, Van Gogh in Arles, or Gene Kelly in a paper mache Scotland, Minnelli succeeded more often than not. As Minnelli himself said " there is beauty in more things than people realize."