Cinema: Pay Dirt

Two Weeks in Another Town. The movie business has long suffered a fascination with its own filth. Bombshell, Sunset Boulevard, The Bad and the Beautiful: the vaults are loaded with ugly stories about the beautiful people. A few of these films are works of considerable art; some of them are honest hate letters from people Hollywood has hurt; most of them, and that includes this picture, are what is known in the trade as pay dirt.

Adapted from a bestselling novel by a supersalaried screenwriter named Irwin Shaw, Two Weeks tells the story of a cinemale (Kirk Douglas) who goes barreling down Easy Street, runs into a mental block, spends six years on the reassembly line, comes out with a brand-new head, starts warily down the comeback trail. He finds it jammed with competition, potholed with passions, mined with animosities.

The trail leads to Rome, where the actor’s favorite director (Edward G. Robinson) has summoned him to play a bit part. But his boom companion is not really his bust friend. When the actor arrives in Rome he finds the part, if there ever was one, gone. Jolted, he pulls himself together and takes a modest job in the dubbing room. But all at once the screenqueen (Cyd Charisse) who drove him to distraction and destruction turns up in his hotel and starts tormenting him again. Desperate, he soothes his shattered nerves with a dose of nature’s own narcotic (Dahlia Lavi), and when the director has a heart attack he offers to finish the picture for auld lang syne. But when the actor shows a real flair for directing, the invalid flies into a snit, accuses him of “stealing my picture,” orders him thrown off the set, smears him in the columns.

Why is everybody so nasty? The script does not say. It simply leaves the customers to assume that Hollywood, no matter where you find it, is hell, and the people who run it are devils. It may be so, but this movie won’t make anybody believe it or even care. The moviemakers clearly want people to care. Director Vincente Minnelli and Actor Douglas have worked hard on the film. They are dead serious—and therein lies their error: the subject is too trivial for serious treatment. It could probably be more tellingly developed as a farce. Imagine all those cinemoguls washing their dirty Lincolns in public.