“You can’t entirely dislike a man who’s tried to kill you.” Old Hollywood’s gift for complicating rugged individualism is on vibrant display in this late-period work from Vincente Minnelli, about a cracked-up actor getting a second chance at fame by rescuing a troubled film shoot in Rome.

Edward G. Robinson plays the tyrannical old director Maurice Kruger, who by the end of the second act has taken ill and is in need of the kind of legacy-rescuing only a suffering former protege can provide. Kirk Douglas is Jack Andrus, fresh from the sanitarium, who tempers his pride, his cleft chin, and his raspy snarl into instruments of firm compassion, calmly slicing through clouds of empty glamor and toxic ambition as he takes Kruger’s place and wrestles the volatile production back on schedule.

Dave and Jeremy marvel at the fraught path to redemption the movie lays out, rife with spite and malice even as forgiveness and acceptance prevail. When that path puts our hero behind the wheel of a top-down Maserati for a raving one-car death race through nighttime Roman streets–by which our hero hopes to affirm that he is NOT suicidal–the subtext is clear: reckless emotional intensity is the solution to–and the cause of–all of life’s problems.

Pack your bags (and your Oscar™ statuette, if you’re as hungry for past glory as Jack Andrus) and join Dave and Jeremy for TWO WEEKS IN ANOTHER TOWN.

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Music by Jeremy Donald.

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