FeistyUpper If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Cleveronix A different way of telling a story

Suman Roberson It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

Gary The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

justincward TWIAT is about a has-been actor with the shakes who starts to rediscover his mojo as a director in Rome with the help of an Italian gamine (Dahlia Lavi), while everybody else around him manipulates and abuses him and one another. He's got to have been living in the world's most expensive sanatorium, by the way. He finally learns to rely on himself alone, not the people who have had their hooks in him - quite a contemporary message, if done in a very glib way, with a slight twist on 'Casablanca' at the end.There are two common threads with all the reviews here: George Hamilton's 'best' work was ahead of him substituting for Elvis in the Hank Williams story 'Your Cheatin' Heart', and while gorgeous to look at (eg Kirk's Maserati, the 60's Roman parties), and with performances that would go down a scream in pantomime/burlesque, the movie just drags - not too badly, but it does. (Though it picks up well with 9 minutes to go). The music is also very dated.The drag is because while the script expects us to invest our feelings in the post-suicidal Andrus (Douglas), it spends too much time and energy with the co-stars and their much worse neuroses and marriages from hell - and the sub-Fellini Italian traveloguery, while interesting of itself, is obtrusive. There's also a lot of casual violence against women which is not good.On the whole, it's worth watching if you don't have to pay for it and you'd like to see something halfway between Douglas Sirk and Martin Scorsese. Oh, and a bee-ootiful black Gibson archtop at about 1:39. Almost better than the Maserati ragtop, which ends up under a fountain.

Edgar Allan Pooh . . . observes Edward G. Robinson as film director "Maurice Kruger," a clear stand-in for Alfred Hitchcock, who was at the pinnacle of his notoriety when TWO WEEKS IN ANOTHER TOWN was released in 1962. Like "Hitch," Kruger operates under the thumb of his script supervisor\wife, Carla. Like Hitch, Kruger cannot keep his paws off his leading ladies, much to Carla's chagrin. As was the case with Alma Reville (Mrs. Hitch), Carla treats all the words of Kruger's scripts as if they're engraved on a stone tablet just carried down from Mt. Sinai. She does her best to destroy anyone who would dare change a syllable, or otherwise threaten the "Great Man's" Legacy. (Like Hitch, Kruger films no "cover shots," so producers cannot redo his scenes, either.) Though this Docudrama is marred by a surreal one-vehicle "car chase" toward the end (Kirk Douglas and Cyd Charisse seem to be in a sports car twirling in mid-air at the end of a cable), it did a public service for young actresses and models everywhere by blowing the whistle on Mr. Hitchcock's tyrannical philandering tendencies.

david lincoln brooks This movie is truly one of the worst movies ever made. Every moment of it, every gesture, is wrong and ill-considered. It makes movies like HEAD and SKIDOO and HOT RODS TO HELL look like clever, insightful "Le Bad" masterpieces.I think Vincente Minnelli had been watching not only LA DOLCE VITA, but also Godard's LE MéPRIS. Somehow the idea was hatched to make an "arty" new European-style picture... but it's only pure American cliché transplanted to Cinecitta.This was that moment in American cinema in which the old studio system was creaking and crashing, supplanted by television, and ultimately by the new breed of 1960's young turks who would re-script it. But meanwhile you could see old Hollywood making desperate gropes in the dark for some kind of old-school monumentality, McLuhan-defined "hotness".Kirk Douglas is reaching his sell-by date here, no longer convincing as the romantic lead. This is one of those 1960's-style "Viagra" movies, like 1968's PETULIA, or 1969's THE ARRANGEMENT: middle-aged man gets his life's potency back by having a fling with a young honey, all the while reciting his various existential angsts.An old-school symphonic-strings score (which a Fellini or Godard would never dream of including) swoops and shrieks and wails, always obtruding, never vitalizing the on screen action.The naked truth is, Americans, with few exceptions, have never been good at making arty Euro-style films, and this movie is a glaring example.This movie is like the play put on in WAITING FOR GUFFMANN: the players unwittingly make disparaging comments which, as far as the audience can see, can easily apply to the very entertainment they're watching. And that's embarrassing.If you're going to make a bad movie, then at least let the audience savor its badness...a-la a John Waters or Andy Warhol flick. But this film takes itself terribly seriously, even though all the plot points are disjointed, untrue, calculated.Maybe 1962 lacked the censor's freedom to depict an authentic "movie-about-moviemaking" story; to see this same basic story told authentically, convincingly, we would have to wait until 1973's LA NUIT AMERICAINE by Truffaut.

edwagreen Imagine a film with Kirk Douglas, Edward G. Robinson, George Hamilton, Cyd Charisse and Claire Trevor being miserable. It's hard to believe but it's true.The best scenes are when we see clips of Douglas's 1952 "The Bad and the Beautiful." That was a picture.This garbage deals with Douglas as an actor getting over suicide and being brought to Rome to work for director Robinson. There he meets his ex-wife Carlotta, played in a whore-like manner by Ms. Charisse. She is way out of her league in this one but her days of dancing with Fred Astaire were long gone.Interesting to see the teaming of Robinson and Trevor, this time as man and wife. They made such a great duo 14 years before in Trevor's Oscar-winning gem "Key Largo." As was the case with the latter, Trevor is once again a drunkard but with no reason as she had in 'Largo.'The picture is a rip-off of "The Sun Also Rises" as it deals with emotionally unbalanced people. At age 22, George Hamilton, as an actor, is already over the hill.Douglas wants to reenact his hitting of a wall this time in Rome as he had done in L.A. during his drunken suicide attempt. He and the others really hit the wall by making this awful film.