Vincente Minnelli was a peerless director of musicals but he also had a flair for melodrama. Of his 33 feature films, 12 were soapy dramas about doomed lovers, family tensions, or tortured artists. He brought the same technical flair to these passion plays as he did to his song-and-dance routines.

The best known of these dramas is likely 1952’s The Bad and the Beautiful, about a movie producer (Kirk Douglas) and a trio of artists who are simultaneously repelled by and drawn to him. A decade later, Kirk Douglas played a struggling actor in Two Weeks in Another Town, a spiritual sequel to the earlier film.

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