The picture contains several references to The Bad and the Beautiful, a previous successful MGM movie directed by Minnelli and produced by John Houseman a decade earlier, also with a screenplay by Charles Schnee, music by David Raksin, and starring Kirk Douglas as the lead character.
Kruger's mean-spirited wife Clara doesn't pity him a bit, but Andrus is invited to take a lesser job assisting at Cinecittà Studio with the dubbing of the actors' lines.
Two Weeks in Another Town was created by the same team that worked on The Bad and the Beautiful: director (Vincente Minnelli), producer (John Houseman), screenwriter (Charles Schnee), composer (David Raksin), male star (Kirk Douglas), and studio (MGM).
In one scene of the former, the cast watches clips from The Bad and the Beautiful in a screening room, presented as a movie in which Douglas's character, Jack Andrus, had starred.
[2] In the scene where Jack Andrus searches for David Drew in nightclubs in Rome, the song is "O' Pellirossa" featuring the Italian singer and drummer Gegè Di Giacomo.
Joseph Vogel, the new studio head, wanted to transform the project into a "family film" and had it re-edited without Minnelli's input, reducing the total running time by 15 minutes.
An orgy-party scene inspired by Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita was deleted as well as a melancholy monologue by Cyd Charisse that was supposed to humanize her character.
Bosley Crowther in his New York Times review of August 18, 1962 wrote: "The whole thing is a lot of glib trade patter, ridiculous and unconvincing snarls and a weird professional clash between the actor and director that is like something out of a Hollywood cartoon."
They’re a scheming, quarrelsome lot constantly trying to knife each other, both literally and figuratively....The insecurities, the business and personal jealousies, and the riotous behavior of some members of the film company are luridly depicted.
David Thomson called it "underrated," writing in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film that it was "invested with such intense psychological detail that the narrative faults vanish."