I first viewed this movie upon its initial release while I was in elementary school in a small West Virginia town where there was one theater and one drive-in meaning limited choices and frequent luck of the draw in terms of movie selection. This was probably the most boring film I ever saw in my youth although my parents also described the film as terrible and pondered the question of what it was even about. Decades passed, maturation happened along with some possible sophistication so I thought I would give this movie another shot, after all, what does a hick family from the hills know about cinema? The second viewing was more enlightening in making the movie appear dull, self indulgent, cheesy, melodramatic and essentially baffling in addition to my previous assessment of it as boring. Glossy slick color envelops the unlikable characters who spend most of their time bitch slapping and yelling at each other. Kirk Douglas and Edward G Robinson are apparently involved in some sort of love-hate relationship that merely seems schizophrenic as opposed to complex. While the story does show Kirk with a leave of absence from a nut house, he mostly seems angry rather than mental. He gets to go to Italy for a $10K per week paycheck ( in 1962 dollars ), a Maserati 3500 Spyder Vignale rag top ( which has a back story that's more interesting than this movie ) and then meets Daliah Lavi as a love interest and that's enough to make anyone mad. Hey, I wanted a stick, not an automatic dammit! Apparently much of the angst is sourced to Cyd Charisse who provided the only entertaining segment of the film when she's throws herself around like a bag of groceries while Kirk's eyes bug out behind the wheel in an ostensible moment of lunacy. Steering like a madman in front of a backdrop of a previously filmed gyrating landscape, the scene is intended to suggest frenzied, maniacal, out of control speed, yet comes off as laughable. I issued a spoiler alert although I'm not sure that's an applicable concept to a film that has no point to begin with. As far as movies are concerned, this flick had a really cool car.