On the advice of his psychiatrist, actor Jack Andrus (Douglas) leaves the sanitarium he's called home since a career-ending breakdown to accept a part in the troubled Italian production of the egoist director (Robinson) who once betrayed him. It's a journey from asylum to madhouse. Minnelli's final collaboration with producer John Houseman, the film proved controversial from first draft to final cut. Minnelli was pleased to be shooting in Rome and hoped that his vision of a group of starlets, neurotics and petulant celebrities in marital, psychological, financial and aesthetic crisis might be a fitting American counterpart to Fellini and Antonioni. The film climaxes with Minnelli's version of La Dolce Vita’s jet-setting orgy, although much of the sequence was cut by MGM. Regardless, the film is perhaps Minnelli’s most underappreciated, a searing portrait of the old Hollywood order in the throes of collapse.