Days of Wine and Roses

Rating:
Summary: Not Everyone Can Resist the Lure
Review: The Hollywood depiction of the corrosive effects of alcoholism has rarely been so stark as that in DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES. More recent efforts like LEAVING LAS VEGAS suggest that alcoholism is but one offramp on the highway of self-destruction. Director Blake Edwards presents a tale that begins in middle-class happiness, then winds down to the sodden depths of the perversion of Corporate Suburban America, before finishing with the brutal truth that the ability of an alcoholic to free himself from this disease is a function of his inner strength that can only be nurtured, not forced, by Alcoholics Anonymous.

Jack Lemmon is Joe Clay, a man on the rise in his corporate culture. He is a public relations executive, a job that today we would call a spin control mechanic. He makes the good image of a company better while trying to downplay the downside. This image of altered reality forms a subtext which becomes evident when Joe and his fiancee (Lee Remeck) are having dinner with her father (Charles Bickford), who is trying to understand exactly what his daughter's boyfriend does for a living. Joe hems and haws but admits to enhancing the positive aspects of his corporate clients. But the father persists and asks what about any harmful sides to that image. Joe weakly adds that he would then gloss over the downside while always bringing the positive to bear. It is this altering of reality that allows Joe, then later his wife, to get caught up in the freewheeling culture of a drug abuse that has now morphed in one of cocaine. The lure of Wine and Roses is neither absolute nor irresistable. The film makes it clear early on that much time and dissolution is needed to become entangled. One does not take a sip one day to become ensnared the next. Joe Clay makes the crossover from social drinker to hard drinker so gradually that neither he nor his wife are aware until the evidence is so blatant that both recognize the dangers, but still feel the need to explain away these dangers as inconsequential. First Joe falls in, then soon enough his wife. The scenes of Joe's going hysterically mad in his father-in-law's greenhouse and in the county asylum are harrowing in their intensity. Joe has cracked, and it takes the arrival of an AA counselor (Jack Klugman) to place Joe on the right path. But the path to sobriety has many false turns, and Joe has yet to hit rock bottom. The contrapuntal scenes of Lee Remick's own descent in the corked maelstrom are more subdued but not the less miserable. Joe has hit rock bottom and the harsh truth is that he cannot help his wife until he first learns to help himself. By the closing credits, she has yet to learn this most bitter of lessons.

DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES is one of the landmarks of Hollywood in that it takes a no punches withheld look at a subject that many Americans have heard about but perhaps have not seen the consequences that result when the social drinker uncorks that bottle even when alone. Lemmon and Remick are simply outstanding as a couple in which one of them learns this lesson even if the other does not.

Rating:
Summary: Not Everyone Can Resist the Lure
Review: The Hollywood depiction of the corrosive effects of alcoholism has rarely been so stark as that in DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES. More recent efforts like LEAVING LAS VEGAS suggest that alcoholism is but one offramp on the highway of self-destruction. Director Blake Edwards presents a tale that begins in middle-class happiness, then winds down to the sodden depths of the perversion of Corporate Suburban America, before finishing with the brutal truth that the ability of an alcoholic to free himself from this disease is a function of his inner strength that can only be nurtured, not forced, by Alcoholics Anonymous.

Jack Lemmon is Joe Clay, a man on the rise in his corporate culture. He is a public relations executive, a job that today we would call a spin control mechanic. He makes the good image of a company better while trying to downplay the downside. This image of altered reality forms a subtext which becomes evident when Joe and his fiancee (Lee Remeck) are having dinner with her father (Charles Bickford), who is trying to understand exactly what his daughter's boyfriend does for a living. Joe hems and haws but admits to enhancing the positive aspects of his corporate clients. But the father persists and asks what about any harmful sides to that image. Joe weakly adds that he would then gloss over the downside while always bringing the positive to bear. It is this altering of reality that allows Joe, then later his wife, to get caught up in the freewheeling culture of a drug abuse that has now morphed in one of cocaine. The lure of Wine and Roses is neither absolute nor irresistable. The film makes it clear early on that much time and dissolution is needed to become entangled. One does not take a sip one day to become ensnared the next. Joe Clay makes the crossover from social drinker to hard drinker so gradually that neither he nor his wife are aware until the evidence is so blatant that both recognize the dangers, but still feel the need to explain away these dangers as inconsequential. First Joe falls in, then soon enough his wife. The scenes of Joe's going hysterically mad in his father-in-law's greenhouse and in the county asylum are harrowing in their intensity. Joe has cracked, and it takes the arrival of an AA counselor (Jack Klugman) to place Joe on the right path. But the path to sobriety has many false turns, and Joe has yet to hit rock bottom. The contrapuntal scenes of Lee Remick's own descent in the corked maelstrom are more subdued but not the less miserable. Joe has hit rock bottom and the harsh truth is that he cannot help his wife until he first learns to help himself. By the closing credits, she has yet to learn this most bitter of lessons.

DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES is one of the landmarks of Hollywood in that it takes a no punches withheld look at a subject that many Americans have heard about but perhaps have not seen the consequences that result when the social drinker uncorks that bottle even when alone. Lemmon and Remick are simply outstanding as a couple in which one of them learns this lesson even if the other does not.

Rating:
Summary: The greenhouse effect
Review: The late Jack Lemmon is likely to be remembered by most moviegoers for his memorable comic presence in classics like "Some Like It Hot" and the "Odd Couple", but anyone who ever doubted his capacity for dramatic acting should screen "Days Of Wine And Roses". This shattering 1962 Blake Edwards drama was shockingly realistic for its time (apparently prompting opening-week "walkouts" by many Lemmon fans expecting another "funny" role). The film still packs quite a wallop in its depiction of an alcoholic couple and thier hellish descent. Lee Remick, forever underrated, (undoubtedly due to her luminous beauty) delivers another of her brainy, mature performances. Everyone mentions the "greenhouse scene", but I feel the most intense moment comes in the "padded room" scene, with a sweating, screaming, strait-jacketed Lemmon writhing in "withdrawal". Call it "sense memory", "method" or whatever, but to this day it remains one of the the most "naked" scenes of an actor totally "in the moment" ever captured on film. A great American film, and a classic Henry Mancini score to boot.

Rating:
Summary: The greenhouse effect
Review: The late Jack Lemmon is likely to be remembered by most moviegoers for his memorable comic presence in classics like "Some Like It Hot" and the "Odd Couple", but anyone who ever doubted his capacity for dramatic acting should screen "Days Of Wine And Roses". This shattering 1962 Blake Edwards drama was shockingly realistic for its time (apparently prompting opening-week "walkouts" by many Lemmon fans expecting another "funny" role). The film still packs quite a wallop in its depiction of an alcoholic couple and thier hellish descent. Lee Remick, forever underrated, (undoubtedly due to her luminous beauty) delivers another of her brainy, mature performances. Everyone mentions the "greenhouse scene", but I feel the most intense moment comes in the "padded room" scene, with a sweating, screaming, strait-jacketed Lemmon writhing in "withdrawal". Call it "sense memory", "method" or whatever, but to this day it remains one of the the most "naked" scenes of an actor totally "in the moment" ever captured on film. A great American film, and a classic Henry Mancini score to boot.

Rating:
Summary: Dark and honest by HW standards, but still tedious.
Review: The problem with melodramas about alcoholics is that they have a clarity their subject lack. In 'The Days Of Wine And Roses', a film that repeats all the errors of its famous predecessor, Wilder's 'The Lost Weekend', the various factors that lead Jack Lemmon, and then his wife Lee Remick, to become alcoholics, are clearly illustrated. He hates the humiliation and pressure of a job where 'public relations officer' is a synonym for 'pimp', and where he has to hustle and lie to market his boss. He hates himself, and can't face his wife. He has a social inferiority complex too - his parents were vaudeville performers, not the ideal background for an ambitious executive. So he drinks. Because he can't drink alone, he gets his abstemious wife to join him. He is demoted, and moves to Texas - due to loneliness and the fear of her husband's violent moods, as well as a terror of disappointing a strict father, and possibly because she was a bright career woman reduced to motherhood, she too souses herself. Director Blake Edwards' camera is often to be found in a god's eye position looking down on his characters, like a judge, or scientist. By isolating the causes and effects of alcoholism so clearly, the problem can be located, maybe even treated. Preachy lectures (about not being preachy) and the obligatory Alcoholics Anonymous scene (whose brief is explained at length, as in a public information film) are prominent. Because Edwards keeps his distance from the characters, we can only look on at them, removed - any joy they personally get from alcohol is made to seem desperate, grotesque and dangerous to us. Despite the moody photography, the young(ish) stars and the lounge-jazz soundtrack (drowning in moonriverisms), this is the Issue Picture about Alcoholism Stanley Kramer never made.

Normally, accuracy in a film never bothers me - the fewer facts clogging up the narrative the better. But the filmmakers' decision to elucidate or preach has a direct bearing on the movie. Genuine alcoholism has no clear, direct cause - people usually drift into it imperceptibly for a variety of insignificant, but accumulative reasons. There are rarely easily sign-posted, dramatic, 'Meaningful' moments when all is either lost or salvaged. We never sense with this film the messiness of alcoholism, the smells, the fluids, the desperation, the bleariness, the staleness, the impotence, the shift in outlook or sensibility. I'm sure the characters feel all these things, but we're not shown them. Instead, they get to speak Wilder-like epigrams full of irony, word-play, poetic quotations and cogent self-pity. Remick's decline is signalled by exchanging poetry for cartoons - chucking Ernest Dowson for Tex Avery displays excellent judgement, and the filmmakers' elitist inability to see this suggests what's wrong with 'Roses'.

At the time, Lemmon was applauded for his unexpected dramatic prowess, but his character here is an extension of the neurotic, white-collar executives worn down by the rat-race he always played. Both he and Remick, despite their best and sincere efforts, are phony approximations or genteel impersonations of drunkenness. Charles Bickford as Remick's stern father, with his narrow code of decency and integrity, and complete inability to comprehend such crises of modern life that might lead a younger generation to intoxicate themselves for escape, shames them both.

Rating:
Summary: A message of hope, a warning of doom
Review: This early depiction of alcoholism was also among the first to present its sufferers as real people with souls and some dignity, and it remains a timeless and relevant film. Ingeniously, this film not only is about alcoholism, it is also about recovery, and that both are told earns the film classic status. The film's leads, Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick (sadly, neither of whom is with us anymore), got Best Acting Oscar nominations, Lemmon for his frightening depiction of one man's descent to hell but who, leaning heavily on AA philosophy, earns his recovery. As Lemmon's screen wife, Remick is her husband's antithesis, and her final scene leaves us with no hope for her character. Though firmly on the path toward sobriety, Lemmon's character nonetheless injects the warning that even the rosebed of recovery has its thorns. Just as the film's subject remains pertinent, so does Henry Mancini's haunting musicial score. A spate of drug and recovery films have come out through the years since "Days of Wine and Roses," but none have equalled the film's painful honesty and realistic depiction of addiction and recovery.

Rating:
Summary: Frightening, but very good.
Review: This film is more horrifying than self-conscious thrillers, as it will come very close to home to middle class Americans. The pernicious effects of alcoholism on family, career and life are depicted here. Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick are remarkable, and their descent from sweet courtship to alcoholic codependency is terrifying.

Rating:
Summary: A MODERN REALITY
Review: This is as modern a portrayal of alcoholics struggling
against the disease with the help of AA as you'll ever
get, especially if you are an experienced AA attender.
The characters were played out with excellent skill,
and present day realism.

The delivery through black and white cinema
had the same profound impact on me that CITIZEN KANE did,
and a bit more than did LOST WEEKEND, which I also
rated "excellent".

Any active alcoholic wanting, but not quite ready
for, an AA meeting should rehearse with this masterpiece.
It showed the way it REALLY IS (and will be!)

RATING: 5/5 10/10
Bill Schaefer
Berwyn PA
[e-mail]

Rating:
Summary: It will stay with you for days...
Review: This is the incredibly haunting and all-to-realistic tale of an alcoholic couple--it's candor as is seldom seen. Jack Lemmon gives an absolutely stunning dramatic performance filled with ferociousness and passion. I do believe that when it ended, my mouth remained agape and eyes wide for at least a minute. It reached me in ways that few movies have done.

Rating:
Summary: A personal favorite...
Review: Watching this movie again recently, I realized that some of the criticisms I've read about it over the years have some validity. Yes, it is a little bit stagey. Yes, Lee Remick still looks a bit too pretty at the end of the film (she's got her hair pulled back, and she's dressed a little dowdy, but she's hardly ravaged). And Jack Klugman's scenes as the AA councilor are a little hammy.

That said, it's still a touching, and finally devastating film. Lemmon turns in a wonderful performance, and Lee Remick was never better than in this film. 1962 was closing in on the end of the black and white era, and "Days of Wine and Roses" is one of those films that reminds us of why the death of the b/w film was such a loss. Bleak subject matter demands a stark setting. More recent films about dependency suffer in comparison--since few non-indie filmmakers are allowed to opt for black and white any more.

But enough film studies talk. See this one for the story. You will come to care for Joe and Kirsten, and in the last analysis, that's what movies are all about.