Drunks: 'Days of Wine and Roses'

In Blake Edwards' Days of Wine and Roses you can easily see -- even if you didn't know the movie was about alcoholism -- that Lee Remick is going to fall, hard and bad, for liquor. Beginning the movie as a teetotaler, a woman who's only vice is the love of chocolate; we see her weakness arrive when her date (played by Jack Lemmon) insists she imbibe. Knowing that she'll enjoy it, he orders her a fancy chocolate cocktail and watches her delicately down the concoction with an almost vampiric joy, as if knowing another potential boozer is a sixth sense. It's a sad moment watching poor Remick throw that drink back, her innocent enjoyment and eventual giddiness made all the more tragic by how unaware she is. In the midst of an almost predatory drinker and harboring the right kind of troubled past or brain chemicals or addictive personality, we know this woman will not be able to innocently drink again.

First directed in 1958 for the classic television anthology Playhouse 90, Days of Wine and Roses was originally filmed by John Frankenheimer in a searing TV play that starred Cliff Robertson and Piper Laurie. The grittier vision with a darker, more complicated director at the helm, the original has long been considered superior to the 1962 big screen adaptation and Laurie the better actress. Since I revere Frankenheimer, a far better director than Blake Edwards, it's hard for me to disagree. And yet I enjoy watching Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick squirm -- especially Lemmon. All through his career, from The Apartment to Glengarry Glen Ross, the high-strung, twinkly-eyed actor always seemed craving more out of life. But that something, even when given a happy ending (like The Apartment) he will probably never satisfy. He may win Fran Kubelik in the end but will he keep her? Or will she become Remick's Kirsten Arnesen Clay?

The actors are indeed different in the alternate versions (both written by J.P. Miller) but all bring something specific and true to their performances. That Lemmon and Remick appear the passive, nice, normal, All-American couple, even kind of annoyingly fluffy or obnoxiouslly "regular," their fall into the abyss plays almost shocking at times. These are the people who get married, have kids and move to the suburbs, not a flop house next to the closest watering hole.

Lemmon starts the movie as a drunk (though he doesn't know it) and much like his legendary character in The Apartment engages in unseemly activities to move up the corporate ladder. A gregarious pr executive with less charm than he thinks he has, he goes so far as to supply hookers for his bosses just to keep a job that will prove to be unrewarding. Remick is the pretty, Encyclopedia-reading secretary (whom he mistakes as one of the girls at a party -- an awkward, harsh moment) and in a moment of fate for two future sots sharing an addiction they don't even know they have yet, they fall in love, marry, have a child and become desperate drunkards. He loses his job, she can't take care of their neglected child, he tries to dry out, she hits near rock bottom, sleeping with strangers for liquor. And by film's end, we don't know what their future holds.

As acted by a twitchy, sometimes smarmy Lemmon and a wide-eyed, dippy, eventually bitter Remick, both actors become sympathetic with characters who are potentially unlikable. When Lemmon digs up and destroys Remick's father's greenhouse (a wonderfully stoic Charles Bickford) on a selfish, hysterical search for one bottle of booze, his desperation is so embarrassingly human and so pitiful that you're not only shielding your eyes from his destructive digging but for his abasement. And when a strung out Remick comes home later in the movie to Lemmon fresh from AA, no one needs to further discuss what she's been doing all night, how much she's lowered herself.

Though the AA sequences are heavy handed and somewhat irritating, part of this seems purposeful. What a drag, spending the rest of your life being lectured, living whatever de-mystified new life AA expert Jack Klugman is leading. How depressing to be so average. Unlike Ray Milland's clever, handsome writer of The Lost Weekend, or Susan Hayward's Lillian Roth and all her "crying tomorrow," Lemmon and Remick's most interesting characteristic is, sadly, that they are alcoholics. They're not Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf's George and Martha, whose addiction and spitefulness are, in a highly dysfuntional way, weirdly romantic. Lee and Jack -- they're just regular drunks. No wonder they drink.

Comments

[Mr. Cory]

Frankenheimer's better than Blake Edwards? You're outta your ever-loving mind.

[Erich Kuersten]

Hey man, AA doesn't HAVE to be boring, at least not any more - especially in LA and NYC (where meeting tend to be full of stars and former mafia guys) there are even fakers just looking to hang out, babble to a captive audience, and hope some of our drunken glamor will rub off on them. Of course there are dullards like Lemmon's and Klugman's characters, but believe me, there may not be wine, but roses can be found - coffee and roses.

[Mr. Peel]

Maybe Frankenheimer deserved to direct the feature version of his excellent TV play, but I can't discount Edwards' version. It's like the nasty, ultra-dark version of all his comedies where there's lots of drinking going on and the fact that the expanded plot adds the element of Jack Lemmon giving the chocolate-loving Lee Remick her first drink (of course, I don't know if this was Edwards or JP Miller) adds an additional layer to the whole thing later on where they're trying to quit. Whenever I watch the film, it takes a little while to knock it out of my head.

[David Simmons]

I agree, Frakenheimer is a much better director than Edwards, but I think Edwards' early comic touches (the crushed folwers, etc.) make the later drunk scenes that much more horrifying. As always, excellent review.

[Rob Anderson]

The first time I saw this movie, when I was about 17, I found Klugman's character annoying.

Now I find him infuriating. His character is the very essence of the Twelve Step mentality. God help us.

[Dave Clinch]

This film retains its power to shock. I watched it over 20 years ago. I knew what was going to happen and yet I felt shredded by the finish.
No lectures to me, notwithstanding the Klugman character, just pure tragedy.