Film: “Days of Wine and Roses” starring Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick
By the early 1960s, Jack Lemmon was a proven Hollywood commodity. He’d already demonstrated his comedy chops in movies like “Mister Roberts” and “Some Like It Hot.” But nothing let him flex his dramatic muscles like Blake Edwards’ “The Days of Wine and Roses” (1962).
Lemmon plays Joe Clay, a young San Francisco PR executive who’s never without a phone or a drink in hand. One day, during a business event, he meets Kirsten Arnesen (Lee Remick), his boss’s secretary, whom he initially mistakes for a call girl. He invites her for a drink (“I don’t drink,” she protests). But as they chat long into the night, it’s obvious that he is enamored of her, and she of him.
Kirsten takes Joe home to meet her stern, plain-spoken Norwegian father (Charles Bickford) who predictably hates the uber-slick Joe on sight. Despite his misgivings, Joe and Kirsten eventually marry and have a child.
Soon, Joe coaxes Kirsten to begin drinking with him. They slowly go from one martini a night to full-blown alcoholism.
Joe is sent out of town to work on a minor account. Kirsten is left alone with their daughter and passes the time by drinking. While drunk one afternoon, she sets their apartment on fire and almost kills herself and their daughter.
Eventually, Joe is fired, and he spends the next several years going from job to job. The couple moves in with her father and tries to stay sober. But within months they backslide, and during a late-night drinking binge, Joe destroys his father-in-law's greenhouse while looking for a stashed liquor bottle.
Joe is committed to a sanitarium, where he is confined in a straitjacket. After he’s released, he goes on the wagon with the help of his Alcoholics Anonymous’ sponsor Jim Hungerford (Jack Klugman, his future “Odd Couple” co-star).
Meanwhile, Kirsten keeps drinking, and she disappears for days without contacting Joe. When they do reunite, she tempts him with a bottle of booze. As anyone who’s seen this movie or the recent production on Broadway knows, this will not end well.
This haunting movie, adapted from a Playhouse 90 teleplay, had such an impact back in the day that Blake Edwards went into substance-abuse recovery after production, and both Remick and Lennon joined AA.
While both leads are superb, Lemmon gets the edge. The scenes of him destroying the greenhouse and being strapped to a hospital bed are practically unwatchable. But watch them I did, as part of last month’s Jack Lemmon film festival at Film Forum.
The film, which did so much to create public awareness and acceptance of AA, won just a single Academy Award—for its theme music by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer. Eventually, it got the recognition it deserved: in 2018, “Days” was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
A toast to Jack Lemmon (1925-2001), an actor whose performances made us not only laugh but think. Um, a non-alcoholic toast, please.
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