Blake Edwards (1962)

When PR man Joe Clay (Jack Lemmon) meets boss’s secretary Kirsten Arnesen (Lee Remick), they get off on the wrong foot.  She’s coolly dismissive when he tries to make amends.  These opening hostilities might be the starting point for a romantic comedy; instead, they’re the prelude to a torturous ‘social issue’ picture, a clumsy jeremiad about the perils of alcohol.   J P Miller adapted his own 1958 Playhouse 90 teleplay (with Cliff Robertson and Piper Laurie in the leads) and the construction is mechanical.   Kirsten’s switch from standoffishness to accepting Joe’s dinner invitation is sudden and unexplained – beyond the fact that Miller needs it to happen in short order.  Joe is baffled by Kirsten’s contempt, as she stands with her back to him in an elevator:  it’s a credit to Lee Remick that her face shows signs that Kirsten is more interested in Joe than he thinks.  Remick’s character is particularly ill served by Miller’s writing, which pushes Kirsten towards her alcoholic fate in easy, unconvincing stages.  When she first meets Joe, Kirsten doesn’t drink although she’s what would now be called a chocoholic.  He first tempts her with a Brandy Alexander.  Once they’re married and she’s at home with their baby daughter, Joe encourages Kirsten to have a drink or two in the evening before he comes in – so that she won’t notice so much that he’s been doing overtime at the bar.  The script requires that she succumb without a murmur of resistance, even though Remick in her early scenes suggests a believably self-possessed young woman, ready to speak her mind and argue for what she believes in.  Before long, Kirsten is drinking during the day too and manages to set the couple’s apartment on fire.

Blake Edwards’ direction has the same strengths and weaknesses as in the previous year’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s but George Axelrod’s screenplay supplies many more bits than Miller’s which play to the strengths.  Edwards is less than imaginative with visual jokes, like the decapitation of tulip heads by a closing elevator door, and crude when he’s staging a comedy set piece.  There’s an overdone sequence in which Joe sprays insecticide over Kirsten’s apartment – driving the cockroaches centrifugally to the rest of the building and bringing all the other human tenants out of the woodwork in clamorous protest.  (The only consolation of the increasing gloom of Days of Wine and Roses is that the supposedly funny bits dry up.)  Edwards again shows skill in handling the early scenes between the two main characters (once they’ve started to like each other).  These nuanced exchanges have a real emotional current even if it’s easier to understand what Joe sees in Kirsten than vice versa.  Still, Jack Lemmon works so hard at his performance that, every once in a while, he seems to have to stop to draw breath; in these moments Lemmon/Joe’s exhaustion is rather endearing.   Not for the first time, Jack Lemmon brought to mind Pauline Kael’s description of Miranda Richardson’s acting in Dance With a Stranger:  it ‘took a lot of technique, and you see it all’.  Unless you’re prepared to accept it as genetic (we’re told Joe’s parents are a showbiz act in Las Vegas), there’s no real justification for the theatrical busyness of Lemmon’s playing.  He certainly works up a gnawing, hectic pressure but his turns tell us more about the actor’s resources than about the man he’s interpreting.  (Even at this level, Lemmon is occasionally overeager – for example, he anticipates the slap on the face that Kirsten gives Joe in the elevator:  the reaction comes before the blow has landed.)

Although Days of Wine and Roses is set in San Francisco rather than New York, it’s interesting to watch a film based in the world of advertising/PR that’s not only contemporary with the Mad Men era but was actually made during the early 1960s.  The hard drinking in Mad Men is more remarkable than it is here because Don Draper et al, while they might appear to be alcoholics in terms of dependency, can function perfectly well – indeed prosper – in their professional lives.   Kirsten’s father (Charles Bickford, who also played the role on TV, and is good when he’s not required to be melodramatic) runs a gardening business in San Mateo.   The atmosphere there is clean and good, a million miles away from the clouds of alcohol fumes that pervade the big city.  On their first serious attempt to cure their drinking problem (and after Joe has lost yet another job), the couple go to work at the father’s place.  They fall off the wagon spectacularly one night; in case we weren’t finding things overwrought enough, it happens during a thunderstorm.  The way things happen, the descent into alcoholism appears to be principally a means of scaling ever greater histrionic heights.   Joe goes frantically searching for bottles of scotch that he hid in his father-in-law’s greenhouse and, in his violent frustration, starts dismembering potted plants.  Sally found this vandalism particularly upsetting but the whole sequence is so preconceived as one for Lemmon to knock us dead with that I found it hollow and unmoving.

The next scene Joe’s in cold turkey and a straitjacket.   He and Kirsten pass through received ideas of what alcoholism comprises as if the script were a checklist.  When Joe wants to try Alcoholics Anonymous, in-denial Kirsten declares, ‘I am not an alcoholic!’  For what feels like a long stretch, Days of Wine and Roses turns into an extended commercial for AA, with Jack Klugman as Joe’s mentor Jim, a reformed alcoholic who is now evidently addicted to soundbites about how to beat the demon drink.  It’s one of the few funny moments in the film when Klugman’s Jim begins a sentence, ‘At the risk of sounding preachy … ‘, although, to be fair, it’s one of Jack Lemmon’s best when, in spite of the relentless build-up, he reads the line ‘My name is Joe Clay and I’m an alcoholic’ in a fresh, surprising way.

One good scene – an illustration of the only interesting aspect of the way in which the couple’s relationship is treated – comes when Joe goes to the motel the absconded Kirsten has booked into and where she lies blotto in her room.  This bit is dramatically effective because it’s Remick who’s doing the vigorous acting while Lemmon is reacting relatively quietly but there’s a strong idea at work here too:  Joe gives in and joins Kirsten in a drink because he loves her and knows they’ll feel closer if they’re both drinking.  It’s a pity that, as soon as he’s back on the bottle, Joe is again immediately and melodramatically inebriated.  He desperately breaks into, and stumbles as he tries to escape from, a nearby liquor store.  The pointlessly vindictive proprietor jeeringly pours a bottle of scotch over Joe’s head.  Then it’s back to another cold turkey session.

Given the predictability of the piece, it’s surprising that Joe doesn’t have an outburst of remorse about getting Kirsten started on the road to ruin, less surprising that Edwards and Miller are very sketchy in describing the effect of what happens to the marriage on the couple’s daughter Debbie (Blake Edwards’ daughter, Jennifer).   It’s no surprise at all that the script contains such choice offerings as, ‘You and I were a couple of drunks on a sea of booze.  And the boat sank’.  There’s some strikingly wooden acting in smaller roles – especially Alan Hewitt as one of Joe’s bosses.   The film’s title is taken from a poem by Ernest Dowson, which book-reading Kirsten quotes early on in the story[1].   The theme song of the same name, by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, repeated the pair’s Oscar success of the previous year, if not the memorability of its predecessor, ‘Moon River’.

27 January 2011

[1]  ‘They are not long, the days of wine and roses:

Out of a misty dream

Our path emerges for a while, then closes

Within a dream.’