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| Days of Wine and Roses | 
| Category: Movie
Buy New: $2.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  56 reviews
Sales Rank: 5277
Media: Video Download
Running Time: 118 minutes
ASIN: B000I5PPMU
Theatrical Release Date: December 25, 1962
Release Date: June 18, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 The bottom of Hell is a Brandy Alexander bubble bath June 15, 2005
4 out of 12 found this review helpful
Alcoholism is a disease. Fine. And yet wrong. The disease is obsessivity, the fact that some people cannot live within satisfying an obsession of some kind. And I am afraid everyone has a degree of obsessivity that could lead to a catastrophe in many situations. The problem is the object of this obsessivity. It is dangerous if it is excessive and aiming at an object that destroys your willpower, your selfcontrol, your selfesteem. It can be alcohol. It can be tobacco. It can be eating. It can be coffee or tea or any spft drink. It can be any illicit drug. It can be any medical and legal drug. It can be work. It can be absolutely anything. Many of those things are not dangerous but some can be deadly both for the person concerned by the obsession and for the people around the person. Fast driving is just the same. And this obessivity becomes dangerous when one is addicted to the object of the obsession. Addiction is the worst thing that may happen to a sane person. But don't forget that addiction, any addiction is rooted in the deepest layers of one's personality, in his or her deepest past, in her or his most intimate experiences. There are only two ways to deal with such a problem. Either to look for the real deeper cause and solve the problem there, if it is solvable, or to keep away from the object of the obsession, in this case alcohol, and that cannot be achieved without the help of people around you. Alcoholism is the derangement of a personality in a social environment and it can only be solved with the willpower of the person supported by the society around him or her. But we must always remember that one is no longer an alcoholic when he does not feel any desire to drink when confronted to the very object of this potential desire, i.e. alcohol. If he lives in a totally alcohol-free environment he may only be a sober alcoholic, and if he comes across alcohol again and accepts to be tempted the relapse is a hundred times worse than the first binge. One is healed when one can keep alcohol away even when alcohol is there is front of one's eyes. There is no merit not to fall to temptation if there is no temptation. At least that is what Milton used to think and I believe he was deeply right on this question.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
Unforgettable June 14, 2005
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
The 1962 film DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES, developed from a television play of the same name, is one of the great examples of black-and-white realism in the American cinema. It examines the life of a couple, Joe and Kiersten Clay, who gradually become alcoholics. DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES also seems modern. Surely this was one of the first films to call alcoholism an illness, or to show an AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) meeting. As Joe, Jack Lemmon plays his usual character-type of the basically decent man overwhelmed by the world. Here, though, his situation takes a tragic, not a comic, turn as he drinks chronically to cope and as a result becomes violent in his behavior. As Kiersten, Lee Remick's acting is every bit as brilliant as Lemmon's, particularly in the drunk scenes. Jack Klugman stands out in the supporting part of Jim Hungerford, a tough-looking yet gentle AA representative who refuses to give up on Joe. The movie presents several unforgettable images: Joe and Kiersten gazing out at the river on their first date; Joe becoming hysterical over one misplaced bottle of liquor; Jim wiping Joe's perspired face in the hospital; Joe gazing out his window after a departing Kiersten as a neon bar sign flashes. DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES is a movie which once seen is never forgotten. It is also movie to make the non-drinker (like me) want to never drink.
Choice of language in DVD's November 2, 2004
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
I would like to comment on Reviewer's Allen Smalling "Constant Reader," (Chicago, IL United States) - when he said and I quote "THE DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES (1962) is a wonderful film, but this DVD is burdened with an unacceptable Director's Commentary." I would like to know if this gentleman knows that there is a choice of viewing this DVD WITHOUT the director's comment? Sometimes when we put the DVD in the machine it starts in a way we do not like, for example in a foreign language or with the director's commentary. In this case you go to Language, and choose your language and puff goes the director. I give 5 stars to this movie and I pray that they use it in AA groups.
Lemmon in his best portrait ! October 27, 2004
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
1962 was the most difficult year for awarding the Best Actor in all the Academy story . Consider Gregory Peck for To kill a mockingbird (who won with this role) , Peter O'Toole for Lawrence and Jack Lemmon for Days of wine and roses .
To me Peter O'Toole deserved this prize by far but Lemmon even his role was more introspective, tragic and harsh , made the best role of his career playing an alcoholic husband role . Lee Remick was fantastic too , but the sinister moments you watch to Lemmon for instance in the sequence of the garden in the middle of the rain night is simply outstanding .
The script is a perfect circle without any hole . A merciless story which typified many couples in the world .
A classic and bitter film!
 Edwards' Recall "Laughed and Ran Away Like a Child at Play" October 8, 2004
5 out of 7 found this review helpful
THE DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES (1962) is a wonderful film, but this DVD is burdened with an unacceptable Director's Commentary. This highly successful film was everything Blake Edwards, the director, could have wanted from it; or at least it is according to the many reviews and favorable critical comments I've read over the years.
Fresh from the thunderous reception of BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S, Edwards wisely stuck with Henry Mancini as the movie's musical composer (and whose theme for the movie won Mancini his second Oscar in two years, following TIFFANY's). For WINE AND ROSES, Edwards took his nearly legendary, trademark style--particularly the insouciant, almost breezy charm of the JFK years as represented in TIFFANY'S--and applied it to subject matter that is anything but screwball in nature: alcoholism.
A boozy, needy P.R. guy (Jack Lemmon) "meets cute" and befriends at work a humorous and intelligent, but slightly aloof executive secretary (Lee Remick). In 1962, words like "codependency," "enabling" and "dysfunctional" were not in most Americans' vocabulary but we can see them at work here...and at first they seem glamorous because of all the charm. Lemmon's character grew up the child of itenerant entertainers, and his standards of achievement are largely superficial and visual. He grew up "Eatin' peanut butter," and wants his life to "have class," whether it's a well-stacked "doll" in a cocktail bar, a high standard of living (and drinking), or rounding up a bunch of lovelies as "entertainment" for his firm's many clients.
But after Lemmon's character meets Remick's, his values begin to change. Remick's character got her integrity and stubborn faith in self-reliance from her Norwegian-American immigrant father (played with brilliant understatement by Charles Bickford) who, as a small businessman, cannot understand why large corporations need flacks like Lemmon to tint unfortunate events with a rosy hue. Lemmon's character comes to view his P.R. procurements (correctly) as a kind of glorified pimping. To get away from that and live a "classy" life he takes a lateral move within his firm . . . but is he simply copping out of a more demanding but satisfying career? While Lemmon's life coping with alcoholism becomes a little easier--at least for a while--what happens to Remick is fatal. He gets Remick, who "can't stand the taste of alcohol," to drink with him by exploiting her favorite jones, chocolate. Her first mixed drink is a Brandy Alexander, where the brandy is largely drowned out by Creme de Cacao.
Soon, though, Remick likes her hard-stuff straight, and the film itself moves onto the hard realities of two alcoholics' lives. Things gradually get less and less charming--and more and more on-point with the realities of full-blown alcoholism, until sanity arrives in the form of an Alcholics Anonymous sponsor, played passionately by Jack Klugman. Lemmon's character accepts the then-novel AA conception of alcoholism as a type of disease, but for Remick cutting down on the drinking is "just a matter of self-respect and will power." What will happen?
DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES is an extraordinary film not only for its style and great acting, and the way the charming plot eases us into the nightmare of full-blown alcoholism, but also for its psychological insights. Every time I see this movie I notice something new: from the symbolism of the cockroaches that Lemmon tries to aerosol-bomb in his girlfriend's "roach palace" of an apartment (look how the middle-class neighbors react); to the fact that Lemmon, whose metaphor for a deprived and rootless upbringing is "Eatin' peanut butter," tries to charm Remick with a box of peanut brittle! (Didn't Freud say that a present says more about the giver than the recipient?)
As such, DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES is an entirely different turn from the documentary-like, "hard-hitting" social-issue approach to alcoholism that started showing up in the films of the late Eisenhower period in the Fifties. Edwards himself, in the film's commentary track, remarks that in the early Sixties people were just beginning to get used to the kind of metaphors carried by the "roach palace" sequence. Unfortunately, that is one of the very few times the director's comments connect with what's going on up on the screen in any significant way.
A few minutes into the commentary track, Blake Edwards wonders aloud if maybe he shouldn't have seen his movie fresh, so that he could better structure his comments about it. I sure wish he had, because most of the rambling, unfocused remarks he makes about his movie are repetitious ("You've gotta remember I myself was an alcoholic then"), or trite ("That's the way it was back then . . . everybody drank"), or irrelevant if sympathetic ("The last time my wife [Julie Andrews] and I saw Lee [Remick] was in the hospital . . ."). We do hear a little about acting styles, particularly the way Lemmon's comically nebishy persona was harnessed to lighten up a dead-serious theme, but we hear next-to-nothing about the technical aspects of how the film was made.
So while THE DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES is a great movie, not a period piece but a charming bittersweet love story about a love that becomes besotten and horrible (yet not without the possibility of redemption), I feel I must downgrade my star-count from a five to a four because of unacceptable bells-and-whistles. Simply plunking even primary talent like a director or star in front of a film and expecting instant insight is not the way to go for DVD's. Sadly, this DVD has company; it's just among the worst of a field in which Audio Commentary's relevance, usefulness and anecdotal enjoyment are very catch-as-catch-can propositions.
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