Yes, this is a relatively depressing movie, but its ending only offers a mere hope that Lemmon, who has finally rejected his wife for his own sobriety,...he might make it if he continues to discipline his mind and continue with his program.

It is a sad film but one which is incredibly relevant. I would've liked it if Remick had stuck it out and made a go of the marriage, but she wanted the threesome - herself, her husband and the bottle. Maybe the baby, but her baby was the bottle. Highly recommended, and again a film which could be considered family fare, as there was no profanity, sex, or violence, but an incredibly powerful message. A message in a bottle, as they say, but still as provocative as it was when it was first made. A Great Film!!!


Dark and honest by HW standards, but still tedious.   March 6, 2002
 7 out of 28 found this review helpful

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.