Down the Hatch

Days of Wine and Roses. All drunks are dull, and the rule generally applies to movies about drunks. The last exception was The Lost Weekend (1945). This is another.

Adapted by J. P. Miller from his television play and titled with a line from Ernest Dowson, Days of Wine and Roses recites the case histories of two alcoholics: a public relations man (Jack Lemmon) and the secretary (Lee Remick) he marries. When they meet, she is hooked on chocolate bars, but he pretty soon switches her to the sauce. Hour after hour she sits tippling with TV, and he is too busy watching pink elephants to notice that they are pouring their lives down the hatch. He runs through five jobs in four years before he crawls on the wagon and drags her on it too. But they soon fall off, and he keeps falling until he hits bottom--one day he wakes up in a straitjacket. The minute he gets out of it he joins Alcoholics Anonymous, but she goes right on drinking. In horror he understands that the cure will be almost worse than the disease, that in order to give up the booze he will have to give up his wife.

Strong stuff, and Director Blake Edwards (Breakfast at Tiffany's) does not dilute it. The liquor flows hard and fast, and the scenes in the alcoholic ward are guaranteed to take the lining off a sober spectator's complacency. Then and always, Lemmon's portrayal is easily the most intelligent, intense and complex performance so far accomplished by an actor who started out as a light comedian but apparently can do darn near anything he pleases in front of a camera and most of the time do it better than any American cinemactor of his generation. In this picture Lemmon starts out as a gay and gloriously funny falling-down drunk; as his disease progresses he regresses with a ferocity few players could express and fewer still control; at the climax he is simply a maniacal infant screaming for his bottle.

Nevertheless, something is seriously missing in this movie, and something is seriously wrong. What is missing is a fundamental attempt to understand the social, emotional and spiritual nature of alcoholism. What is wrong is the attempt to be entertaining at all times, even though sometimes the story could be deepened and strengthened by a thoughtful pause. But it is not hard to see why Director Edwards is afraid of losing his audience's attention. It isn't much fun to sit through a 117-minute drinking party without a glass in your hand.

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