Days of Wine and Roses

Starring:Jack Lemmon, Lee Remick, Charles Bickford, Jack Klugman, Alan Hewitt, Tom Palmer (II), Debbie Megowan, Maxine Stuart, Jack Albertson, Ken Lynch, Robert 'Buddy' Shaw, John Bard Manulis, Dick Crockett, Chuck Hicks, Jennifer Edwards, Charles Wood, Tai Yen Horowitz, Katherine Squire, Roger Barrett, Peggy Patten
Director: Blake Edwards
Studio: Warner Home Video
Product Type: DVD

Amazon.com essential video

Days of Wine and Roses is one film not to watch if you are melancholic by nature, as this tale of middle-class alcoholism rings very true. Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick are the besotted couple who find that life is not always fun when viewed through rosé-colored glasses. He's the San Francisco business executive who marries Remick and seduces her into a cocktail culture that soon overpowers them both. It is not a pretty picture when their life shatters around them, but this film is extremely compelling for their performances. It is matched only by Billy Wilder's Lost Weekend and the more explicit Leaving Las Vegas. This was nominated for five Academy Awards and won for the title song by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer. Filmed by Blake Edwards in 1962, it is based on a Playhouse 90 television production from 1958, starring Cliff Robertson and Piper Laurie. --Rochelle O'Gorman

Description

Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick are unforgetable-and the title tune wins an Oscar(R) in Blake Edwards' searing, bittersweet study of an alcoholic couple on the rocks. Year: 1962 Director: Blake Edwards Starring: Jack Lemmon, Lee Remick, Charles Bickford

Customer Reviews:

Days of Wine and Roses.......2007-06-27

A downbeat love story pickled in bile and booze, this melodrama of addiction by the great Blake Edwards skirts the same terrain as "Lost Weekend" without ever getting preachy. Instead, Edwards examines the sullied yet undying connection between his two self-destructive protagonists, played by Lemmon and Remick with unblinking honesty. (Two specific scenes--his in a madhouse and hers in a motel--are wrenching.) Charles Bickford lends terrific support as Kirsten's widower father, as does Jack Klugman in a small role as Joe's AA sponsor. "Days" is a hard-hitting drama about love in the ruins, buoyed by Henry Mancini's melancholic jazz score.

One Of The Classics.......2007-06-27

This is a heart-rending story of alcoholism and how it affects a newly married couple. Jack Lemmon & Lee Remick are superb as the couple drowning deeper and deeper into their addictions. One of them is able to conquer the addiction, but as the movie ends, you see the other will probably be lost forever. It's a movie classic!

...4-5-3...4-3-5...3-5-4..........2007-03-31

To witness the power of great acting, to understand the craft and the depth of the form, I suggest watching Days of Wine and Roses. Elevated to classic status as a tale of alcohol's maddening grip on a marriage, it's two leads-Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick-deliver gut-wrenching, soul-crushing performances, the film is potent for it's exposure of addiction and it's harrowing imagery of the physical and emotional torment it renders.
Immediate associations with The Lost Weekend and Leaving Las Vegas are legitimate. Though those two revolve around an individuals alcoholism as opposed to a couples, they do provide a gage of the evolving cinematic vision of addiction, and for their respective times were bold films. Both leads (Milland & Cage) also won Oscars. Lemmon and Remick were both nominated-he lost to Gregory Peck's Atticus Finch (To Kill a Mockingbird), she to Anne Bancroft's Annie Sullivan (The Miracle Worker).
I would say too that Days of Wine and Roses succeeds as a tale of the everyman within the social structure, willing and able to climb the ladder, whose alcoholism may have preceeded his occupational necessity to drink, or may not have. Lost amidst the corporation he works for as a p.r. man his lack of definition and satisfaction, clarified by his having to procure (ala The Apartment) young women for his boss' parties, drives him as much into marriage as into alcoholism.
Considering this came out in 1962, it must be regarded that a young woman, wholesome and kind, working as a secretary who transforms into a housewife who's parenting suffers for her rapt addiction to booze, who abandons and betrays those closest to her, was a striking and devastating vision.
The ending to Days of Wine and Roses is not only bleak, haunting and quiet, it's poetic.

An excellent movie.......2007-01-11

Jack Lemon gives a memorable, great performance. This movie also shows how the disease of alcoholism takes over and affects not only the drinker but his family and friends. It also shows how AA can help. Running the movie with Blake Edwards commentary is interesting as well. Blake and Jack talked about their own issues with drinking and how thought provoking the movie was for them. If you love Jack Lemon or want to know more about alcoholism this is probably one of the best movies to watch.

An all-encompassing movie about alcoholism.......2006-12-05

"Days of Wines and Roses" is head and shoulders above any other movies about alcoholism for many reasons, most of which can be summed up in the word "multidimensional". Instead of showing a snapshot in the life of an alcoholic, like "Lost Weekend", for example, "Days of Wines and Roses" follows the entire descent of not one, but two characters, into the depths of addiction. The interplay between man and woman and the progress of their relationship allows for the depiction of many aspects of alcoholism: the casual start; the discovery of a new pleasure; how one person can unwillingly lead another to become an alcoholic; the recovery; the belief that it is possible to have an occasional drink after recovery; the relapse; the different ways two people who love each other can deal with the problem and how they can influence one another for good or for bad. Everything is here. And the ending is astonishingly realistic. Instead of the usual message that everything will turn out fine in the end, the movie makes it clear that, once you become an alcoholic, the outcome is uncertain. You may or you may not recover. This is a powerful and poignant movie that has never been equaled. Recommended.

Average customer rating:

Days of Wine and Roses
One Of The Classics
...4-5-3...4-3-5...3-5-4...
An excellent movie
An all-encompassing movie about alcoholism

Days of Wine and Roses [Region 2]
Starring: Jack Lemmon , Lee Remick , Charles Bickford , Jack Klugman , and Alan Hewitt
Director: Blake Edwards
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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