Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		5.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		3.0
Overall		4.5

Days of Wine and Roses Blu-ray Movie Review

Comrades in Drink

Reviewed by Michael Reuben December 15, 2019

Blake Edwards is usually remembered as a skilled coordinator of slapstick mayhem in his Pink Panther movies, but Edwards' range as a director was far broader than pratfalls. He guided Audrey Hepburn through her whimsically romantic performance in Breakfast at Tiffany's; brought film noir to television with Peter Gunn; cannily satirized gender stereotypes in Victor/Victoria and Switch; and provided oddball takes on spy movies in The Tamarind Seed and Darling Lili (the failure of the latter inspiring his vicious Hollywood satire, S.O.B.). And in 1962, Edwards helmed the filmed adaptation of a prestige TV drama about alcoholism that was as far from comedic as a film could go.

Star Jack Lemmon, who had replaced original TV lead Cliff Robertson (unfairly, in the opinion of many), requested that Edwards be brought in to give the bleak tale a touch of lightness, but Edwards didn't compromise on the script's grim account. He and Lemmon would later collaborate on a full-out, pedal-to-the-metal comic masterpiece in The Great Race, but with Wine and Roses they produced an uncompromising classic of kitchen sink realism. The film changed the industry's perception of Lemmon, who had already won an Oscar for his funnyman skills in Mister Roberts but was not considered a serious dramatic actor. Wine and Roses established Lemmon's versatility, and when he won his second Oscar, it was for a serious lead in the darkly cynical Save the Tiger. Wine and Roses paved the actor's way to that victory, and it remains a highlight among many in Lemmon's filmography.

Wine and Roses has now been brought to Blu-ray by the Warner Archive Collection, adding to a growing collection of Blake Edwards' films that includes Victor/Victoria, The Great Race and S.O.B. As usual, WAC has produced a superb Blu-ray, here derived from a new 4K scan from the original camera negative.

"You and I were a couple of drunks on a sea of booze, and the boat sank."

Joe Clay (Lemmon) is a San Francisco-based PR man, who doesn't much like his job, especially when it involves unsavory tasks like pimping for a wealthy client's yacht party. But he very much likes this particular client's assistant, Karen, who is played by Lee Remick in a radical departure from the kewpie doll roles for which she was then known (notably in Anatomy of a Murder). Joe is a heavy drinker, and Karen abstains, but he eventually corrupts her through her love of chocolate and the crème de cacao in Brandy Alexanders. It's the tragic flip side of what Sky Masterson does to Josie in Guys and Dolls when he gets her drunk on milkshakes spiked with a "native flavoring" called Bacardi.

Despite the disapproval of Karen's stern father (Charles Bickford), who runs a landscaping business outside the city, Joe and Karen marry and begin a life driven by their mutual craving for alcohol. Even the birth of their daughter doesn't unite them so much as their anticipation of the next drink. Hollywood had dealt with alcoholism before, most famously in The Lost Weekend, but Wine and Roses is as much about what we now call "codependency" in its relentless focus on how Joe and Karen enable each other's dipsomania. The film offers harrowing scenes of delirium tremens and withdrawal, as well as a memorable sequence in which a plastered Joe destroys his father-in-law's greenhouse desperately searching for the bottle he's sure is hidden there. But as effective as those scenes are—and Lemmon was so committed to his performance that Edwards and the crew would sometimes have to shake him out of it after the director called cut—none of these are Wine and Roses' most disturbing moment. That arrives later, after Joe has sobered up with the help of AA and a devoted sponsor (Jack Klugman), while Karen continues to drink. When she disappears, Joe tracks her to a cheap motel, where she purposefully seduces him—not into bed, but back into the bottle.

Wine and Roses does not have a happy ending, but neither does it have a dreary one. It concludes on the kind of perpetual question mark that hangs over every reformed alcoholic's or addict's life. Edwards claims to have threatened studio executives with a different ending that would have left audiences in despair (and probably killed the box office). But he was never serious (or so he says) about changing author J.P. Miller's ending, which leaves the viewer clinging to a slender reed of hope, much as Joe and Karen each do at different points in the film. But can they do it together, both for each other's sake and for their daughter's? That is the nagging question that Days of Wine and Roses memorably puts on the screen, and it echoes long past the film's final frames.

Days of Wine and Roses Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Days of Wine and Roses was shot by a poet of black-and-white photography, Philip Lathrop, whose résumé includes The Americanization of Emily, Lonely Are the Brave and the famous crane shot that opens Touch of Evil. (Lathrop was equally at home in color, as demonstrated by Point Blank, Breakfast at Tiffany's and his Oscar-nominated work on Earthquake.) For this 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray, the Warner Archive Collection has returned to the original camera negative, which has been scanned by Warner's MPI facility at 4K, followed by MPI's customary meticulous color-correction and WAC's equally customary thorough clean-up. The Blu-ray image is fantastic, with stable densities, deep blacks, finely delineated shades of gray and white, and a naturally rendered grain pattern that reveals fine detail in every shot. Blake Edwards' choice to shoot in black-and-white at a time when Hollywood films had largely switched to color reflected his desire to give Wine and Roses a documentary sensibility, but the frames are as carefully composed as the most deliberate of art films, juxtaposing Joe and Karen in alternating patterns of dominance as their relationship shifts in and out of focus, fueled by their addiction. WAC's Blu-ray reproduces every nuance of Edwards' and Lathrop's compositions, and the results are stunning.

The average bitrate is WAC's usual 35 Mbps, and Wine and Roses continues WAC's recent retention of the original 1.85:1 aspect ratio for films originally shot in that format. The tiny black bars at top and bottom may not be visible on most monitors, but they are readily observable in screenshots and (I suspect) on projector screens.

Days of Wine and Roses Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The film's original mono soundtrack has been taken from the magnetic master, cleaned of any age-related damage and encoded as lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0. It's an effective mix, aptly conveying the noisiness of big scenes (like Joe trashing the greenhouse) and supporting quieter moments with discreetly placed effects like the clink of glasses. The dialogue is clearly rendered, and the entire film is elevated by the powerful score from Blake Edwards' reliable collaborator, Henry Mancini, who won a total of four Oscars for his work on Edwards' films, including one for Wine and Roses' title song (shared with Johnny Mercer for the lyrics).

Days of Wine and Roses Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The extras have been ported over from Warner's 2004 DVD of Days of Wine and Roses. The trailer has been remastered in 1080p.

• Commentary with Director Blake Edwards: Edwards was in his early 80s when he recorded this commentary, and he is surprised to realize that he hasn't seen the film since he made it. He apologizes repeatedly for lapsing into frequent silences as he rediscovers the film and its performances, but when he speaks, it's always interesting and worthwhile. Although he did not select the principal cast, he discusses how he worked with each of them and is newly amazed at the quality of their work. He begins the commentary with a disclaimer that he expects to find a lot of things he'd do differently, but by the end he pronounces himself satisfied with what he and his creative partners accomplished. In between, he provides much information about the production process, the film's reception and the challenges of being a recovering alcoholic, a category into which Edwards unashamedly places himself.



• Jack Lemmon Interview (480i; 5:06): This is an odd sort of interview in which Lemmon is on the phone being asked questions that result in long pauses. The aspect ratio is curious; you would expect it to be 1:33:1, given the era, but it's closer to that of an iPhone. Perhaps the intent was to add a questioner in split-screen.



• Trailer (1080p; 1.78:1; 3:33): In an effort to surmount the marketing challenges of a downbeat story about alcoholism, the trailer includes an extended presentation by Lemmon exhorting viewers to come see the film.

Days of Wine and Roses Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Days of Wine and Roses is not the kind of film that one watches for a casual evening's diversion. It demands your full attention and rewards it with the sort of horror story in which the monsters are all too real and all too human. The film comes from a different era of movie-making, when studios were willing to make dramas about everyday people and the public was willing to see them in theaters. But in a country where opioid abuse has multiplied the toll taken by alcoholism, Wine and Roses remains a powerful and relevant statement. Highly recommended.