The Daze of Wine and Roses

For many of us, “Days of Wine and Roses” is primarily a ballad, best known in a 1963 rendition by pop singer Andy Williams. It’s got a noble pedigree, featuring Johnny Mercer’s lyrics set to a Henry Mancini tune.  Over the years it’s often been recorded, and has become a jazz standard. It won a Grammy for 1963 Song of the Year, as well as an Oscar for its appearance in the film of the same name.

 It’s that 1962 film I want to focus on now, partly because it, and the Playhouse 90 teleplay that preceded it,  have recently inspired a musical version (now running through the end of this month) that features some of Broadway’s best and brightest. The music is by Adam Guettel, with book by Craig Lucas, both of whom have impressive resumés and reputations for producing serious dramatic work. (Their prime collaboration is the musical version of another sensitive movie drama, The Light in the Piazza.) The female lead is the much-honored Kelli O’Hara, and her male counterpart is another Broadway veteran, Brian d’Arcy James. The score, which does not include the Mancini/Mercer ballad, is gorgeous, and I’ve heard the staging is highly inventive. But the fact that the play was originally scheduled to run through April 28 suggests it has not caught fire with audiences, and I wonder how most of us will ever manage to see it.

 Days of Wine and Roses, directed by Blake Edwards from a JP Miller screenplay, takes a close look at how lives are destroyed by alcohol abuse. In this it makes a fascinating contrast to the early classic of the genre, Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend. The 1945 Wilder film, starring Ray Milland, is an unforgettable close-up look at a man who, over the course of two harrowing days, nearly destroys his life because of his addiction to the bottle. By contrast, Days of Wine and Roses has a much larger canvas. It unfolds over a number of years, encompassing periods of binge drinking, sobriety, and relapse.  It’s also about a romantic couple, whose relationship to alcohol first enhances and then destroys their marriage. The leads are played by Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick, both of whom give award-worthy performances. Both were indeed nominated for Oscars, but lost out to Gregory Peck (To Kill a Mockingbird) and Anne Bancroft (The Miracle Worker) in a strong year. Shockingly, the film’s only win was for that featured title song, perhaps because this was also the year of Lawrence of Arabia, The Music Man, Sweet Bird of Youth, and The Manchurian Candidate.

 What I’ve found fascinating, both then and now, is the way marriage and alcoholism are shown to be strange bedfellows. Lemmon’s character, San Francisco public relations exec Joe Clay, is a bon vivant type, one who enjoys social drinking and uses liquor to fuel his relationship with clients. When he falls for teetotaler secretary Kirsten, he makes Brandy Alexanders a central part of their exuberant courtship. Over time, both begin to depend on liquor in their domestic relationship: when one pulls back, the other is resentful. Eventually after their cravings have taken a toll on their professional and social lives, the marriage itself implodes, leaving two lost souls in its wake.

 The year 1962 was a long time ago, but this film (despite its black-&-white cinematography) still feels modern. I’ve read it had a powerful long-term effect on its cast and crew, many of whom had their own addictions to face. (Within the film, Alcoholics Anonymous is an important presence in one character’s shaky but genuine recovery.)

 

Anatomy of a Murder: Piecing Together a Heinous Crime

Anatomy of a Murder fascinated me when I was a kid. Not that I ever saw this 1959 courtroom drama. But the title was intriguing, and I was captivated by the poster art. Against a lurid orange and red backdrop, it features the fragmented silhouette of a crudely drawn human body, with the film’s title sprawling across the figure’s legs and torso. This was the work of Saul Bass, the graphic designer whose long list of Hollywood credits includes the title sequences from some of Hitchcock’s finest: Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho. On the Anatomy of a Murder poster, there were no glamour shots of film’s stars, who included veteran Jimmy Stewart and up-and-comers Ben Gazzara, Lee Remick, and George C. Scott. This was not, clearly, intended as a star-spangled production: the poster was all about the movie.

 This movie was the work of Otto Preminger, an Austrian emigré who had first made his mark in Hollywood with classy noirs like Laura (1944). When the studio system was in its death throes, he moved on with great success to independent production. I’m grateful to film scholar Nick Pinkerton, whose notes to the DVD edition of Anatomy of a Murder include the following: “Preminger didn’t court controversy; he went steady with it. He frankly depicted heroin addiction in a 1955 screen adaptation of Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm. He helped to bust the blacklist by crediting Dalton Trumbo as the screenwriter on 1960’s Exodus. He visited a gay bar in 1962’s Advise and Consent, tangled with Cardinal Spellman over 1963’s The Cardinal and in Anatomy of a Murder put the [Production Code Administration’s] stock-in-trade, the very idea of euphemistic or insinuating language, on trial.”

 How exactly was language on trial in Anatomy of a Murder?  We spend much of it in a courtroom, where the proceedings move forward so realistically that law students cite this movie as one of their favorites. Stewart, as the defense attorney in a murder case, performs his courtroom role so artfully (beneath an aw-shucks exterior) that we’re rooting for him, even though we’re not quite sure that the defendant (Gazzara as a hot-tempered soldier with an enticing wife) deserves to be let off. In the name of realism, words and concepts are bandied about—rape, woman chaser, panties—that in earlier days would have run afoul of stringent MPAA rules about what can be said or implied on screen.

 Part of the reason the film seems so real is that its basic story really did happen, in the same Upper Peninsula town where Preminger staged his production. It was made into a bestselling novel by a certain Robert Traver, this being the pen name of a Michigan Supreme Court justice who went back into private practice after losing an election, much like Stewart’s character. Partly to keep to the reality of the situation, Preminger was inspired to bring in an actual attorney—and a famous one—to preside over the film’s courtroom. He was Robert Welch, a superstar in that era for taking down Senator Joseph McCarthy in the nationally televised Army hearings of 1954.

 Preminger too had studied law, as had his father before him. Maybe that’s why he ends his film with ambiguity, not with a clear sense of of who’s right and who’a wrong. Says a character in another Preminger film, “The truth is what the jury decides.” This is a fascinating movie about complicated people whose depths we’ll never entirely plumb . . . and the unexpectedly jazzy  Duke Ellington score has its own enigmatic allure.