Days of Wine and Roses (1963)
Directed by Blake Edwards
An alcoholic falls in love with and gets married to a young woman, whom he systematically addicts to booze so they can share his "passion" together.
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What critics compared Days of Wine and Roses to
Anyone who’s seen Days of Wine and Roses (1962), and countless similar dramas, knows their fairly worn-out dynamic.
What makes this different from genre classics like “The Lost Weekend,” “Days of Wine and Roses” and “Leaving Las Vegas” is an action-packed first act and a bravura performance by Denzel Washington.
That, seven miles up, lives depend on pilots sobriety and skill is not the films point of concentration, which appears more in line with that of such better considerations as The Lost Weekend, The Country Girl, Come Back, Little Sheba, Days of Wine and Roses, Long Days Journey into Night and Leaving Las Vegas.
Their relationship is Days of Wine and Roses stuff, a dramatic ballet of co-dependency and the inevitability of one person wising up before the other.
Cut from the same cloth of addiction-denial-recovery dramas (most recently “ Smashed ,” which plays like a “ Days of Wine and Roses ” for millennials), “Flight” hinges on the question of whether Whip will finally accept the reality of his disease or succumb to it.
It’s been a long time since films about the downward spiral of alcoholism, like Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend or Blake Edwards’ Days of Wine and Roses, provided much in the way of raw shock.
I headed into The Spectacular Now expecting to see a movie like Sixteen Candles and was stunned when I got a prequel to Days of Wine and Roses instead.
Both movies could be considered versions of Days of Wine and Roses for millennials.
But it’s also specifically about addiction, and on that second level, it at times resembles one of those old-fashioned movies about alcoholism, like Days Of Wine And Roses.
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Marty was followed by adaptations of two other Chayefsky dramas, The Bachelor Party (1957) and Middle of the Night (1959), as well as adaptations of TV dramas by Rod Serling (1956’s Patterns and 1962’s Requiem for a Heavyweight) and J. P. Miller (1959’s The Rabbit Trap and 1962’s Days of Wine and Roses).