Days of Wine and Roses (1958)
Reviewed in April 2010
Director: John Frankenheimer. Cast: Cliff Robertson, Piper Laurie, Charles Bickford, Martha Wentworth, Dick Elliott, Malcolm Atterbury, Marc Lawrence, Mimi Gibson.
Screenplay: J.P. Miller.
Sterling Hayden's intro: 5 million Amer alcoholics?; copious, obsessive cigarette smoking and exchange; "great line of bull" @AA meeting; 10yrs ago first met Kirsten;
drunk guy in the audience keeps interrupting his speech; 2032; CR begging PL to feed the girl with formula and go ahead and drink; Debbie's first bday last night "and
Kirsten and I really hung one on ... with a capital Hung!"; narrativized housefire, dropped from Houston, kicked out from other apts; CU on CR holding car keys as CB entrusts
him to make truck deliveries; "I'm not proposing an all-out orgy" after taping bottles to his legs undr his pants, and doing his little striptease; "a threesome, you and me
and booze"; they live across the street from a bar!; CR intones the Serentiy plede in the blinking light of the Bar sign across the street, and that's it (PL has left, b/c
she doesn't want to be sober)
P I P E R L A U R I E
watches the water for sea monsters? obvoiusly not drinking anything at party; sometimes slings out a line with a weird, quick, obdurate flatness, which in its way calls
attention to the line and gets her to some other place in the speech or the perf that apparently interests her; odd phys and emotional vocabulary; Sandy Dennis'ing on "You
do your JAAAAAAHHHB!" with muscular head fling; she's like a full-bodied red from the sam evineyard that yielded SDennis as a dry white; gruesome tic-of; she's twitchy and
he's sweaty; expl meaning of "unfathomable" to her daughter, "you don't know how far down you can go"; "I'm drunk as a skunk and I want you to kiss me good night - screaming
at her daughter, 'You leave my daddy alone!'"; wound tight but jerking wildly, a clipped electricity wire, but heavier than that, more blunt; things everything looks dirty
when she's sober, "like the water in the Hudson River"; "I'm afraid I'm not that unselfish, Joe - better give up on me"
B–
