Kirsten Arnesen (Lee Remick) likes chocolate. Joe Clay (Jack Lemmon) prefers booze. They have a 1960s version of a meet-cute and, on their first date, Joe gets Kirsten her fateful first drink.
They marry and start drinking more. He wants her to drink to be fun and she learns drinking can stave off boredom. Their drinking affects his work and her care of their child. Kirsten burns their house down and Joe gets fired. Joe figures it out first: “Look at me. I’m a drunk and I don’t do my job and that’s it! […] We’ve turned into bums!”
Joe and Kirsten start on the road to sobriety at Kirsten’s childhood home with her father (Charles Bickford), but they relapse. They try again: Joe starts going to AA while Kirsten goes cold turkey. She relapses, he relapses.
After a hospital stay, Joe sobers up for good, but Kirsten can’t face the idea of never having another drink. He tells her:
You and I were a couple of drunks on the sea of booze, and the boat sank. I got a hold of something that kept me from going under. I’m not letting go. Not for you, not for anyone.
The end isn’t totally bleak, though: when their daughter asks Joe if mommy’ll be coming home, he tells her that mommy is sick. “Is she going to get well?” she asks. He responds: “I did, didn’t I?”
Rating: 6/10, more like Days of Whine and Roses.
Cast and Crew
Jack Lemmon was getting pigeonholed as a comic actor. Even if he was an elite one with three Oscar nominations (Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, and a Supporting Actor nod for 1955’s Mister Roberts), he wanted something more. Days of Wine and Roses was Lemmon’s jump to drama, and dang, it was a big success. Lemmon didn’t quit the comedy game post-Roses, but it’ll be the dramas we’ll see him in from here on out.
We saw Lee Remick in Anatomy of a Murder, where she played a wife who may or may not have been raped. This role is much more challenging, as she starts doe-eyed and innocent and ends a broken alcoholic. It’s a great performance. Let’s discuss some of Remicks’s other career highlights:
Her first role was in A Face in the Crowd (1957), an Elia Kazan film; she made another with him in 1960, Wild River.
The Running Man (1963), with Laurence Harvey, which isn’t about a deadly game show.
The Omen (1976), where she and Gregory Peck raise a little baby Antichrist.1
Two noteworthy television miniseries: “Wheels” (1978) and “Ike: The War Years” (1979).2
Days of Wine and Roses began life as an episode of “Playhouse 90.” The episode starred Cliff Robertson and Piper Laurie3 and had Jack Klugman in a supporting role as Joe Clay’s sponsor. Klugman reprised that role in the film. His film career doesn’t have too many hits in it4, but he and Tony Randall starred in the big-deal TV adaptation of Neil Simon’s “The Odd Couple” (1970-1975). You need to know a lot about “The Odd Couple,” which is why we’ve got the table below:
Klugman also starred as the titular medical examiner in the TV procedural “Quincy, M.E.” (1976-1983). Quincy would typically find something suspicious with the body he was examining and would then go and solve the crime because, hey, it’s TV.
Johnny Mercer (lyrics) and Henry Mancini (composer) put together the sleep-inducing title theme to Days of Wine and Roses. Mercer and Mancini also did “Moon River” from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The orchestral version is a drag, but Audrey Hepburn’s diegetic version in the film is pretty good.
If you want to read about Mancini, he had a #1 hit with “Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet,” so Tom Breihan’s column can fill you in. The CliffsNotes: he scored The Pink Panther, whose main theme you’ll probably recognize.5 He did “Baby Elephant Walk” from Hatari! (1962), another ridiculous earworm. And he did the iconic theme to the show “Peter Gunn” (1958-1961).6
As for Johnny Mercer, the “Sentimental Gentleman from Georgia”: he got his start as a Tin Pan Alley lyricist and penned noteworthy songs “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive,” “Hooray for Hollywood,” and “On the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe.” Oh, and he wrote the (English) lyrics for the jazz standard-i-est jazz standard, “Autumn Leaves.” And for good measure, he co-founded Capitol Records.
The Trivia
Chocolate-lover Kirsten has a Brandy Alexander as her first drink, so today we’re talkin’ cream cocktails. Cream plays well with chocolate, so let’s start with cocktails that use cream and crème de cacao as a base:
A Brandy Alexander adds brandy to the cream and crème de cacao. It’s a variation of an older drink called the Alexander that was made with gin. If you’re in the cult of Fernet Branca, you can swap it for the brandy.
Grasshopper: its special ingredient is crème de menthe, which turns the drink green (it uses white crème de cacao to not ruin the effect).7
Pink Squirrel: this one has crème de noyaux8, an almond-flavored liqueur, turning it, yeah, pink.
But if you prefer coffee to chocolate, the following drinks pair cream with a coffee liqueur (something like Kahlúa, Tia Maria, or RumChata):
White Russian: has vodka (hence “Russian”). The recipe and the name are both flexible: eschew the cream? It’s a Black Russian. Make it with rum or tequila? Call it a White Cuban or a White Mexican. Make it with skim milk instead of cream? Then it’s an Anna Kournikova. But the biggest cultural footprint for the White Russian comes from The Big Lebowski (1998), where The Dude knocks back nine of ‘em.
Mudslide: a White Russian, but with the addition of Irish cream (like Baileys). Ben & Jerry’s made a Dublin Mudslide ice cream; here’s an intoxicating video of a guy recreating that recipe at home.
Then you’ve got creamy, citrus-y cocktails:
Creamsicle: vodka, cream, orange liqueur, milk, and sugar (though I’ve also seen recipes swapping the milk with orange juice or orange soda).
Ramos Gin Fizz9: A New Orleans classic, this one’s got gin, sugar, lemon and lime juice, and an egg white alongside the cream.
While looking into these cocktails, I discovered the secret to old-school mixology for cream cocktails: take your base spirit, add the cream, add a liqueur, and give it a fun name. So here’s a KW/OU invention: the Membrillo Dream, where the mystique of anise meets the charm of quince.
1 oz. pastis (remember our discussion of pastis?)
1 oz. Crema De Membrillo (a Mexican quince-based liqueur)
2 oz. heavy cream
Shake with ice and pour down the drain.10
Odds and Ends
Kirsten fires off a number of highbrow quotations throughout the film:
“Full many a flow'r is born to blush unseen / And waste its sweetness on the desert air.” (From Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”)
“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may / Old Time is still a-flying.” (From Robert Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”)
“They are not long, the days of wine and roses.” (from Ernest Dowson’s11 “Vitae Summa Brevis”)
Joe Clay mentions that “anything worth having is worth suffering for,” which is also probably why you read this blog…Bill Wilson was the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous (their meetings are frequently referred to as “Friends of Bill W”)…because all existing IP becomes a musical sooner or later, there was a 2024 Broadway musical adaptation of this story…we’ll see Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick together again in a 1980 film, and man, I hope it’s not such a downer.
I’m not really a horror guy, but The Omen is well-known for that part where the nanny hangs herself during Damien’s birthday party.
In “Ike: The War Years,” Remick played Kay Summersby, Eisenhower’s chauffeur and personal secretary. There’s suspicion that Ike had an affair with Summersby; this Washington Post article doesn’t think so, and I don’t care enough to figure out what I think.
We saw her in The Hustler.
Though he’s one of the jurors in 12 Angry Men (1957) and co-starred in Judy Garland’s final film, I Could Go On Singing (1963).
Mancini scored much of the work of director Blake Edwards: the two collaborated on Days of Wine and Roses, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and many of the Pink Panther films. A bit on Edwards: he was married to Julie Andrews and directed her in numerous films, including Darling Lili, S.O.B, and Victor/Victoria. He was also behind the Bo Derek film 10 (1979), which I can’t even begin to explain.
The first-ever Grammy for Album of the Year went to the album “The Music from Peter Gunn.” What a weird piece of trivia.
Bonus drink with crème de menthe: mix it with vanilla vodka, heavy cream, and chocolate bitters to make a Shamrock Shot, a cream drink popular [sic] on St. Patrick’s Day.
Crème de noyaux is almond flavored but is actually made from the pits of apricots, peaches, or cherries.
The cream is what makes the Ramos different from a regular Gin Fizz. You might have trouble telling a Gin Fizz from a Collins, which has the same ingredients, or a Rickey, which swaps lemon for lime and ditches the sugar. This page goes through some of these classic (non-cream) cocktails.
When I instructed ChatGPT to tell me what makes our Membrillo Dream great, here’s what I got: the intriguing contrast between the anise and quince provides a unique flavor profile, the cream adds a velvety texture, and the cocktail’s versatility makes it perfect for sipping. Don’t trust ChatGPT or, for that matter, most of what you read on the internet.
Dowson’s also known for the poem “Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae,” which includes the phrase “gone with the wind” and is therefore the source of the title of Margaret Mitchell’s long book.