Days of Wine and Roses

It's as true to life as a vodka martini.

The above quote is from director Blake Edwards, it's taken from the highly recommended commentary track he provides on the DVD for this excellent and compelling piece of work.

Joe is a social drinker but he's social all the time, during one of his arranged parties for a client he meets and falls in love with teetotal Kirsten. They get married and changes start to dominate their marital bliss, he is stressed from work and drinks daily to forget the rigours of the job, she being the loving wife chooses to drink with him to help ease his pain, but soon the joyous days of wine & roses will turn to something dark and terribly turbulent, and this will threaten their own respective sanity.

The film...

This is an intriguing, heavy drama about the downward spiral into alcoholism, and how it irrevocably tore apart the lives of one man and his wife. I have some respect for Blake Edwards, having seen this, as I previously had a low opinion of him after seeing The Pink Panther, which to this day I do not understand why it was so successful. But I'm not reviewing The Pink Panther, so I'll lay off it for now. In Days of Wine and Roses, Jack Lemmon really is brilliant, and Lee Remick is disturbingly realistic. The film is right up there with The Lost Weekend (1945), and the story carries an important moral lesson, which it delivers with a punch.

Would I recommend? Yes. But to the mature viewer, who can really understand and appreciate it.