BEFORE: Jack Lemmon carries over from "The Apartment" - all part of the plan.
Looks like I'm off to San Francisco tonight, while TCM is spending the day in the American South, with "The Baby Doll", "The Miracle Worker", "Sounder" and "I Am A Fugitive From a Chain Gang". Also "Glory", which I've seen, and "Gone With the Wind", which I have to pass on yet again. Maybe I'll save that one (and "Gandhi", and "Doctor Zhivago") for the end of the project. I could go out on "Gone With the Wind" - but I am picking up two films, "All the King's Men" and "In the Heat of the Night" - another two winners of the Best Picture Oscar!
THE PLOT: 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.
AFTER: I felt a little waylaid by this one, since it starts out like a romance, and the 2nd half is little more than a cautionary tale, or a public service announcement for Alcoholics Anonymous. Lemmon plays a public-relations man this time, and part of his job (and, I suspect, many jobs in the 1960's) was wining and dining clients, being social and attending functions, obviously where alcohol is served in mass quantities.
He meets a woman (whom he mistakes at first for one of an Arab sheik's "dates"), and they have a love-hate thing going on, until they both realize the attraction, confide in each other - but he's a steady drinker and she's not. Personally I didn't see the problem here - doesn't he always have a designated driver this way? But he turns her on to chocolate-flavored girlie drinks (who knew a Brandy Alexander was a gateway drug?) and before long, they're boozing it up together.
They marry and have a daughter, and one day a situation forces them to try and regain control of their lives. But as you may imagine, it's tough for alchoholics to quit just like that, without surrendering to the higher power or whatever, so they keep backsliding and digging the hole deeper and deeper.
I thought that the situations portrayed were vastly over-blown - I'm not an expert, but I don't think too many alcoholics end up in a strait-jacket in the "nervous ward". Plus I'm guessing that A.A. was a pretty new deal back in 1962, because they sort of had to over-explain what it was founded to accomplish, and how it's non-denominational, self-funded, non-judgmental, etc. These days you just have to show a meeting in progress in a movie or on a TV show, and most or us will get the drift.
I can't speak about whether the points made about alcoholism were valid or not - I'm a heavy drinker sometimes, like at beer festivals, but I've never felt like I was a "slave to demon alcohol", or out of control. I've certainly never torn up a greenhouse looking for a hidden flask, or felt the need to hide a flask somewhere on my body.
But this was a different age, when any self-respecting man carried a flask, no? And I'm not prepared to say that Lemmon's character lost his job because of booze - it seemed more like he got marginalized for not performing tasks he found unsavory, and for that he should be championed, rather than pilloried.
So I don't know if the situation could be as black-and-white (figuratively, not literally, though the film is also in black-and-white) as portrayed here - I suppose some people can become social drinkers again and some can't. And sometimes maybe after failing to help someone, or realizing they don't want help, you have to watch someone you care about struggle with their demons, at the cost of the relationship. Certainly if two people aren't on the same page, someone might have to be cut loose. But that sucks.
Also starring Lee Remick, Jack Klugman, Charles Bickford, Jack Albertson.
RATING: 4 out of 10 shot glasses
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