The movie opens with Joe Clay (Jack Lemmon) in a bar, soliciting girls to attend a party being thrown on a prince's yacht. It turns out that Joe isn't really happy with his job, effectively - as he himself puts it later in the movie - acting as a pimp for his firm's clients. He drinks because it's a part of his job; he also drinks because he doesn't much care for the job. On the prince's yacht, he meets Kirsten (Lee Remick) - his boss's secretary. She doesn't drink, and the two get off to a shaky start, but eventually they fall in love, and Joe manages to suck Kirsten into his world of drinking. They seem to be in love, they have a not bad marriage, they have a daughter, but the drinking gets more and more out of control and we watch as their lives unravel, to the point at which Kirsten almost kills herself and the daughter when she sets their apartment on fire after passing out while smoking.
It's a different kind of role for Lemmon, who at this point in his career - and later, for that matter - usually played in lighter stuff, but he pulled the part off magnificently, as did Remick in the role of Kirsten. The scene that I think will stay with me is Joe rolling around on the floor of his father-in-laws' greenhouse sucking on a liquor bottle like a baby would suck on its mother's breast. That was truly unsettling.
The movie starts off a bit slowly, although that's probably deliberate, since the point is how easily (and, in some ways, innocently) one can get into this mess. The second half of the movie, which introduces Jack Klugman as Jim, becomes in some ways a barely disguised commercial for Alcoholics Anonymous. Jim is a recovered alcoholic (almost TOO recovered in fact, and almost TOO good a guy to be believable) who's active in AA, and he rescues Joe from the drunk tank and sets to work at setting him straight. AA is a great organization that's helped a lot of people but somehow the promotion was too overt for me and it took away from some of the drama of the movie. The ending of the movie was appropriately ambiguous, offering both hope and despair, as Joe and Kirsten seem to take opposite directions in life.
Having grown up in a family in which alcoholism (not to this extent, but still very real) was common I've always marveled and been grateful for the fact that I managed to avoid it. This movie made me even more grateful. 7/10
It's a different kind of role for Lemmon, who at this point in his career - and later, for that matter - usually played in lighter stuff, but he pulled the part off magnificently, as did Remick in the role of Kirsten. The scene that I think will stay with me is Joe rolling around on the floor of his father-in-laws' greenhouse sucking on a liquor bottle like a baby would suck on its mother's breast. That was truly unsettling.
The movie starts off a bit slowly, although that's probably deliberate, since the point is how easily (and, in some ways, innocently) one can get into this mess. The second half of the movie, which introduces Jack Klugman as Jim, becomes in some ways a barely disguised commercial for Alcoholics Anonymous. Jim is a recovered alcoholic (almost TOO recovered in fact, and almost TOO good a guy to be believable) who's active in AA, and he rescues Joe from the drunk tank and sets to work at setting him straight. AA is a great organization that's helped a lot of people but somehow the promotion was too overt for me and it took away from some of the drama of the movie. The ending of the movie was appropriately ambiguous, offering both hope and despair, as Joe and Kirsten seem to take opposite directions in life.
Having grown up in a family in which alcoholism (not to this extent, but still very real) was common I've always marveled and been grateful for the fact that I managed to avoid it. This movie made me even more grateful. 7/10