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"You and me and booze. A threesome." Wilder is the bedrock, The Lost Weekend plus The Apartment, Griffith's The Struggle is also adjusted for the Sixties of three-martini lunches. Barely afloat on a meretricious society, the PR man who's a glorified pimp (Jack Lemmon) and the secretary who leans on her prettiness (Lee Remick). Alcohol is the palliative, it comes to the teetotaler hidden under chocolate, the giddy-harrowing spiral follows. "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may..." The vulnerability and panic behind Blake Edwards' slapstick, a companion piece to Experiment in Terror. The hidden flask in the flower pot brings down the greenhouse, the utter breakdown of climbing into bed with daddy (Charles Bickford) during a bender is punctuated with a shot from Psycho. The mentor from Alcoholics Anonymous (Jack Klugman) helps untangle the husband's straitjacket, the wife meanwhile dismisses therapy, just "hot coffee and cold feet." The ocean looks beautiful from afar and filthy up close, the "roach kingdom" lurks beyond the façade of a neat San Francisco apartment—does drinking conceal these things or magnify them? "Drunk world is one world, sober world is another world." Forms sterile by day and sinister by night, liquor poured right onto the camera lens dissolves to an overhead shot of the protagonist strapped to a hospital table. The last refuge is the motel bungalow littered with empty bottles, where Lemmon recoils from Remick's gin-flavored kiss: "Now he doesn't even like the taste of me anymore." Stability is but a glass reflection, hard-won and tenuous, two and a half decades later Edwards makes the case for soused abandon in Blind Date. With Alan Hewitt, Tom Palmer, Debbie Megowan, Maxine Stuart, and Jack Albertson. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |