Aeons away from his trademark comedy schtick, Blake Edwards' alcoholic drama still holds up well, thanks to a script that steers clear of the usual Hollywood clichés about alcoholism, treating it as the fatal illness that it is.
Jack Lemmon (debatably a career best) and Lee Remick (definitely a career best) shift from happy young lovers to disenfranchised drunks, with a scene of Lemmon destroying a greenhouse being particularly gruelling. Their performances are riveting, playing out the agonies and ecstacies of addiction in a downward spiralling vortex that will inevitably lead to tragedy, but never succumbs to sentimentality.
