Week 3 of the Criterion challenge and we’ve already arrived at a bit of a rulebreaker. As per usual a quick introduction: Criterion produces a line of boutique Blu-rays that highlight culturally important as well as underseen cinema, spanning across each decade of film. The challenge is the combination of 52 categories, with one film from the collection to be watched for each. In 2026 in an effort to expand my physical collection and my film knowledge, I am reviewing a film both on my Letterboxd and my blog, biancalovesfilm, at the start of every week.
This weeks choice is an unconventional one, The Days of Wine and Roses, for the category, watch a film with a colour in the title. Although a film exists for this work, the Criterion release is the predecessor, a live television play. The teleplay comes in a collection of 8 other similar works of the same time period as the name suggests, the first ‘Golden Age of Television’ during the 1950s. Television couldn’t have been invented at a single moment, but existed for almost 2 decades prior to this, but of course the Great Depression and war efforts stifled any recreational television use for a long time. Following this is what is presented in the collection, television was almost only viewed as an event rather than a regular occurrence. None of the collection had been screened more than once until they came together in this set, originally produced to air live on American cable television in the eighties, and here, preserved on DVD (and subsequently the internet, of course).
Eventually I will cover them all over the course of the year, so it feels quite ironic to start with the last of the collection. As director John Frankenheimer himself notes in an interview done for the American rebroadcast, tape was already being used in television when The Days of Wine and Roses aired, just not as widely as it would eventually. All of the teleplays suffer from a similar issue, as they attempt to follow and emulate the enormous cultural heights of Tenesse Williams, Arthur Miller and the like in their melodramatic criticism of the American dream. Budget and time constraints as well as lessened public interest would never allow these productions to reach such a creative summit, instead opting for an increased focus on sensational melodrama.
This is certainly the case in The Days of Wine and Roses, starring then up-and-comers Piper Laurie and Cliff Robertson as a couple failing quite publicly at staying on the wagon. In today’s world it reads more like a PSA, and with the close participation of Alcoholics Anonymous and it’s meetings as a framing device for telling the story of the play, it certainly functions as one. Importantly at this time AA had only just gone nationwide, and did not have the notability it has today. As you would expect the play is only afforded 79 minutes, placing it’s entire focus on the quick deterioration of a marriage making its scenes of drunkenness incredibly theatrical, and asking a lot of its actors. Piper Laurie’s particularly weepy performance is especially jarring but still remains phenomenal in its own right.
There truly isn’t too much to say here as it is so reliant on its actors, as many plays are, but particularly here as the writing is lower quality than a traditional play, as expected. It circles on the effect of alcohol on a nuclear family, which we are obviously familiar with, so it undoubtedly wanes on interest outside of its novelty in television history. The transfer does not help in this regard, unsurprising as it is. Kinescoping is the preservation technique of using a film camera to record programs being broadcast on a television set. This comes with many issues, the warping of the image due to the shape of a set, frame rate differences, debris on the set and the like, but really what else can be done. The sound is equally bad, but the extras on the disc are a small bonus, including the introduction broadcast with it’s first showing on PBS in the eighties, as well as a 10 minute interview with Frankenheimer that is quite useful for it’s short length. The essay by Ron Simon which is included has also a lot more love and care than can be said for some of shabby entries into the collection as well.
Fulfilling their job, Criterion preserves a moment in time with this collection, and doesn’t really do much more than they need to. It was always going to have a small audience, but it is nice to have this small piece of television history, given we have lost so much of this time.