Blake Edwards

CHAPTER 5 Days of Wine and Roses (1962)

Directed by Blake Edwards

Days of Wine and Roses (1962), arguably the most popular and critically acclaimed drama in Edwards’s career, appeared at a pivotal moment. Edwards, who was becoming known as a rising star director of “A” films, significantly chose to remake a 1958 episode of Playhouse 90. During that same year of 1962, he also wrote the story for The Couch, itself a remake of the 1950 “The Eight O’Clock Killer,” one of the most well-known episodes of his successful radio series, Richard Diamond, Private Detective. All of these works, combined with Edwards’s previous feature, Experiment in Terror, point to the influence of a genre he had earlier avoided in feature films that he directed, Film Noir. The two films are his first directorial features photographed in black and white, and they deal with dark, often disturbing material. They mark a new direction from his earlier film directing, which had been in color and was often comedic.

It is commonplace to view Edwards’s early work as a stepping stone to film directing, which is presumed to be his important work. Such an assumption views Edwards’s career in radio, television, and film as hierarchical, with film perched at the top of the pyramid. Such an assumption is not only profoundly wrong but it also misconstrues Edwards’s understanding of his own career. In 1985 on the set of A Fine Mess, we asked him between shot setups which of the media forms in which he had worked was his ...