\u201cThe first thing I said to them,\u201d Van Dyke recalled, \u201cwas \u2018How did you know I was an alcoholic?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As Dick Van Dyke celebrates his one hundredth birthday, he seems like the kind of all-around entertainer that you half assume grew up on the vaudeville circuit: an extraordinary slapstick artist and a song-and-dance man to boot, and one whose innate affability made him television\u2019s natural everyman \u2013 the kind of guy you\u2019d tune in to hang out with each week. Lesser seen are his gifts as a dramatic actor. The shock of his performance in the 1974 TV movie The Morning After<\/em> remains undiluted because he\u2019s largely maintained the persona that it deconstructs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Van Dyke had been in recovery for about a year when he signed on to do The Morning After<\/em>. He plays Charlie Lester, who is celebrating a big success (and accompanying fat raise) at his job as a speechwriter. If you\u2019re watching blind, it would be easy to think his wife Fran (Lynn Carlin) is an overreacting nag: he\u2019s gotten a raise, and besides, it\u2019s almost Christmas, yet she frets at him drinking a bottle of wine. Charlie quite reasonably tells her that the French drink it with their meals. His speech doesn\u2019t slur; he\u2019s exasperated only in a gentle, loving way. But as things gradually unravel, you realise that we haven\u2019t come in at the beginning of this story. All of this has happened, exactly like this, over and over, like one of Matheson\u2019s Twilight Zone<\/em> scripts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Charlie is a highly functional alcoholic, a star employee, an adoring husband, and a dedicated father \u2013 until he\u2019s not. He\u2019s as kind and sweet and silly as Rob Petrie from The Dick Van Dyke Show<\/em>, until he\u2019s spilling drinks, yelling, breaking things. He sings \u201cYesterday\u201d to himself, and each time, simple nostalgia gives further and further way to something dark. By the final reprise, it\u2019s not a love song, not even a sad one: it\u2019s a song about vivid, contradictory longings, to be free from alcohol and to have it to, that both represent a desire to retreat from the pain of living in the present. \u201cYesterday \/ All my troubles seemed so far away.\u201d Dick Van Dyke is, for the first time, frightening. In part because of his skinniness, his tallness usually plays in the manner of a lanky goofball, but at Charlie\u2019s drunkest, it\u2019s closer to slasher villain. When he chases or shoves Fran, danger is palpable. <\/p>\n\n\n In The Morning After<\/em>\u2019s spiral-shaped narrative, Charlie hits \u201crock bottom\u201d again and again. When his boss excoriates him for coming to an important meeting smelling like a brewery (the boss assumes he\u2019s hungover, but we know he\u2019s still drunk). The first time he hits Fran, and the first time she tries to leave. The next time, when he smacks her onto the concrete floor and she plans to file assault charges. When he throws up so hard he bursts a blood vessel in his throat. When he reads an \u201care you an alcoholic\u201d checklist in a pamphlet and says yes to every question while downing glasses of vodka. When the teenagers who find him passed out on the beach think he\u2019s a corpse. When he has a bout of the DTs and winds up hospitalized in a psych ward. Every time, it feels like the moment things will turn around. Sometimes he promises it will be, desperate and pleading. But every rock bottom is a false bottom. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In this way, The Morning After<\/em> critiques many of the clich\u00e9s of the recovery drama, and especially its made-for-TV variant. It\u2019s full of scenes that, in isolation, seem like the kind of dollar-store insight associated with hackneyed TV movies about the social-issue-of-the-week. The first time Fran threatens to leave, Charlie promises to see a therapist \u2013 and he actually follows through. In one of the sessions, Charlie talks about how after his alcoholic father died when he was twelve, his mother expected him to take on all that responsibility without giving him her love in return \u2013 that she saved for his perfect baby brother. His drinking, he figures, resulted from an inability to deal with his deep feelings of inadequacy in the face of his mother\u2019s neglect. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Van Dyke delivers the speech well, but it feels too pat, somehow didactic even as it presents familiar stereotypes. Did you know that alcoholics have alcoholic dads and withholding mothers? Cut to: Charlie explaining to Fran that he\u2019s been discharged, and his therapist agrees that he should be able to drink normally now. The scene of his \u201cbreakthrough\u201d is instantly recontextualised: even if the content of what he said was true, it was a rote recitation of traumas he\u2019s already worked through, delivered to manipulate the therapist. It doesn\u2019t work \u2013 it\u2019s obvious he discharged himself \u2013 but maybe it\u2019ll work on Fran. As Charlie, Van Dyke\u2019s affable dad persona is skin-deep: the carefully curated exterior of a manipulative addict. <\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/morning2-1024x576.webp\")
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