NFR Project: 'The Lost Weekend' (1945)

 

NFR Project: “The Lost Weekend”

Dir: Billy Wilder

Scr: Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett

Pho: John F. Seitz

Ed: Doane Harrison

Premiere: Nov. 29, 1945

101 min.

Billy Wilder had just made Double Indemnity. He would stay in a gritty mode for this feature, which won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay at the Oscars.

Rarely had a “problem” picture been made in mainstream cinema before. Movies at the time were escapist, not confrontative. Director/writer Wilder and his co-writer Brackett had an excellent source in Charles Jackson’s 1944 novel; their adaptation is close to perfect. Never before had a problem like alcoholism been examined in such detail. (Note that the poster declares it "not suitable for general exhibition.")

Don Birnam (Ray Milland) is a wannabe writer in New York City. He had some success with it in school; now he tries desperately to begin his first novel. He can’t, however. He’s too drunk. His brother Wick (Phillip Terry) tries to manage him, making excuses for him, but finally gets sick of it and leaves for a long weekend. Meanwhile, Birnham’s suffering girlfriend Helen (Jane Wyman) sweetly and politely keeps encouraging him to get sober.

Birnham blows off the weekend away from town and stays in New York. He finds $10 his brother has hidden and blows it on booze. (Check out Howard da Silva as a not-so-friendly bartender.)

From here on the movie telescopes the deterioration of an alcoholic into four days’ time. Birnham hates himself, judges himself as unworthy, untalented. He doesn’t want to write, he wants to be a writer. Big difference.He is nasty and mean to everyone around him, a real jerk. (Why is Helen with him? Delusional? A martyr? Co-dependent?) It took a lot of guts for Ray Milland to play such a despicable character, but he doesn’t shy away from the challenges of playing a man deep in dysfunction. His damaged intensity is captured in ruthless close-ups.

Out of money and booze, Birnham goes to a nightclub, drinks. He finds he doesn’t have enough money and steals a lady’s purse to get the funds he needs. He is caught and thrown out. He thinks to hock his typewriter (symbolism, anyone?) to get the money for a drink. Unfortunately, all the pawnshops in the city are closed – it’s Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement!

Finally, he visits a prostitute he is acquainted with and bums a few bucks off of her. However, he stumbles and falls down the stairs as he leaves her apartment, knocking himself out. He is picked up by the police and placed in the drunk ward at Bellevue Hospital. (Frank Faylen has a great turn as a sarcastic nurse.) There he finds himself in a room full of men twitching, mumbling, sweating, shaking, coming off of the high of drink. One of them starts screaming; Birnham escapes.

He marches into a liquor store and brazenly steals a bottle of whiskey. At home, he downs it. His mind wanders; finally, he sees the hallucinations he was told would come. He screams. Helen shows up and puts him to bed.

The next morning, he sneaks out and successfully pawns his typewriter -- for a gun. Helen finds him ready to kill himself. She breaks down, telling him she’d rather have him alive and drunk than dead and sober. She dissuades him from blowing his brains out, and gets him to start on his novel. He determines that he will never drink again. 

Seitz’s impressive cinematography makes a noir film out of an addiction saga – the shadows loom large here. Some of the film was shot on the fly in NYC; Milland walked up Third Avenue among an unaware crowd. Notable also is Miklos Rozsa’s score, which does a lot of heavy lifting here. Pay special attention to the I-am-going-crazy sound of the theremin, an electronic instrument – it’s the debut appearance of one in a motion picture score. (Rozsa would use it again in Hitchcock’s Spellbound a month later.)

So how accurate is this portrayal? The movie captures many aspects of the alcoholic personality – the narcissism, the amorality, the subordination of everything else in the quest to get another drink. It’s a ruthless disease that most people (myself included) have overcome only by surrendering to a higher power and working the 12 steps of recovery, via Alcoholics Anonymous. Presumably Birnham will make his way to a meeting, eventually; the idea that one can overcome booze through sheer will power is a strategy that has failed spectacularly, time and again.

The film changed the way the public thought about addiction. Finally, it was seen as a disease rather than as a moral failing. Lost Weekend is deeply compassionate; it stares into the dark heart of Birnham’s suicidal descent into alcoholic madness and never flinches. We are caught up in the turmoil of this tormented individual; by film’s end we are, somehow, rooting for him.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: ‘Mildred Pierce.’