The Lost Weekend
(1945)
Cast: Ray Milland, Jane Wyman
Screenplay by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett
Directed by Billy Wilder
From an aerial view of Manhattan, the camera zooms in on the image of a
bottle dangling outside an apartment window . Inside, Don Birnam is packing
his suitcase in preparation for a weekend in the country with his fiancee
and his brother. Birnam, an alcoholic writer, tells the pair that he hasn’t
touched alcohol in ten days and, therefore, their fear that he will resume
his drinking is unfounded.
So begins The Lost Weekend, Billy Wilder’s Oscar winning film based on Charles Jackson’s novel that was the first film to present a realistic portrayal of a problem now classified as a disease. Though more than a half century has passed since its release, The Lost Weekend, though not as effective as it was in 1945, remains the definitive cinematic depiction of alcoholism.
Birnam (Ray Milland) never makes it to the country. Left alone for what is meant to be a few hours, he steals the money to pay the cleaning woman, buys two bottles of rye at a liquor store, then retreats to a bar where, over a drink, he tells the bartender of his attraction to alcohol and its effect on his psyche:
"I’m Horowitz playing the Emperor Concerto, John Barrymore before the movies got him by the throat, and Jesse James and his brothers, all three of them, and William Shakespeare...and out there it isn’t Third Avenue, it is the Nile, man, the Nile, and down comes the barge of Cleopatra."
But Birnam never invites comparisons with Horowitz, Barrymore, the James’ brothers, or Shakespeare. Instead, his life is one of frustration and failure. He’s a writer who can only write when he’s drunk, but one who is always too drunk to write. During his lost weekend, he never writes a word. He steals a woman’s purse in search of money to buy more booze, pawns his typewriter with the same intention, and, in one memorably eerie sequence, lands in the alcoholic ward of Bellevue Hospital where a male nurse who may have served as Ken Kesey’s inspiration for Nurse Ratchett in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest mockingly describes to Birnam what he can expect when he experiences the DTs. Escaping from Bellevue, Birnam steals more booze and, at his apartment, is horrified when he imagines a mouse being devoured by a bat.
In filming The Lost Weekend, director Wilder, who co-wrote the screenplay with frequent collaborator Charles Brackett, was determined to make the film as realistic as possible. Although some footage was shot on the backlot of Paramount, Wilder shot much of the film on actual New York locations, even taking his camera into Bellevue, previously off-limits to film crews. Most of the filming took place by day to make use of natural light, including the long tracking shot in which Birnam seeks out a shop to pawn his typewriter. For interior scenes, Wilder employed a visual style similar to his previous film, the noir thriller Double Indemnity, with cinematographer Johnny Seitz pluming every shadow from the harrowing hallucination sequence. The score by Miklos Rosza is spooky enough for a horror film, and the editing is sparse, creating a seamlessness that allows the action to unfold in a reasonable facsimile of real time.
The casting of Ray Milland, an actor whose previous roles were in the light comedy vein, is effective overall. The audiences of 1945, whose image of a drinking man had been formed by the comical drunks of W.C. Fields, may not have had much empathy for the grim, tortured alcoholic presented here had Milland’s earlier screen appearances in such light-hearted fare as Preston Sturges’ Easy Living (1937) and Wilder’s own The Major and the Minor (1942) not established him as a charming and likable man. Milland’s iconography, contrasting sharply with his role as Don Birnam, worked to make the character worthy of the audience’s compassion, just as the gay, AIDS stricken lawyer of Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia was made palatable 48 years later by the casting of nice guy Tom Hanks. Like Hanks, Milland’s wiliness to risk his image for the sake of a challenging role paid off with an Oscar for best actor.
If The Lost Weekend’s attempt at realism falters, it is in its conclusion. After buying a gun with the plan to commit suicide, Birnam is confronted by his fiancee who shows him the typewriter he had pawned but which an unidentified good Samaritan has sent back to him, and encourages him to write about his humiliating exploits. "Put it down, to whom it may concern," she lectures, "and it concerns so many people." As Birnam drops his cigarette into a glass of whiskey and embarks upon another speech ("I’m gonna put this whole weekend down, minute by minute..."), the implication is that his problem is solved, or will be once he writes his book, a tome he generically titles The Bottle.
Today, a half century after The Lost Weekend won raves from critics, as well as four Academy Awards including the prize for best picture, Billy Wilder’s film remains fairly potent. If no longer quite 80 proof, it continues to be the film against which all other cinematic studies of alcoholism are measured. In the years to come, Hollywood would produce enough films about the subject that the "alcoholic movie" may warrant consideration as a genre. Among the more notable films to examine the subject are Smash-Up (1947) with Susan Hayward offering a female counterpart to Don Birnam; Days of Wine and Roses (1962) with Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick as lovers who embrace the bottle with more passion than they do each other; and Under the Volcano (1983) with Albert Finney as a drunken diplomat in Mexico. Demonstrating that some things never change, Arthur (1981) resurrected the comic drunk in the person of Dudley Moore whose performance as a perpetually sloshed millionaire earned an Oscar nomination.
The fact that even the best and most serious of these films has not threatened or equaled the standing of Wilder’s classic may have less to do with The Lost Weekend’s enduring strengths than it does respect for its original impact, but it is a film well worth seeing and deserving of classic status.
© Copyright 1999, Brian W. Fairbanks. All Rights Reserved.
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