“Once I even got myself a gun and some bullets. I was going to do it on my 30th birthday. Here are the bullets. The gun went for three quarts of whiskey.” – Don Birnam (Ray Milland), explaining why he’s still talking, The Lost Weekend.
Although not as crazy as Cimarron, this is still a pretty wild poster. The fog is in his mind, you see, because of the demon gin.
With World War II finally over (the 1945 Oscars were voted on and awarded in 1946, as you may recall), the Academy Awards turned their attention to “issue” movies, giving the next three Best Picture Awards to films that dealt with a particular social ill or concern. First up was The Lost Weekend, which dealt with the rather low hanging fruit of alcoholism. Fortunately, the movie is more of a character study of an alcoholic than a Lifetime Channel-esque cautionary tale of the dangers of alcohol, although it does tend to wander into preachy territory from time-to-time.
The Lost Weekend begins with a shot of a bottle of booze hanging out of a window, carefully hidden from the observers inside. We soon learn the bottle belongs to Don Birnam (Ray Milland), a pathetic alcoholic. Don is being taken by his brother Wick (Phillip Terry) to dry out over a long weekend, but Don is intent on sneaking the bottle along with him, somehow missing the point of the trip. Don is supported by a loving girlfriend Helen (Jane Wyman), who wants only to help him. Don tricks Helen and Wick into leaving him alone before the trip then sneaks out to a local bar. Fed up, Wick leaves Don, causing the latter to go on a weekend-long bender, hence the film’s title.
Best Actor winner Ray Milland. Director Billy Wilder said before making the movie that whoever got the part would win the award.
Don’s situation becomes increasingly dire and pathetic as the weekend progresses. He whines pitifully about how he met Helen (their coats were mixed up at a theater’s coat check and his coat had a bottle of sweet, sweet bourbon in its pocket), hits on a lonely hooker, tries to steal more booze money from a couple on a date, and resorts to selling his cherished typewriter (he is a long-blocked writer) to get more liquor money. Finally Don ends up in a sanitarium. Can he ever overcome his demons?
Like I said, The Lost Weekend is better-than-expected because it’s more than just a simple “alcohol corrupts innocent soul” type of picture. In fact, we never see Don not as an alcoholic, and the movie never really searches for a redeeming reason why Don did end up as an alcoholic. That said, Don is so unlikeable, both drunk or sober – he tends to make pompous speeches sprinkled with Shakespeare quotes when he’s not wallowing in self-pity – that it’s hard to root for him to ever recover. When he is stymied by the pawn shops being closed for Yom Kippur, he’s so pathetic I nearly laughed. I also enjoyed the surly bartender who suggests on more than one occasion that Don kill himself, which was probably not the story’s intention (the bartender eventually makes up for being a dick).
The great lamp scene
The movie is perhaps most notable for being directed by famed director Billy Wilder, who helmed such classics as Double Indemnity and Some Like It Hot. Wilder, a two-time winner (The Apartment), continued the long-standing Oscar tradition of honoring directors for films that are not their best or most well remembered work (i.e. Hitchcock’s Rebecca instead of Vertigo or Psycho or Martin Scorsese for The Departed instead of Goodfellas or Raging Bull). Wilder infuses the movie with a lot of noir-style touches, like a great scene where Don frantically searches for a missing bottle of booze. The bottle is hidden in a lamp and its shadow becomes apparent to the audience, but not Don, when he turns the light on. The Lost Weekend was also one of the originators of the shot where a character walks down the street past an array of disappointing signs (in this case notification that all the pawn shops are closed), becoming more distraught and disheveled as he walks. It’s a pretty famous trope these days, although I don’t think a lot of people realize where it comes from.
However, some of the direction is borderline hokey by today’s standards. At one point, Wilder shoots a crazy nose-dive zoom-in into a full shot glass while ominous music plays in the background. Wilder also heavily uses a Theremin, the sort of waily string instruments that would become clichéd in cheesy sci-fi flicks of the 50s and unfortunately makes today’s viewer think of those movies when we’re supposed to be focused on Don’s descent.
The Lost Weekend isn’t as ridiculous as many of the cautionary movies of the late 30s like Reefer Madness and truly strives – while not always succeeding – to be an adult exploration of an alcoholic’s life.
Operation: Oscar 