The Lost Weekend (film)

• Release Date: 1945
• Director(s): Billy Wilder
• Writer(s): Charles Brackett; Billy Wilder
• Principal Actors and Roles: Ray Milland (Don Birnam ); Jane Wyman (Helen St. James); Howard Da Silva (Nat); Doris Dowling (Gloria); Frank Faylen (Bim' Nolan); Phillip Terry (Wick Birnam)
• Book / Story Film Based On: The Lost Weekend by Charles R. Jackson

The Lost Weekend is a classic 1945 film directed by Billy Wilder. The film was based on the novel by Charles Jackson and adapted for the screen by Wilder and Charles Brackett. It won four Academy Awards—Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay. It has been widely admired as a searing depiction of alcoholism, including Ray Milland’s performance as Don Birnam, an alcoholic in search of redemption, for which the film’s star deservedly won an Oscar.

Plot

The film takes place over a five-day period, including the so-called lost weekend of the title. Don desperately aspires to be a writer. At the beginning of the film, he has managed to remain sober for ten days. Fortunately for Don, he has two people who care deeply about him: his brother, Wick, played by Phillip Terry; and his girlfriend, Helen St. James, played by Jane Wyman. Don lives in a squalid New York City apartment, and Wick tries to help him by arranging a trip to the countryside. Don finds $10 that Wick left to pay Don’s cleaning woman. Don uses the money to get drunk at a bar that he frequents called Nat’s. He fails to catch his train, thereby missing out on the trip that Wick had planned. Don also avoids attending a concert with Helen by suggesting that Wick go in place of him.

The next day, Don returns to Nat’s. Don is prone to having one-sided conversations with the owner, who also serves as a bartender. In one of these pretend conversations, Don reveals that he once started writing an autobiographical novel about his alcoholism. In another such conversation, Don recounts to Nat in a flashback how he met Helen. Don had been attending the opera when the coat-check girl made a mistake, handing him Helen’s coat instead of his own. Don also remembers how he disappointed Helen by succumbing to his nerves and failing to appear at a luncheon at which he was scheduled to meet her parents.

At home later, Don finds a liquor bottle that he had stashed away. The next day, he goes to Nat’s, as usual, but Nat, angry that Don had mistreated of Helen, refuses to serve him.

Desperately in need of cash, Don considers pawning his typewriter. Instead, he goes to the apartment of Gloria, a woman whom he knows from Nat’s Bar. Like Don, Gloria is an alcoholic. She sleeps with men in exchange for money to buy drinks. Nevertheless, she is attracted to Don and carries on a flirtation with him even though he mistreats her in much the same way he mistreats Helen. Gloria takes pity on him and gives him a small amount of money that she has saved.

As Don is leaving her apartment, he falls down the stairs. When he awakens the next day, he finds himself at a hospital in the ward that is reserved for alcoholics. He escapes, then steals a bottle of whiskey and gets drunk.

Helen visits him at his apartment, where she finds him not only drunk but also hallucinating. While she is sleeping, he goes to a pawnshop, where he exchanges her coat for a gun.

When Helen awakens, she notices that her coat is missing. She goes to the pawnshop where she learns about the gun. Realizing that Don is planning to kill himself, she returns to the apartment, where she finds him ready to carry out his plan. Earlier, Don had insisted to her that he had two selves, one an alcoholic and the other a writer. Helen convinces him that the two are in fact the same.

Nat arrives with Don’s typewriter, the one that he had left in Gloria’s building when he fell down the stairs. Helen interprets this as a sign that Don should continue writing. Motivated by her love for him, he agrees to try. In his closing narration, Don wonders how common his plight is, envisioning men who are laughed at by others "as they stagger blindly towards another binge, another bender, another spree."

Significance

In addition to winning four Academy Awards, The Lost Weekend was a box office success. The film cost $1.25 million to produce and earned more than $11 million.

It had considerable impact not only in Hollywood but also in America at large. Prior to The Lost Weekend, Hollywood had shied away from stories about alcoholics, avoiding material with socially weighty themes in general. With its immersion in the sordid details of Don’s life—his petty thievery, his delirium tremens, and, most important, the way that he hurts those closest to him—The Lost Weekend must have struck viewers as being astonishingly real. It seems likely that it especially struck a chord because alcoholism was prevalent among GIs returning home from World War II. The Lost Weekend inspired a series of films that examined serious social issues, including The Men (1950), Marlon Brando’s first film, about a disabled veteran.

Billy Wilder, one of Hollywood’s greatest directors, was the ideal filmmaker to bring Charles Jackson’s novel to the screen. Wilder was born in Austria and worked at UFA, the famous German film studio. When he directed The Lost Weekend, Wilder had cowritten the screenplay for Ernst Lubitsch’s classic comedy Ninotchka (1939). He had also directed four previous films, including the classic film noir drama Double Indemnity (1944). Wilder had a dark sensibility—although he was also gifted at making comedies, including the classic Some Like It Hot (1959)—and he thoroughly immerses the viewer in Don’s anguish. In collaboration with the cinematographer John F. Seitz, Wilder creates black-and-white images that are starkly memorable: Don trudging along a deserted city street, staring at a shelf of whiskey bottles, and cowering in his bed in a city hospital. For all of its realism, Wilder’s film also incorporates elements of German expressionism and film noir. The former is a term associated with German cinema of the 1920s. That earlier period of film history involved enhancing the depiction of realistic states of consciousness through creative means, such as when Wilder and Seitz render objects blurry in order to reflect the instability of Don’s life. French critics coined the term film noir for the dark Hollywood films of the 1940s and 1950s. Seitz’s chiaroscuro lighting and reliance upon shadows are characteristic of film noir. Another important element in the film is the haunting musical score of Miklós Rózsa. With his collaborators, Wilder created a film that is ranked among Hollywood’s best.

Awards and nominations

Won

• Academy Award (1945) Best Picture
• Academy Award (1945) Best Director: Billy Wilder
• Academy Award (1945) Best Actor: Ray Milland
• Academy Award (1945) Best Screenplay (Adapted): Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder
• Cannes Film Festival (1946) Palme d'Or: Billy Wilder

Nominated

• Academy Award (1945) Best Cinematography (Black-and-White)
• Academy Award (1945) Best Film Editing ()
• Academy Award (1945) Best Original Score ()

Bibliography

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Crowe, Cameron. Conversations with Wilder. New York: Knopf, 1999. Print.

Crowther, Bosley. "The Lost Weekend (1945)." New York Times. The New York Times Company, 3 Dec. 1945. Web. 15 Jan. 2016.

Hopp, Glenn. Billy Wilder: The Complete Films, the Cinema of Wit 1906–2002. Cologne: Taschen, 2003. Print.

Horton, Robert. Billy Wilder: Interviews (Conversations with Filmmakers). Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2002. Print.

Jackson, Charles. The Lost Weekend. 1944. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1996. Print.

"The Lost Weekend (1945)." Filmsite Movie Review. American Movie Classics Company, n.d. Web. 15 Jan. 2016.

McNally, Karen, ed. Billy Wilder, Movie-Maker: Critical Essays on the Films. Jefferson: McFarland, 2010. Print.

Phillips, Gene D. Some Like It Wilder: The Life and Controversial Films of Billy Wilder. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 2010. Print.

Sikov, Ed. On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder. New York: Hyperion, 1998. Print.

Slide, Anthony, ed. "It’s the Pictures That Got Small": Charles Brackett on Billy Wilder and Hollywood’s Golden Age. New York: Columbia UP, 2014. Print.