Billy Wilder (1945)

According to the website Cinephilia & Beyond[1], Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend was the first mainstream picture to focus on alcoholism.  It has the look of a film noir (the cinematographer, John F Seitz, had shot Double Indemnity for Wilder the previous year).  It also tells a highly concentrated story:  there are no subplots in Wilder’s and Charles Brackett’s adaptation of Charles R Jackson’s 1944 novel.  The narrative follows the main character, a blocked, alcoholic writer called Don Birnam (Ray Milland), from one Thursday afternoon to the next Tuesday morning.  On the Thursday, he and his brother Wick (Philip Terry) are in Don’s New York City apartment, preparing to leave for a weekend break.  Don’s girlfriend, Helen St James (Jane Wyman), arrives with two tickets for a classical concert later in the afternoon.  Don encourages Wick to accompany Helen to the concert:  he and his brother can then take a later train out of New York.  Wick agrees – once, that is, he’s discovered the bottle Don had suspended from a rope outside the apartment window:  Wick pours the bottle’s contents down the sink.  When he and Helen leave, Don picks up a ten-dollar bill left for his cleaning lady and heads for Nat’s Bar, where he soon loses track of time.  Returning to the apartment late in the evening, he watches Helen and Wick on the street, hears his exasperated brother telling his distressed girlfriend she’s a fool to stay with Don.  Left to his own devices, Don goes from bad to worse over the course of the next few days.  By the Tuesday morning, he’s on the verge of suicide.  Helen arrives at the apartment just in time to save his life and their relationship.

Although it’s often striking, The Lost Weekend is basically monotonous.  (This was the second time I’d seen it, about twenty years after the first.)  Don’s dark nights of the soul, and the days in between, are interrupted only by an extended flashback that describes his first meeting with Helen and the romance that develops between them, which is soon threatened by Don’s alcoholism.  The film compares unfavourably – both as a drama and as a character study – with Powell and Pressburger’s The Small Back Room (1949), where the protagonist’s drink dependency is satisfyingly grounded in his psychology.  While Don’s habit is linked to his writer’s block, it’s never clear why, as we’re told, he has never succeeded in completing anything, from his degree studies at Cornell onwards.  The lead performance in The Small Back Room, from David Farrar, is better, too.  Ray Milland gives his role all he’s got but his playing of bug-eyed torment looks dated now.  As you’d expect from Wilder and Brackett, there’s plenty of sharp dialogue but the characters are thinly written, Jane Wyman’s loyal-girlfriend number included.  Apart from Don’s climactic DT hallucinations, the film’s grim set pieces are melodramatic without seeming particularly imaginative.

The Lost Weekend is stronger in more incidental moments.  On one of Don’s several visits to Nat’s Bar, a middle-aged man enters, looking for sex worker Gloria (Doris Dowling); the gesture that Nat (Howard Da Silva) makes to the punter, pointing Gloria out, is as expressive as it’s discreet.  In a club Don, out of funds, steals from a woman sitting at a neighbouring table; theft and thief are quickly discovered; Don ashamedly hands back the money and gets chucked out; as he exits, the club pianist sings ‘Somebody stole my purse’ to the tune of ‘Somebody Stole My Girl’, and everyone has a good laugh.  Don goes to a pawn shop, finds it shut up, despairingly asks a woman on the street why; chewing on a sweet and not much interested, the woman suggests that maybe someone died.  (In fact, as Don then finds out, the place is closed for Yom Kippur.)   Wilder was allowed to film inside the actual Bellevue Hospital for the sequences where Don is a patient on the alcoholic ward there.  It’s Frank Faylen’s cameo as a male nurse that vitalises the episode:  Faylen gives the nurse’s for-your-own-good plain speaking to Don a spiteful,  nearly sadistic edge.

It couldn’t have been Billy Wilder’s intention that the musical elements should be the most nightmarish in the film but they are.  The long flashback episode begins at the New York opera:  it’s more than understandable that Don, fidgeting in his seat in the stalls, gets sweaty and anxious having to sit through ‘Libiamo’ in La Traviata, and not just because it’s a drinking song.  The film won four Oscars – Best Picture, Director, Actor and Adapted Screenplay.  A mercy that it didn’t also win Best Original Score.  Miklós Rózsa’s hysterical music is having a nervous breakdown before The Lost Weekend is a few minutes old and barely lets up in the next hour and a half.  It soon made me feel I needed a drink and I don’t drink.  Rózsa’s score was nominated, though, and he did win that year’s Oscar for another tale of psychological disintegration, Hitchcock’s Spellbound.

6 July 2024

[1]  https://cinephiliabeyond.org/