The Lost Weekend (1945)

Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend chronicles the four-day bender of alcoholic Don Birnam, a troubled writer that has lost his inspiration. After ten days on the wagon, Don dodges a weekend getaway with his brother Wick to stay at home with a bottle tied to his window. Don recalls the events leading up to the present to his bartender- he steals, lies and sells his things for booze money until he winds up in the alcoholic ward at a hospital, witnessing many that are just like him… or worse. After being sent home, he teeters on the razor’s edge of choosing life or deciding that there is nothing left to lose.

After the postwar hope-amidst-hardship messages of the last several Best Picture winners, The Lost Weekend is a pretty ballsy but sensible move. After all, this story was a reality for many drug-addled PTSD war veterans with little hope of real employment and a refuge in crime and cheap liquor. In the tradition of Leaving Las Vegas or Requiem for a Dream, this film is less a linear story and more of a dreamlike character study into desperation and even madness; one particular hallucination scene of a bat eating a mouse from the wall had a shock value reminiscent of the baby scene in Trainspotting. Even the music in this film sounds more like something from a spooky sci-fi movie, as if to suggest that the threat behind The Lost Weekend is similar in scariness but much more tangible and real. I have grown to absolutely love the films of Billy Wilder, especially Some Like it Hot and the near-perfect Sunset Boulevard. While Weekend was likely an intense and outstanding movie for it’s time, it loses power and credibility with a very neatly tied-up “I beat alcohol, and you can too!” ending that seems to endorse that a person can just choose not to drink after being coaxed enough by a pretty girl. Sure, Birnam may decide to keep his typewriter today but he’ll be out trying to sell it again tomorrow. This break from the tone and trivialization of the conflict brings this film down a few pegs and keeps it from greatness. Still, it has to be respected for being the brave pioneer that allowed many of the aforementioned films to happen.

Yeah, this movie had some good moments.  And then it had some bizzare-o moments.  Like when Don falls down some stairs.  He basically just falls.  No one pushes him.  One minute he's standing, the next he's at the bottom of the stairs and then he passes out.  He's sent to an alcoholic ward.  It's kind of like celebrity rehab... but Lindsey Lohan wouldn't be caught dead there.  Bim, the nurse who takes care of Don, is not very supportive.  He constantly tells Don how he'll be seeing him soon, since he's an alkie.  I mean, that's probably the last thing I want to hear from my nurse.  Not super compassionate... but I guess that's really NOT the point of the movie.  One of my favorite lines in the movie was when an old girlfriend of Don's yells at him for asking for money.  She says, "Don't be ridic!" aka abbrevs for ridiculous... that was hilarious.  Concordia would be sad to know they weren't the first to implement abbrevs.  Not by a long shot.  Like Tim said about the end, weird and abrupt... not that we would've wanted a morbid ending but it just seemed like a cautionary tale where a guy was drunk but then he wasn't... The End.  (Sounds like college to me.) 

Billy Wilder claimed the liquor industry offered Paramount $5 million to not release the film; he also suggested that he would have accepted, had they offered it to him.

Nat: One's too many an' a hundred's not enough.