The Lost Weekend Reviews

Billy Wilder was never afraid to bounce back and forth between making you laugh and making you cry. People tend to think of him as the jovial jokester behind Some Like It Hot, The Fortune Cookie and The Apartment. Fine movies all, but he also did black-as-midnight comedies (Sunset Boulevard) and tremendously powerful dramas like The Lost Weekend. Billy Wilder was a genius, and this was only his fourth film which he has infamously stated he made to understand Raymond Chandler’s alcoholism while working on Double Indemnity.

And so, we are thrust into the hellish world of an alcoholic for an hour and forty minutes. Ray Milland essays a writer stifled by a bout of creative blockage and a growing, crippling addiction. He lies to his brother, who is ready to walk out after six years of the same false promises and blatant lies, and to his girlfriend, who isn’t ready yet to call it quits. We catch him sometime between soberities as the movie opens, he proclaims to have not touched the stuff for ten days. That may sound like small change but that’s his entire world. One of the first things that we see is a bottle hanging from a window – this is not a good sign. Yes, he has been sober for ten days. Now we’re going to watch him go on a five day bender, the “lost weekend” of the title. And somewhere in-between the drinking episodes, in which Milland’s face and eyes descend into rodent-like madness, we see anecdotes that correlate how he got so far into this bottle.

This is a compact, tight and highly believable script. It doesn’t allow for the drunk stereotypes to play out like they do so often in other older films, such as The Day of Wine and Roses. The Lost Weekend sinks us down into his brain and we come to understand this man, even come to understand the feelings of inadequacy that are always gnawing at his insides. This is a knowing look at a disease, not an excuse for actors to go melodramatic.

I have mentioned several times that actors have a tendency to go over-the-top or too melodramatic when portraying alcoholics, and this is true. The same could also be said of the mentally ill, drug addicts and unstable people. Ray Milland never veers close to the edge. In fact, his performance is quite possibly the most pitch-perfect depiction of an alcoholic ever seen on film. An impressive scene that always springs to mind happens early in the film. During a flashback we see Milland sitting in the audience watching an opera. The actors onstage are holding champagne glasses and drinking toasts. His eyes, lips and entire demeanor veer back and forth from predatory jungle cat to self-hating loner within seconds. That is committed acting. Another great scene comes when he awakens by a shrilly ringing telephone. He doesn’t answer it, but speaks to it. He tells the rings everything he would tell the person on the other end, even begging it to stop haunting him. He deservedly won the Academy Award for Best Actor that year.

In every sense, in every choice and in every frame, The Lost Weekend is a disturbed, achingly poignant study of one man’s addiction. This story remains timeless, and if you don’t believe that watch one episode of Intervention. This is filmmaking as a reflection and response to a social ill.