The filming by Paramount of "The Lost Weekend" marks a particularly outstanding achievement in the Hollywood setting. The psychiatric study of an alcoholic, it is an unusual picture. It is intense, morbid -- and thrilling. Here is an intelligent dissection of one of society's most rampant evils. Ray Milland and Jane Wyman are the stars. It is smash boxoffice.This is no picture to serve as sheer entertainment, for herein is what may well be termed the heresy of filmmaking. A picture of doubtful entertainment value? Well, now.
"Weekend" hasn't any laughs. Or gams. Or crackling, smart dialog. It is startling in its manic-depression. It required courage for Paramount to violate cardinal boxoffice principles to film it. Yet, here is a pic that should snowball b.o. interest on the basis of word-of-mouth and intelligent, conservative exploitation. That is, if the original novel by Charles R. Jackson hasn't already developed that interest.
"Weekend" is the specific story of a quondam writer who has yet to put down his first novel on paper. He talks about it continuously but something always seems to send him awry just when he has a mind to work. Booze. Two quarts at a time. He goes on drunks for days. And his typewriter invariably winds up in the pawnshop. To get dough for you-know-what.
Involved in his struggle to fight alcoholism are a brother, upon whom he's dependant for subsistence, and the drunk's sweetheart. They plan cures for him, but it's no use. Depriving him of funds, or appropriating hidden bottles are out of the question. His twisted mind always seems to determine a way to get the stuff.
Of course, there's the inevitable barkeep, a philosophical sort of guy named Nat who's pretty mad at himself for being a barkeep when he has to sell liquor to guys like this Don Birnam. Nat, next to the sot, is the story's most trenchantly written character.
"Weekend" isn't a pretty story for more than one reason. Its moral, of course, crusades against alcoholism, but to casual readers of the book and patrons of the picture there may well be a wholesale condemnation of the suppliers of spirits. Laymen aren't apt to be so perceptive as to determine for themselves that here is a film that doesn't condemn drinking, as such, but only seeks to illustrate the evils of over-imbibing.
"Weekend," filmed entirely in New York, is frequently terrifying in its realism. It atom-bombs in depicting a Bellevue hospital alcoholic ward. A d.t., for instance, who must be straight-jacketed and given a "treatment"; he "sees" beetles swarming all over him. And there's Birnam lurching from pawnshop to pawnshop--only to find them all closed because of a holiday. He wanted to hock his typewriter and satisfy a maddening craving. And he's sunk low enough, too, to accept money from a prostitute, to buy booze. And there's a particularly pathetic scene wherein he suddenly finds a bottle--one whose hiding place he had forgotten, in a drunken stupor. And, finally, where he himself becomes deeted. He imagines a mouse trying to squeeze through a crack in the wall, only to have a nondescript bird swoop down on it. His warped brain is terrified (and so is the audience) as he imagines the rodent's blood streaming down the wall.
Ray Milland has certainly given no better performance in his career. His portrayal will have to be reckoned with when filmdom makes its annual awards. Drunks may frequently excite laughter, but at no time can there be even a suggestion of levity to the part Milland plays. Only at the film's end is the character out of focus, but that is the fault of the script. The suggestion of rehabilitation should have been more carefully developed.
Jane Wyman is the girl. Philip Terry the brother. They help make the story overshadow the characters. The entire cast, in fact, contributes notably. And that goes especially for Howard da Silva as the bartender.
Billy Wilder's direction is always certain, always conscious that the characters were never to over-state the situations. Throughout it is manifest that here is a story whose prime asset is in the telling rather than in the people who portray it. Which stands the test of any fine yarn. Charles Brackett produced, and he and Wilder teamed on the screenplay. They have teamed well. Suspiciously well.
Kahn.
1945: Best Picture, Director, Actor (Ray Milland), Screenplay
Nominations: Best B&W Cinematography, Editing, Scoring of a Dramatic Picture
