I have supp’d full with horrors.
—William Shakespeare, Macbeth
Billy Wilder was on his way by train to New York for a holiday in the spring of 1944. He picked up a copy of Charles Jackson’s novel The Lost Weekend at a kiosk during the stopover at Union Station in Chicago. Wilder sat up all night reading it. By the time he reached Pennsylvania Station in New York City the following morning, Wilder had finished the book. He was convinced that it would make an engrossing movie.
Wilder phoned Paramount executive Buddy De Sylva from the station and requested that the studio purchase the screen rights to the book. De Sylva informed him that Y. Frank Freeman was out of town but said that he would buy the novel for Wilder on his own authority. So De Sylva plunked down fifty thousand dollars for The Lost Weekend.1 De Sylva had started in show business as a lyricist for major songwriters like Jerome Kern, with whom he had composed “Look for the Silver Lining.” He graduated to producing pictures and became Paramount’s head of production in 1939. He supported Wilder in the making of Double Indemnity, which turned out well, and he was more than willing to sponsor another Wilder project. Wilder then sold Brackett on the book; both were eager to collaborate again.2
When Freeman learned what De Sylva had done in his absence, he was outraged. As a Bible Belt Baptist, he did not approve of Paramount’s making what he considered a sordid movie about a disreputable souse. Wilder did not relish having to face Freeman, who had likewise strongly disapproved of Double Indemnity. Freeman called an executive meeting to rake Wilder over the coals.3 Wilder presented an inspired talk at the meeting, in which he emphasized that the movie would not be a dreary message picture about temperance. “If you want to send a message,” he commented, “go to Western Union.” He said that the script would focus on the romance between the main character and his loyal girlfriend. He devised on the spot a classic “meet-cute” to rival the one he had pitched to Ernst Lubitsch for the script of Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife. In the present instance the hero and heroine would meet over the mix-up of their coats in the cloakroom of the Metropolitan Opera House. But Freeman remained intransigent; he stated emphatically that The Lost Weekend would be made “over my dead body.” Wilder muttered under his breath that that could be arranged.4
There is a saying in Hollywood that a director is only as good as his last picture. Although Double Indemnity would not be released until the fall, the buzz about the picture in the film colony was enthusiastic, a point in Wilder’s favor. Furthermore, De Sylva was in Wilder’s corner. Consequently, the board of executives at the meeting finally green-lighted the project. Their decision was ratified by Barney Balaban, president of Paramount, whose office was at the studio’s headquarters in New York City. Balaban, who had run a lucrative chain of theaters in the greater Chicago area before taking over at Paramount, was a canny judge of potential film projects.
After the conference, Wilder commented to a journalist that The Lost Weekend was not going to be the ordinary Hollywood fare. “Hollywood is in a rut,” he said. Speaking of the run-of-the-mill movies the studios churned out, he noted that Hollywood was a slave to formula. “They don’t make pictures, they remake them.” The Lost Weekend, he continued, would be the first mainstream film to take alcoholism seriously.5
Prior to this movie, drinking was primarily employed on the screen as comic relief. “In those days an alcoholic was something you roared with laughter about,” Wilder explained.6 The drunkard would be a comedian like W. C. Fields, who would get plastered in a bar, then bump into the furniture and put on his hat backward as he left. But Don Birnam, the writer in The Lost Weekend whose addiction to liquor leads him into the wretched world of the alcoholic, is not a comic drunk, Wilder said: He does not stagger; he is a dignified man. In fact, there is nothing at all funny about Don Birnam.
Asked if he modeled Don in the screenplay for The Lost Weekend on Raymond Chandler, the alcoholic writer he collaborated with on Double Indemnity, Wilder replied, “Not consciously; I may have had him in mind subconsciously. But many screenwriters back then were heavy drinkers.” As a matter of fact, Wilder said that he had another American writer with a serious drinking problem in mind when he wrote the script: F. Scott Fitzgerald.
For Brackett, The Lost Weekend had some painful parallels in his own family. His wife Elizabeth had suffered from alcohol dependency for more than a decade and had not profited from hospitalization. In addition, one of Brackett’s daughters, Alexandra, was a heavy drinker; she would eventually be killed by falling down a flight of stairs while in an alcoholic stupor.7 In the script of The Lost Weekend, Don tumbles down a staircase, but his fall is not fatal.
When Charles Jackson published the novel in 1944, he was often asked, “How much of Don Birnam is you?” Jackson would reluctantly concede that there was some resonance of his own drinking problem in the book. By the time the novel was reprinted in 1963, however, Jackson was prepared to admit that it was decidedly autobiographical. In point of fact, only a couple of “minor incidents were pure invention.”8 For example, Jackson did not pawn his girlfriend’s expensive coat.
Literary critic Philip Wylie has termed the novel “the most compelling gift to the literature of addiction since De Quincey,” referring to Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822). Some commentators on Jackson’s book have described it as more of a case history than a novel. On the contrary, Don’s addiction is dramatized with the novelist’s skill, rather than merely analyzed as a clinical study. Said Brackett, the novel has “more of a sense of horror than any horror story I ever read.”9
Wilder researched the subject of alcoholism before beginning to fashion the screenplay. He not only consulted with Jackson but visited Alcoholics Anonymous, where he talked with alcoholics and physicians. “When I researched it,” said Wilder, “I realized that the novel was no exaggeration, but an accurate picture of an alcoholic.”10 Wilder and Brackett proceeded to turn out a screenplay that was an unflinching portrayal of dipsomania. For good measure they engaged Dr. George Thompson, an expert in alcoholic studies, as a medical adviser on the script.
The writing team decided to stick primarily to depicting Don’s wild weekend, keeping flashbacks to Don’s past life to a minimum (there are only two flashbacks in the film). Some of the deletions Wilder and Brackett made in the novel’s plot were at the behest of Joseph Breen. For example, Jackson’s intimations that Don drinks to excess because he cannot acknowledge his repressed homosexuality could not be brought up in the movie. The industry’s censorship code decreed that explicit references to “sex perversion” were prohibited. Consequently, “any filmic adaptation of plays or novels that had homosexual content . . . had to be revised to eliminate the offending subject matter.”11 In the book Don is nagged by memories of his “passionate hero-worship of an upperclassman during the very first month at college, a worship that led, like a fatal infatuation, to scandal and public disgrace.”12 Don was expelled from his fraternity for writing a love letter to the student he idolized. But this episode is not mentioned in the screenplay. “Look,” said Wilder, “I think I had enough problems already, making an alcoholic a sympathetic character,” which was hardly standard movie fare at the time. “If, on top of that, he also was a homosexual . . .”13 Therefore, in the script, Don Birnam, a once promising novelist, turns to drink to assuage the frustration and depression he experiences as a result of his failure to produce a salable piece of fiction.
Actually, Breen was less concerned about the portrayal of Don than he was about the depiction of Gloria, a woman who hangs around the bar that Don frequents. “The characterization of Gloria as a prostitute is definitely unacceptable,” Breen pronounced; he suggested that Wilder make her a “hostess” at the bar.14 Wilder was sure that, although Gloria seeks to ingratiate herself with Don and other male customers, nowhere in the script was she designated as a whore. He therefore judiciously ignored Breen’s complaint about Gloria, and Breen let the matter drop.
The Lost Weekend was to some degree influenced by the years that Wilder spent in Berlin during the heyday of the expressionist movement, which made a significant impact on German cinema. The bizarre dream sequence that Wilder wrote into his script for the 1931 German film Emil und die Detektive smacked of expressionism. In The Lost Weekend, when Don’s liquor supply runs out, he spies the shadow of a whiskey bottle, which he has earlier stashed in the chandelier, and the magnified shadow of the bottle falls across his face, signaling how alcohol has cast a shadow across his whole life.
The Lost Weekend is another superlative example of film noir. Wilder, in consultation with cinematographer John Seitz, planned to employ expressionistic lighting, which readily lends itself to the ambience of film noir. “The nighttime hours predominate in film noir,” Foster Hirsch explains, as we have seen in another noir classic, Double Indemnity. So in the present film Wilder conjures up, with the help of Seitz’s low-key lighting, the grim, isolated atmosphere in which the alcoholic exists: dimly lit, claustrophobic sets with elongated shadows looming on the walls and archways. As Joan Didion notes, the Wilder world “is one seen at dawn through a hangover, a world . . . of stale smoke, and drinks in which the ice has melted; a true country of despair.”15 In sum, “the character’s breakdown is presented in a vivid noir style,” typified by Seitz’s expressionistic lighting.16
Because Jackson’s novel was so tightly constructed, Wilder and Brackett found that adapting it for film was relatively simple. In fact, Brackett stated, “The Lost Weekend was the easiest script we wrote, thanks to the superb novel.”17 They finished the rough draft in July 1944, having spent only two months, rather than the usual four months, on the preliminary draft. They had plenty of time to rework the script, since shooting was scheduled to commence in late September.
While revising the screenplay, Wilder got involved with casting. He wanted José Ferrer for the male lead—a curious choice. Admittedly, Ferrer had made his mark in Othello as Iago on Broadway in 1942, opposite Paul Robeson as Othello. But Ferrer had not yet appeared in a film, so he was an unknown quantity to the mass audience. Hence De Sylva nixed Wilder’s choice of Ferrer. “Take a leading man,” De Sylva advised Wilder, “because then the audience will feel with him, even when he slides into degradation. They will wish that he would reform.”18 So Wilder selected Ray Milland, a Paramount contract player who specialized in light comedies like The Major and the Minor. Still, Milland had earned his spurs as a serious actor by playing a former mental patient in Fritz Lang’s The Ministry of Fear, which he had made earlier that year.
De Sylva gave Milland a copy of the novel with a note attached: “Read it. Study it. You’re going to play it.” Before he finished the book, Milland had misgivings about playing an alcoholic on a bender. He was put off by the “depressing story,” he writes in his autobiography. More important, he saw that “the part was going to call for some pretty serious acting,” and he was not sure that he was equipped to do it. Furthermore, Frank Freeman assured Milland that playing a disheveled drunkard on a spree would be career suicide. But Milland’s wife, Mal, convinced him to give it a try.19 Andrew Sarris points out that both Double Indemnity and The Lost Weekend involved “a casting coup,” in which Fred MacMurray and Ray Milland were persuaded by Wilder “to switch type from glossy leading man to gritty semi-villain.”20
Wilder also opted to give Jane Wyman a chance with a meaty dramatic role, that of Helen St. James, Don Birnam’s long-suffering girlfriend. Wyman usually played secondary roles in comedies like Brother Rat (1939) at Warner Bros., so she too would be cast against type. Jack Warner was pleased to loan Wyman to Paramount for “that drunk film,” since she was not in demand at her home studio.21 The Lost Weekend proved to be a turning point in Wyman’s career, for it established her as a serious actress. For the part of Helen’s mother, Wilder selected Lillian Fontaine, the mother of Joan Fontaine, who would also be in his next movie, The Emperor Waltz.
Wilder targeted Howard Da Silva for the role of Nat, the understanding barkeep, in The Lost Weekend. Da Silva was a character actor with a long list of credits, including Sergeant York (1941). Wilder’s choice for the role of Gloria, the bar girl at Nat’s tavern, raised some eyebrows in Hollywood. He chose his mistress, Doris Dowling, a twenty-three-year-old starlet who had been marking time at Paramount. As Dowling tells it, one day when she and Wilder were lunching with Charles Jackson at Lucy’s, Jackson hazarded that “it was too bad that I wasn’t a more common type, so I could play Gloria.” Wilder never looked up from his plate; he just replied, “She is.”22
By September Wilder had assembled both his cast and crew. In addition to John Seitz, film editor Doane Harrison and composer Miklos Rozsa were back on board. Wilder insisted to the studio that he would have to do some location work in New York to give the picture documentary-like realism. Production designer Earl Hedrick, a newcomer to Wilder’s production team, scouted locations around New York that would be suitable for the picture. Shortly before filming began, Milland went on a crash diet of toast and boiled eggs to assume the look of a haggard alcoholic who habitually forgets to eat.
Wilder and Brackett arrived in New York on September 24, 1944, with a film unit of twenty cast and crew members. Principal photography started on October 1. Wilder shot about a third of the film on location in New York, just as he had filmed Double Indemnity in part around Los Angeles, to get away from the studio back lot. In The Lost Weekend, “we used P. J. Clarke’s bar at the corner of Third Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street,” Wilder said, “because that is where Charles Jackson did his drinking; and that is where his friendly bartender, called Nat in the movie, worked.”
Wilder got some exterior shots of the apartment house between Second and Third avenues on East Fifty-fifth Street where Charles Jackson lived during his drinking days. Axel Madsen writes that this motion picture’s “vision of New York remains among the most unsparing ever recorded on film. Here is a nightmare of litter-strewn streets, a cluttered apartment looking onto a desolate cityscape, the elevated train clanging up Third Avenue in the dirty light of a summer morning.”23
Pauline Kael notes that some scenes in the movie are indicative of the “distinctive cruel edge” that was the Wilder-Brackett writing team’s specialty. In this regard she points to Don’s “long, plodding walk along Third Avenue in an attempt to hawk his typewriter, when the pawnshops are closed on Yom Kippur.”24 Wilder explained that he shot this scene in New York “because there was simply no other way to reproduce Don’s thirty-block trek up Third Avenue.” The sequence was shot in a single day, on a Sunday, when all the pawnshops would be closed. Milland trudged up Third Avenue from Fifty-fifth Street to 110th Street, lugging a typewriter. John Seitz recalled that he captured this particular scene as unobtrusively as possible, by means of a hidden camera, “so that people on the street would not know we were there. All these pedestrians walking leisurely by” added to the documentary feel.25 The camera was hidden along the route in the backs of delivery trucks, behind huge packing crates on the sidewalk, and in the windows of empty stores.
Wilder enhanced the film’s realistic atmosphere by photographing a sequence in Bellevue Hospital in which Don is forced to spend the night in the hospital’s alcoholic ward. To prepare for this scene, Milland had Wilder arrange with the hospital authorities for him to check himself into the alcoholic ward a few days before. “I was given hospital pajamas and a threadbare terrycloth robe, and assigned to a narrow iron bed,” writes Milland. “The place was a multitude of smells, but the dominant one was that of a cesspool. And there were the sounds of moaning; two of the inmates had to be restrained, strapped to their beds.” During the night Milland was awakened by a new arrival, a hysterical man whom the guards were attempting to subdue. “Suddenly the room was bedlam,” Milland remembers; “I knew I was looking into the deepest pit.”26
Milland bolted from the ward when no one was looking and attempted to hail a cab on Thirty-fourth Street. But a policeman, who recognized the Bellevue bathrobe Milland was wearing, grabbed him and hustled him back inside. He was able to convince the attendant on night duty to allow him to notify Wilder of his predicament. Wilder soon showed up, brandishing documentation that proved that Milland was no derelict but a movie star making a film. Milland was duly released, and Wilder utilized the very same ward to shoot the Bellevue scenes a few days later.
The officials at Bellevue subsequently regretted allowing Wilder to film on the premises, claiming that he had made Bellevue look more like a jail than a hospital. Director George Seaton said that, when he later asked Bellevue’s managing director for permission to shoot some scenes there for The Miracle on 34th Street (1947), “the hospital manager practically threw me out. He was still mad at himself for having given Wilder permission to shoot at the hospital.”27 Ed Sikov writes that the hospital manager complained that Wilder had given him a bogus copy of the script: “He showed me one script, which I approved, but then he filmed a different script!”28
Wilder finished filming on New York locations by October 19, 1944, and filming resumed at the studio in Hollywood on October 23. Production designer Earl Hedrick built an exact replica of P. J. Clarke’s bar on a soundstage at Paramount to serve as Nat’s bar in the film.
Wilder sometimes described the shooting period as a battle, which made some journalists wonder how agreeable he was when working with actors. He would reply that he always tried to be flexible and listen patiently to actors’ suggestions—except when they wanted him to alter lines in the script. Wilder explained that the dialogue that the director takes out to satisfy an actor may be “very important,” while what he substitutes on the spur of the moment may be “plain stupid.”29
Principal photography wrapped on December 30, 1944. By April 1945, Harrison had finished his preliminary edit of the film with Wilder’s collaboration. The studio arranged a test screening at a Santa Barbara theater. Wilder stood in the back of the house before the screening began; when the house lights dimmed, a hush of expectation fell over the audience.
The picture plunges into the world of the alcoholic with the very first shot. The camera pans across the New York skyline and pauses outside the window of Don’s East Side apartment, where a liquor bottle dangles from a rope attached to the windowsill. The camera then glides through the window and focuses on Don as he moves about his bedroom. Don casts a furtive glance in the direction of the bottle from time to time, hoping that it will not be noticed by his fiancée, Helen, when she visits his apartment shortly. Don plans to spend the evening having a drink or two but not drinking to excess. This is surely not a realistic expectation. As his long- suffering brother, Wick (Phillip Terry), tells him later in the film, for an alcoholic like Don to assume that he can drink moderately is the same as believing that “he can step off a roof and expect to fall only one floor.”
Later on in the evening, Don stops in at Nat’s bar for a few drinks. Gloria makes a pass at Don, whom she fancies. “You do like me a little, don’t you, honey?” she is fond of saying to him. She has genuine feelings for him, but he usually ignores her to chat with Nat. He explains to Nat that, when he is sober, he is troubled by the nagging fear that he will never succeed as a writer, and drinking makes him feel supremely self-confident. In due course Don relates to Nat how he met Helen, his faithful fiancée. With that, Wilder launches into a flashback, showing Don at a performance of Verdi’s La traviata at the Metropolitan Opera House.
The chorus raise their glasses for a toast and burst into a drinking song, “Libiamo, ne’ lieti calici” (Let’s drink from the joyful glasses). The shot of the chorus dissolves to a shot of a row of coats on a rack in the cloakroom. Then the camera focuses on Don’s trench coat; by means of a double exposure, Don’s coat becomes transparent, making the whiskey bottle in one of the pockets visible. Don craves a swig of whiskey, so he walks out on the opera to retrieve the bottle from his coat. Wilder’s portrayal of Don’s fantasy demonstrates the influence of German expressionism on the director. In fact, this scene, with its emphasis on visual imagery, could have been transplanted complete from the German silent cinema.
Don arrives at the cloakroom, only to discover that he has been given the wrong coat check, and he must wait until the opera is over to set things right. When Helen appears in the lobby, she and Don exchange coat checks, so that he gets his trench coat and she gets her leopard-skin coat. With that, the flashback ends. “The Wilderian ‘meet-cute’ packs a pungent punch,” writes Richard Armstrong, and it is, of course, a bit of an homage to Lubitsch.30
In the course of Don’s chat with Nat, the bartender pointedly suggests that Don consider drying out. Nat’s philosophy is that, for an alcoholic, “One drink is too many and a hundred are not enough.” But Don disregards Nat’s advice. “I’m on a merry-go-round,” Don answers, “and I have to ride it all the way.” Don goes back to his apartment, where he finishes off a bottle of liquor he has concealed in the chandelier. The next day he endeavors to begin his confessional novel, The Bottle, but he cannot get past page 1. Don despairs of ever rekindling his writing career, and he decides to drown his sorrow in booze. He aims to pawn his typewriter for money to buy some more liquor. He is, in essence, willing to sacrifice his career to his addiction. But Don’s painful trek up Third Avenue carrying his typewriter is all in vain, because the pawnshops are closed in observance of Yom Kippur. Later on, however, Don succeeds in snatching a bottle of booze, gets smashed all over again, and falls down a flight of stairs. He comes to later in the city alcoholic ward at Bellevue.
“Bim” Nolan (Frank Faylen), the nurse who attends Don, is a gay man who gives homosexuality a bad name. He is a leering, malevolent individual who enjoys taunting his charges about the horrors of delirium tremens (d.t.’s).31 “This is Hangover Plaza,” he tells Don. “Your blood is straight applejack—96 proof. There will be a floor show, when the guys . . . start seeing little animals. That stuff about pink elephants is the bunk; it’s little animals, like beetles, that they see.” Bim reminds Don that “delirium is a disease of the night” just before he switches off the lights and leaves Don to suffer the tortures of the damned with the other inmates of the ward. “I did manage to portray the orderly at Bellevue’s alcoholic ward as a homosexual, even though homosexuality was a taboo subject in American films in those days,” Wilder commented. “I directed the actor how to play his role as a homosexual. The film industry’s censor couldn’t nail me on it, however, because I had been subtle about it, and he couldn’t pin anything down to which he could object. The cognoscenti, those who looked and listened, got the implications of the scene.” Wilder laconically commented, “Those were different days.” Indeed they were; by 1970, he was able to make homosexuality an issue in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. But in 1945, Judy Cornes reminds us, “audiences were not prepared for any references to homosexuality in mainstream Hollywood films.”32
Don manages to escape from Bellevue the following morning. He makes it back to his apartment, where he suffers hallucinations of “little animals” resulting from d.t.’s, just as Bim said. In this harrowing scene, Don fantasizes that a mouse is sticking its head out of a hole in the plaster on his apartment wall. Suddenly a bat swoops down and pounces on the helpless rodent, and blood oozes down the wall. In the grim world of the alcoholic portrayed in the film, there is no place for pretty pink elephants.
Gordon Jennings, head of the special effects department at Paramount, was responsible for creating Don’s hallucination. In fact, he was given a special Academy Award at the Oscar ceremony in 1944 for his technical achievements. Jennings sometimes borrowed gimmicks that were used to produce visual tricks in stage plays. He created Don’s delirious fantasy of the ravenous bat attacking a hapless mouse by an old-fashioned method: he employed a mechanical bat attached to thin wires, which are invisible on the screen, zeroing in on a real mouse. Seen today, the sequence is as frightening as it ever was.
Wilder had initially planned to include other surreal images in Don’s hallucination. But Brackett worried that he was going overboard with German expressionism in the sequence. Wilder said that Brackett warned him that, if he made Don’s vision any more grotesque than it already was, the sequence “would be conspicuous and out of style for this picture; and worse, people might laugh. So I settled for the bat and the mouse.”33
As the apparition fades, Don is cowering in a chair, screaming at the predatory bat, when Helen bursts into his apartment. He pulls himself together, and before Helen realizes what he is up to, he seizes her leopard-skin coat and disappears out the door. Don is convinced that he is at the end of his rope and proceeds to pawn Helen’s coat to obtain a gun with which to commit suicide. Ironically, this is the same coat that brought them together.
By the time Don returns to the apartment, Helen has figured out that he has swapped her missing coat for a gun, and she beseeches him not to end his life. At this point Nat, the bartender, shows up at Don’s door. He has come by to return the battered typewriter Don carelessly left behind in the bar after he failed to hock it. Nat assures Don that “it still writes pretty good,” even though it has been kicked around. He implies that the same can be said of Don himself: Don too can still write, despite what he has been through.
After Nat leaves, Helen coaxes Don to write a novel about his lost weekend, in hopes that putting some words down on paper may keep him off the bottle. She finally convinces him that he has a powerful personal experience to write about; Don promises her that he is “going to put this whole weekend down, minute by minute.” As an emblem of his resolve to stay on the wagon, he douses a cigarette in a glass of whiskey. From now on Don intends to be running on empty. With that, Don begins to punch the keys of his portable.
The opening shot is reversed at the end of the film so that the camera pans away from Don’s apartment and back to the New York skyline. Don says, in voice-over on the sound track, “Out there is that great big concrete jungle. I wonder how many others there are like me, poor bedeviled guys . . .”
Cornes comments, “The movie ends . . . with an upbeat note, far different from Charles Jackson’s original, grittier, more realistic ending.”34 Unlike the movie’s Don Birnam, the novel’s Don Birnam implies that his self-destructive pattern of behavior will probably continue. He even minimizes the agony that he endured during his recent binge. “This one was over and nothing had happened at all. Why did they make such a fuss?”35 Cornes is not the only critic who finds the film’s more conventional ending unsatisfying. Stephen Farber maintains that Don’s new lease on life is not consistent with the rest of the movie. “Wilder’s eleventh hour conversions are troublesome,” writes Farber. “Certainly such conversions are possible. But Wilder is rarely successful at dramatizing them. His commitment seems to be to the cynical attitude expressed through the first three-fourths of these films; the morally uplifting conclusions are played almost invariably without conviction.”36 Sarris makes Farber’s point more bluntly: “Billy Wilder is too cynical to believe even his own cynicism.”37
“The so-called happy ending of Lost Weekend was not something imposed on me by the studio or by the censors or anyone else,” Wilder said. He himself sees the ending of the film as ambiguous: “When Don promises his girl that he is going to stop drinking, this is not a pat happy ending at all. He says he will try not to drink anymore. The film does not imply that he will never drink again, because, for all we know, he may have gotten drunk again the next day. We end on a note of promise, that he is going to make one more attempt to reform, but that is as far as the picture goes.” Wilder concluded, “Don sees the bottle as his worst enemy, but Don Birnam is his own worst enemy.” One can say safely that the ending of any Wilder picture is just as uncompromising as the story requires, and The Lost Weekend follows this rule.
Wilder created a fine piece of cinema with this film. The Lost Weekend is an intense and intricate story of spiritual meltdown, told with invisible dexterity and emotional acuity. But that is not how the first preview audience judged the picture. The Santa Barbara preview in early April 1945 was an unmitigated catastrophe. The audience did not know about the novel, which had just been published and had not yet become a best-seller. Consequently, Wilder said, “they did not know the movie was going to be a serious picture about drinking”; they were not prepared for the drama that unspooled. They giggled uproariously, as if it were a comedy about a slaphappy drunk, à la W. C. Fields. When they discovered that the picture was not about a comic souse, they started walking out in droves. “Three hundred people turned into fifty,” Wilder recalled forlornly. The preview cards uniformly denounced the picture as dull and disgusting.38 Frank Freeman, Wilder’s nemesis, used the Santa Barbara movie preview as a stick to beat Wilder with. Having vehemently but unsuccessfully opposed making the picture, Freeman was now against releasing it. He pointed out that The Lost Weekend had cost $1.3 million to make; for the studio to spend another $2 million on prints and advertising would be throwing good money after bad. Freeman threatened to shelve the picture indefinitely.
Wilder was not licked yet; he was already planning some damage control. For one thing, the print of The Lost Weekend screened in Santa Barbara had a temporary music track, since Rozsa had not yet finished his score. The temporary score comprised prerecorded music and at some points had a “jazzy, Gershwinesque” flavor, according to Rozsa, which was “disastrously inappropriate.”39 He told Wilder that he wanted to do a full symphonic score, which was what was indicated for a picture about a self-destructive alcoholic. Wilder told him to go ahead. To supply the haunting background music the movie required, Rozsa made extended use of the theremin, an electronic musical instrument that produces a high-pitched, quavering sound that perfectly augments the weird atmosphere of the picture. Rozsa had skillfully utilized the theremin for the first time in his score for Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945), and it likewise proved a highlight of his music for The Lost Weekend. For example, the bizarre quivering of the theremin helped to transform Don’s delirium tremens scene into something really bloodcurdling. Rozsa’s score “demonstrated that film music could be serious and contemporary, while still remaining within the symphonic tradition.”40
In addition to conferring with Rozsa about the background music for The Lost Weekend, Wilder tinkered with the movie’s final cut with Harrison. Wilder on principle had always abhorred sentimentality in a movie, but Harrison reminded him that a scene could have sentiment without descending to sentimentality. A case in point was the final scene of The Lost Weekend, when Helen attempts to dissuade Don from suicide. Harrison felt that, if Wyman delivered the speech with more emotion, the entire scene would be more arresting, especially when Helen says, “I’d rather have you drunk than dead!” Harrison commented on the scene to Wilder, “You didn’t break my heart; go back and do it again.” Wilder trusted Harrison’s intuition and complied. Members of the cast and crew reconvened on April 10, 1945, to reshoot the final scene, and the production wrapped for good on April 11. Both Wilder and Harrison thought the revised scene represented a marked improvement in the final cut of the movie.41
After The Lost Weekend was in the can, Wilder accepted the invitation of the Office of War Information (OWI) in May 1945 to join the armed forces temporarily as a liaison between the American army of occupation and the people of Germany. He knew that Paramount’s decision about the fate of The Lost Weekend would not be forthcoming, so he might as well make himself useful to the U.S. Army. During the summer of 1945, Wilder collaborated on an anti-Nazi documentary before returning to Hollywood in mid-September.
While he was away, the liquor industry joined in lobbying against The Lost Weekend. Stanley Barr, head of public relations for Allied Liquor Industries, issued an open letter to Paramount, warning that the “professional prohibitionists” would use the movie as a weapon in their campaign to reinstate Prohibition.42 The powerful liquor lobbyists were not above double-dealing behind the scenes to get the picture buried. Mafioso Frank Costello was authorized by the liquor interests to make a clandestine offer to the studio brass of $5 million to buy the original negative of the film and all existing prints, in order to burn them. Since Freeman had already considered writing the picture off as a loss, Costello’s offer was tempting. But Balaban was not inclined to accept a bribe from the mob to destroy the picture. Balaban, never one to mince words when discussing business, overruled Freeman by declaring flatly, “Once we make a picture, we don’t just flush it down the toilet.”43
Accordingly, on August 9, 1945, Paramount held a private screening of The Lost Weekend for members of the industry. The final cut shown included not only Wilder’s refurbished final scene but also Rozsa’s stunning score. The picture was received enthusiastically. In addition, the advance reviews in the trade papers were very favorable; they applauded the honesty with which the movie had been made, pointing out that The Lost Weekend “hasn’t any laughs; or games.” It “required courage for Paramount to violate cardinal box-office principles about what makes a hit to film it.”44
When Wilder returned to the studio, he was greeted with the news that Paramount had officially decided to release the picture. It opened to rave reviews on November 16, 1945, almost a full year after principal photography was completed. James Agee, who was himself known in critical circles to be an avid drinking man, ended his positive notice with a little joke on himself. Referring to Barr’s open letter, Agee delivered this punch line: “I understand that the liquor interesh are rather worried about thish film. Thash tough.”45
In the light of the movie’s success, the liquor lobbyists opted to abide by the old adage, “If you can’t beat them, join them.” The House of Seagram issued a press release declaring, “Paramount has succeeded in burning into the hearts and minds of all who see this vivid screen story our own long-held and oft-published belief that some men should not drink!”46
For his part, Charles Jackson endorsed the movie in an interview in terms that echoed James M. Cain’s comments about Wilder’s Double Indemnity: Wilder “thought of things I wish I had thought of first.”47 There is, for example, the sardonic Wilder wit, which of course is not in the novel, as when Don “reassures” a clerk in a liquor store that he is buying alcohol to fill his cigarette lighter.
The movie’s somber subject matter did not dissuade the mass audience from making the film a box office favorite. The Lost Weekend brought in $4.3 million in domestic rentals. One of the reasons that the movie was a commercial success across the country was that the reputation of the novel had caught up with it. The book had become a best-seller, with the help of its being a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. By the time the picture was released, audiences knew they should expect a serious picture about a dipsomaniac and not a farcical film about a slaphappy drunkard.
Sarris summarizes the virtues of the movie by saying that its punishing portrait of an alcoholic is still shocking today. “It has stood the test of time as an expressionistic forties film noir, principally for such factors as the theremin of Miklos Rozsa’s score and the hallucinatory images of a swooping bat and a bleeding mouse.”48
At age thirty-eight, Billy Wilder was ushered into the class of top directors by The Lost Weekend. As Wilder himself put it, “It was after this picture that people started noticing me.”49 Indeed they did. The Lost Weekend went on to become the most honored film of the year. It won the Grand Prize at the first postwar Cannes Film Festival. In addition, Academy Awards were conferred on the film for best actor, Milland; best screenplay, Brackett and Wilder; best director, Wilder; and best picture of the year, which went to Brackett as the film’s producer. Cinematographer Seitz and editor Harrison were also nominated.
When the Academy Awards ceremony took place at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, William Wyler, Billy Wilder’s fellow immigrant, presented the best director award to him. Wilder noted afterward that Leo McCarey was nominated as best director for yet another picture with Bing Crosby as a priest, The Bells of St. Mary’s. He said jokingly that he was afraid that McCarey might trip him as he marched up the aisle to accept the award, just as he had tripped McCarey the year before. Speaking seriously, Wilder said that he had a hunch that the academy named him best director for The Lost Weekend because they passed over him in 1944 for Double Indemnity. “So in 1945 they made up for it. It is very gratifying to win, because it is a validation of the work.”50
After Milland had accepted his award, Bob Hope, the master of ceremonies, gingerly observed, “I’m surprised they just handed it to him. I thought they’d hide it in the chandelier!”51 Wilder was not surprised that Milland won. As he said years later, “I knew the guy who played the drunk would get the Academy Award.” He added, “Mr. Ray Milland was surely not an Academy Award–worthy actor. He’s dead now, so I can say it.” Wilder explained, “If you are a cripple, if you stammer, if you are an alcoholic, people think that is great acting. An actor could not win an Oscar playing Cary Grant parts,” he concluded. “There is nothing astonishing there, coming in and saying, ‘Tennis, anyone?’ ”52
Perhaps Wilder’s fondest memory of the 1946 award ceremony was that on the following morning, as he drove onto the Paramount lot, he noticed that from every window of the writers’ building was hanging a whiskey bottle suspended on a cord.
In the late spring of 1945, Wilder had joined the film unit of the Psychological Warfare Division (PsyWar) of the U.S. Army with the rank of colonel. He flew to Europe on May 9 in a seaplane and arrived in due course at PsyWar’s headquarters in Bad Homburg, north of Frankfurt. He had a conference with two Russian officers who were assigned to help rejuvenate the German film industry. When they discovered that Colonel Wilder was an American movie director, one of them beamed and exclaimed, “Mrs. Miniver!” This 1942 film, a stiff-upper-lip movie about the British war effort on the home front, had been in fact directed by William Wyler, but Billy Wilder accepted the Russian colonel’s praise.53
One of Wilder’s chores was to collaborate on a documentary about the concentration camps, to be titled Die Todesmühlen (Death Mills). The filmed record of the Nazi atrocities, a frank account of man’s inhumanity to man, was to be shown in German cinemas. Wilder viewed the raw footage of the extermination camps filmed by official army photographers who had accompanied the liberating armies. He found the shots of the gas ovens, mass graves, and skeletal survivors shattering.
By the time Wilder joined the project in August 1945, Hanus Borger, a U.S. colonel in PsyWar and a documentary filmmaker, had produced a compilation of the footage. His rough cut of Die Todesmühlen, which ran eighty-six minutes, had been shipped to the PsyWar branch in London. Ivor Montagu, a British documentary filmmaker who was supervising Die Todesmühlen, judged Borger’s preliminary edit to be much too long. Borger’s version of the film was accordingly shipped back to Bad Homburg, where Wilder condensed and polished it for a documentary short running half an hour.54
Wilder left Germany with the outline of a film he hoped to make about the American occupation of Berlin firmly in mind. The movie would focus on a GI’s romance with a German woman. “As for the GI,” Wilder wrote in a farewell memo to the OWI, “I shall not make him a flag-waving hero,” but something of a cynic.55 The picture, when it was finally made in 1948, would be called A Foreign Affair.
On the credit side of the ledger, as we know, Wilder returned home to find that he had a successful film on his hands, The Lost Weekend. On the debit side of the ledger, however, Judith Wilder, his estranged wife, sued him for divorce two weeks after he returned. This came as a surprise to no one, least of all Billy Wilder. Wilder’s marriage had for all practical purposes ended by the time he finished shooting The Lost Weekend. It was an open secret that his mistress was Doris Dowling, whom he had cast in the movie. What’s more, he had started dating Audrey Young, a bit player who played a hat-check girl in the film. Young was not much of an actress; she was better known as a singer with Tommy Dorsey’s band. Thus Wilder, while cheating on his wife with Dowling, was also “cheating on his mistress by pursuing Audrey Young.” That spelled the end of Wilder’s stormy relationship with Dowling. Young “got her man, but her part wound up on the cutting room floor,” David Freeman observes.56
Judith Wilder officially filed for divorce on October 2, 1945; the divorce decree was finally granted on March 6, 1947. In the meantime, Judith and Victoria, their only child, took up permanent residence in the San Francisco Bay area. Wilder always blamed himself for the breakup of his first marriage. “I thought I was in love with Judith,” he reflected, “but I didn’t know what love was.”57
When Wilder started dating Young, he discovered that she lived in an unfashionable district of Los Angeles. “I would worship the ground you walk on,” he quipped, “if you lived in a better neighborhood.”58 Audrey learned from the outset of their relationship to roll with the punch lines of Wilder’s jokes.
Billy Wilder and Audrey Young were married on June 30, 1949. Audrey recalled that Billy was self-conscious about getting married a second time and wanted to keep the occasion as simple and unostentatious as possible. They drove to Linden, Nevada, and were married by a justice of the peace. They tied the knot, she remembered, “for $2.00 in three minutes.” He bought her a wedding ring for $17.95, which Audrey has worn ever since.59 Billy’s marriage to Audrey lasted till the end of his days. On their first wedding anniversary, Audrey greeted her husband at breakfast by reminding him of the date. Without looking up from his copy of the Hollywood Reporter, he exclaimed, “Please, not while I’m eating!”60 When asked whether she felt that her husband placed his movie career ahead of his marriage, Audrey answered, “You’re always going to come second.”61
Wilder wanted his film about an American GI in occupied Berlin to be his next project for Paramount. But he realized that it was too soon after the war to attempt extensive location shooting in the streets of Berlin. Berliners were understandably resentful of the American occupation forces. They would not welcome a Hollywood film crew taking over whole blocks of downtown for shooting. So he postponed A Foreign Affair. When Hollywood gossip columnist Louella Parsons asked him in February 1946 what his next film would be, he responded that he was going to make a musical called The Emperor Waltz. “Instead of the bat and the mouse in The Lost Weekend,” he added, “we’re having Bing Crosby and Joan Fontaine.”62