“The Lost Weekend”—a good, freezing movie—covers very specialized subject matter and activity, a long weekend of destructive drinking done by a frustrated writer and dipsomaniac, Don Birnam (Ray Milland). The picture ends when he is saved from shooting himself in front of the bathroom mirror by his girl, who works for Time, Inc. It is the kind of movie in which everything seems to be dressed up to look better, which moves diagrammatically and with somewhat dull success, but it seems essentially honest and works up by generally conservative means into a powerful film.
The realism of “The Lost Weekend” is the dogged, broadminded kind the producers, Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, always manage to overlay with a tinny brilliance. One of the most extreme examples of the latter is the characterization of Gloria (Doris Dowling), who is a hostess in Nat’s Bar, where the hero—one of the least heroic of all Hollywood movie heroes—spends most of his time. Gloria is supposed to be dressed to catch a customer’s eye, but actually she is dressed like nothing save possibly a chandelier—and especially so for the simple sort of life you get in a workingman’s bar like Nat’s. Gloria (a vital performer, though one who always seems about to go to pieces) has a phony poetic elegance, a literary manner similar to Birnam’s and she is decorated with speech mannerisms and gestures bizarre enough to make almost anyone who happened to be in the bar spill most of his drink.
A more average indication of the showy style is in such a scene as that of Birnam leaving his apartment one morning to go to Nat’s; as he comes out he is in a black ensemble that seems calculated to make a striking image against the white walls and white doors of the apartment. Then he is seen outside of the bar and again the image—looking out from the bar at him through piled-up chairs and tables—is the kind of stiff, contrived shot that was prevalent in Orson Welles’s movies. The style gives a fake coloring to almost every inch of the movie; it throws melodramatic shadow effects implying a cage behind Birnam in the scene at night in the hospital, makes the noises of the delirious patients sound like those of maddened jungle animals, over-specializes details like the shadow cast by a bottle in the chandelier, drapes ornate mannerisms on characters—like Gloria’s “No thanks, thanks, but no thanks,” the hero’s putting the wrong end of a cork-tipped cigarette into his mouth, and Nat’s charades of suicide.
Probably the most successful moments occur when the movie is dealing with something really ornamental—the sequence from “La Traviata,” satirizing its slow-motion grand manner and the unjustified happiness everywhere apparent on the stage. It has a dreamy, heavy kind of insanity like Goya’s etching, up until the last moment when a discordant, surrealist shot tells you that the hero’s mind is on a whiskey bottle in his overcoat, a fact that had been apparent for the previous ten minutes.
This is one of those rare movies in which a small action sometimes seems wonderfully colored by the character of the person and pervades not only the expression of his impulse, but his manner of carrying it out and his reaction to it. An instance of this is the preparation Birnam, like the artist in his surest moment of invention, goes through before a solitary night of drinking in his apartment, particularly his deciding to save time by not turning on the light, his feeling that he has done something brilliant in hiding the second bottle in the chandelier and the pleasure he takes in getting the bottle up there and getting down without breaking his neck, the professional way he takes off his coat. Some of Birnam’s other maneuvers, though they are often too neat, unfold as elaborately as a perfect football play, recorded somehow by a cameraman who is never more than a yard away from the hero and always in a position to expose each of his moves in the most dramatic way.
Except for Milland, “The Lost Weekend” is cast with lesser known Hollywood people and extremely dull ones, though they are seemingly intended to be that way. The plush Hollywood stamp is apparent from the start, when you see Milland, a fluent, handsome, exhibitionistic person in a cramped, mousy building on New York’s East Side. At best Milland looks as though he had been out of work and unable to create for about a week and had been on the East Side only as long as it took to film the movie, but he gives a strong impression of a number of other facts about Birnam, particularly his narcissism, gentility and lush romanticism (which operates only when he is degrading himself with someone he considers insignificant—Gloria, Nat, the girl in the night club, the landlady). Milland is a flamboyant player in a movie that is predominantly concerned with his every change of expression, and he succeeds in a spectacular way in making Birnam good entertainment. He is best in those moments when he is portraying Birnam as feeling good with himself or pleased with one of his maneuvers; in general he creates an agitated, actorish character rather than a tragic dipsomaniac. He misses the sorrow of the character, the sunken states—up to possibly the last scene; in his driven moments he seems simply athletic and he often looks as silly with a drink as he claims his brother does. One episode where the directing and acting have themselves a fling involves a male nurse (Frank Faylen) in a provocative, sneering act—one of the only inspired movie portraits of homosexuality I have ever seen.
January 7, 1946