The Lost Weekend (1945)
Directed by Billy Wilder
Longtime alcoholic Don Birnam has been sober for ten days and appears to be over the worst... but his craving has just become more insidious. Evading a country weekend planned by his brother and girlfriend, he begins a four-day bender that just might be his last – one way or another.
9 connections found
View:
9 connections, in both directions
What critics compared The Lost Weekend to
Weaving along the booze-soaked trail that so many great film actors have navigated before him, Washington gives a career-defining performance, right up there with Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend, Jack Lemmon in Days of Wine and Roses, and Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas.
As excerpted in the film's trailer, the harrowing airplane crash sequence suggests that screenwriter John Gatins has revamped the disaster genre, but this is less an update of "Airport" than of "The Lost Weekend," plus the heavy spiritual component of such past Zemeckis films as "Cast Away" (also about a plane crash) and "Contact" (with Jodie Foster as another type of sky worker, an astronomer).
Treading similar ground to Billy Wilder’s exasperatingly cautionary The Lost Weekend (1945), in which Ray Milland plays a desperate drunk finding and hiding drops wherever he can (lamp fittings, under the coach, from the bar down the road, etc) Whitaker encounters booze everywhere.
“Flight” is not acrid or cruel, like Billy Wilder’s “The Lost Weekend” (1945), in which we see the world through the eyes of Ray Milland’s character as he suffers the d.t.s.
If you like this, try: Substance abuse classics like “The Days of Wine and Roses” and “The Lost Weekend”…
To be completely honest, I often wonder who addiction dramas are for, besides actors looking for a gritty challenge, to shrug off vanity and get messy. It’s been a long time since films about the downward spiral of alcoholism, like Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend or Blake Edwards’ Days of Wine and Roses, provided much in the way of raw shock. That said, a distinctive setting and imaginative narrative embellishment can make the desolation of unhealthy dependency compelling.
Ever since Ray Milland slurred and gnashed his way to an Oscar win for The Lost Weekend in 1946, the role of the screen-chewing alcoholic has been an essential rite of passage for all self-respecting, trophy-hungry performers.
Even the best of them — Billy Wilder's 1944 "The Lost Weekend," with Ray Milland dragging his typewriter up Third Ave. to hock it for the price of a drink, or Otto Preminger directing Sinatra as 1955's "The Man with the Golden Arm" — come off as less than the whole story to this survivor of a household ruled by a mean drunk of a British father.
And as in “The Lost Weekend” (1945), starring Ray Milland , we have an addict trying to white-knuckle it through a very long three days.
Advertisement
One such episode involves a chase through time-frozen streets with the four kids fleeing from three creatures that appear to have been inspired by the Black Riders in The Fellowship of the Ring.
Freddie abandons The Cause to find his own salvation, tracks down his wartime sweetheart and finds her married, then goes on a binge that makes The Lost Weekend look like a Disney cartoon.
To say that this is Wilder and Diamond’s best screenplay would invite argument; after all, Diamond co-wrote Wilder’s “Some Like It Hot,” while Wilder also wrote or co-wrote “Ninotchka,” “Double Indemnity,” “Sunset Boulevard,” “The Lost Weekend,” “Stalag 17”... you get the idea.
Wilder's “The Lost Weekend” (1945) was made 17 years earlier but feels more contemporary in his treatment of alcoholism.
Advertisement
The credits are astonishing: “ Double Indemnity ,” “ Ace in the Hole ,” “ Some Like It Hot ,” “The Apartment,” “The Lost Weekend,” “Stalag 17,” “Witness for the Prosecution,” “Sabrina.”
A tale of misplaced ambition, self-deluded dementia, and, in a way, the empty signifiers of the illusory film medium that Wilder loves, the picture is less a noir, however (at least in terms of Double Indemnity, a seminal noir) than it is the closest thing Wilder made to a horror film (in lighting, score, and character dynamic) after The Lost Weekend.
Billy Wilder ("Sunset Boulevard"/"The Seven Year Itch "/"Some Like It Hot") directs this original, intense and grim study of a hopeless alcoholic.
For instance: The Lost Weekend won the top prize at both Cannes and the Academy Awards, to date only one of two films to do so; conversely, The Emperor Waltz received mixed reviews and is today considered one of the pair’s lesser efforts.
Wilder’s scripts are always excellent, from Double Indemnity (1944) and The Lost Weekend (1945) to Some Like it Hot (1959).
Five years later, Wilder would create his masterwork, "Sunset Boulevard," an instant classic that blended melodrama with satire.