Oscars Retrospective: The Lost Weekend (18th Academy Awards Review)

 

The Lost Weekend~The Lost Weekend - Miklós Rósza

If you remember from the last chapter, Billy Wilder did not take his loss of Double Indemnity (1944) to Going My Way (1944) too well. Well, surprise and luckily for him, he ended up winning the following year for The Lost Weekend. Now, under normal circumstances, I would assume that this is because of Hollywood politics trying to make it up to him (a feat that is responsible for more dumb Oscar wins that you can count) but there’s more to it than that. For one, The Lost Weekend is actually a great movie but, even more interestingly, The Lost Weekend also won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival.

Unlike the Academy Awards, the Cannes Film Festival is considered genuinely prestigious and actually winning an award, let alone winning the biggest award (Grand Prix in 1946, renamed to the Palme d’Or in 1955, back to the Grand Prix in 1964, then back to Palme d’Or in 1975 though Grand Prix now refers to another award), is actually considered a big deal. Unlike the Academy Awards which are usually based on Hollywood politics and are basically a popularity contest for the rich and famous, the Cannes Film Festival’s jury selection features some of the most devoted cinema snobs on the planet. Even if you don’t agree with them, it’s rare that you’ll see a winner of this award that just seems completely bonkers. Further, the Cannes jury does not try to pass themselves off as the be-all, end-all award that year. The jury is routinely shuffled up and just chooses based on whatever fickle nature these cinephiles this year feel they like. So, even if you end up disagreeing with the Palme d’Or, you can respect them as they are usually choosing for what they genuinely believe is the best in the respective category instead of awards politics.

The Lost Weekend is one of only three films to have won both the Oscar for Best Picture and the Grand Prix/Palme d’Or (the other two being Marty (1955) and Parasite (2019)). The fact that this was the first time the Cannes Film Festival was hosted in about 6 years on account of that whole “Nazis invading France” thing, just made it an even bigger deal. Granted, there were 9 other films that also won the Grand Prix that year but the point remains. This movie is genuinely excellent.

Upon first hearing the name for The Lost Weekend, I figured that this film was going to be a fun romantic-comedy/screwball. Like maybe it’s a couple who go on a weekend trip, have this phenomenal honeymoon planned but then hijinks ensue making the more type-A person of the duo feel like the weekend was a waste. Or something along those lines. Instead, the movie is about a writer named Don Birnam (Ray Milland) who is trying to recover from alcoholism. He and his girlfriend, Helen St. James (Jane Wyman) are about to spend a lovely weekend together. Instead, one false reminder causes Don to relapse and he sneaks away to his favorite bar and starts engaging in a days-long bender. This gives a much more chilling meaning to the term “Lost Weekend.”

While there have been films that have touched on alcoholism and addiction before, such as A Free Soul (1931) and A Star is Born (1937), The Lost Weekend is the first film where the addiction is the main focus of the story. This was a very, very long time before this would become its own subgenre with other tragic and excellent films such as All That Jazz (1979), Requiem for a Dream (2000) and Flight (2012). However, The Lost Weekend manages to stand out from the crowd a little bit due to its censorship from the ongoing Hays Code at the time.

What do I mean by this? Well, you don’t see much in terms of physical decline from Don’s dependence on alcohol. You don’t see his face start to sag, he doesn’t vomit profusely nor do you see anything else that most of us would commonly associate with the side effects of an alcoholic bender. Instead, the movie is much more psychological, focusing on Don’s increasing desperation to get more alcohol. The movie has a sick sense of fun in coming up with increasingly steep situations to try to stop Don from getting more booze to pad out the length of the film and we sit in the increasingly uncomfortable gray zone between admiring our main character for his grim determination while also wishing that he would just stop.

The style of the film also lends itself well to the bender. Wilder takes the same stylized cinematography that made Double Indemnity so cool and lends it to The Lost Weekend to help add to its chilling atmosphere. Over the course of the movie, shots of bottles of whiskey transform from looking like innocuous items into terrifying objects that only contribute to Don’s increasingly delirious alcoholism. It’s very difficult to turn an inanimate object into a symbol of terror but the movie manages it.

This is yet another film where the black-and-white makes the shimmering whiskey that much creepier.

The Lost Weekend pioneered a few other pieces of filmmaking as well. I believe that this is the first film to use the theremin as the main instrument of choice for its soundtrack. A theremin was a precursor to the synth and is one of the first totally electronic instruments. It’s basically a little radio that you would remote control the frequency to change the music that it would put out. Its unique sound was used in films to give scenes an eerie or otherworldly quality. Nowadays it’s most often associated with a lot of space films during the Atomic Age of the 50s such as The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951) but it was by no means exclusive to it.

The Lost Weekend not only pioneered the usage of the theremin but has one of the most artistic uses of it to this day. During the scenes concerning Don’s bender, you almost feel like you’ve entered a completely different world. The theremin comes in hot, the background starts to blur and the black and white seems to glisten to unreal extremes. One sequence remains one of the most definitive portrayals of alcoholism as it showcases Don wandering the streets looking for a liquor store that’s open. The camera retains its focus on Don’s unchanging and increasingly exasperated visage all while time dilates to the point that you’re not entirely sure how long this is taking anymore. This is another famous movie scene has been spoofed countless times.

The style is so intrinsic to the success of The Lost Weekend that if you subtracted any of these aspects, the movie would not work. When the film was first shown to a preview audience, it was initially laughed at as the film was missing the soundtrack which made Ray Milland’s performance seem much more over-the-top and ridiculous. When the film was shown again to another audience with the music now appropriately laid in, the audience sat completely enraptured. It’s amazing how one little change in the filmmaking process can change a bad film into a good one.

I would also like to say that The Lost Weekend was the movie that invented the tortured, alcoholic writer trope but, to be honest, I feel like Ernest Hemingway did more to establish that trope more than any movie could. This probably still did a lot in popularizing that trope to the masses though.

The Lost Weekend is one of the darkest films to have won the Academy Award for Best Motion Picture and easily the darkest film we’ve watched for this blog since the Hays Code was instituted. While it might not be as intense as some more modern movies, it’s still a very great surprise if you’re familiar with films from this time period and acts as a pretty grim portrayal of alcoholism. (Fun fact: the liquor industry tried to bribe the producers of the film to stop the film’s production as they were afraid that it would turn public opinion against alcohol and bring Prohibition back. Reportedly, Billy Wilder was upset that he wasn’t one of the people offered a bribe.)

This man is turning into my new hero.

While The Lost Weekend is excellent, there are two major flaws with the film. First is that the sheer amount of alcohol that Don consumes over the course of the film while still being able to walk around the next morning is ridiculous. By my count, he single-handedly consumes about five bottles of straight whiskey over the course of three days without ingesting any water or much food. I’m pretty sure that this is way more alcohol that any human being can consume in such a short amount of time without ending up dead. Or, if they did survive, they’d be left worshiping the porcelain throne and unable to walk.

The other one concerns the ending of the film so consider this your spoiler warning to stop reading this paragraph if you want to see the movie (which I highly recommend you do). The movie ends with Don being convinced by his girlfriend to give up drinking for good. While this is a nice, happy note to end on and does feel rewarding after watching the living Hell he just put himself through, the scene where he finally puts down a glass of whiskey feels a little… quick. If you compare it to more modern films about addiction, the scene where the addict finally decides to quit forever feels like a big moment. They usually hold on to the moment for a good thirty seconds to get the suspense going to make you wonder if they’ll be able to do it or not. On the other hand, this is an older movie so we can be a bit more forgiving, but man, I wished they really milked that moment more.

Those aside, The Lost Weekend is a great movie and one of the most overlooked great films. Despite the limitations of its era, The Lost Weekend does a great job at bringing the audience to a very dark place and showing us how sometimes it’s not always Nazis and evil businessmen that we have to worry about but sometimes our own personal demons. From both a dramatic angle and a historiographical angle, this is truly a great movie.

But was it movie of the year though?

In case you missed it:

1st Academy Awards (1927/28): Wings/Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans: Part 1, Part 2

2nd Academy Awards (1928/29): The Broadway Melody: Part 1, Part 2

3rd Academy Awards (1929/30): All Quiet on the Western Front: Part 1, Part 2

4th Academy Awards (1930/31): Cimarron: Part 1, Part 2

5th Academy Awards (1931/32): Grand Hotel: Part 1, Part 2

6th Academy Awards (1932/33): Cavalcade: Part 1, Part 2

7th Academy Awards (1934): It Happened One Night: Part 1, Part 2

8th Academy Awards (1935): Mutiny on the Bounty: Part 1, Part 2

9th Academy Awards (1936): The Great Ziegfeld: Part 1, Part 2

10th Academy Awards (1937): The Life of Emile Zola: Part 1, Part 2

11th Academy Awards (1938): You Can't Take It With You: Part 1, Part 2

12th Academy Awards (1939): Gone With the Wind: Part 1, Part 2

13th Academy Awards (1940): Rebecca: Part 1, Part 2

14th Academy Awards (1941): How Green Was My Valley: Part 1, Part 2

15th Academy Awards (1942): Mrs. Miniver: Part 1, Part 2

16th Academy Awards (1943): Casablanca: Part 1, Part 2

17th Academy Awards (1944): Going My Way: Part 1, Part 2