- Person
- Billy Wilder
- Lived
- 1906–2002
- Field
- Film
- From
- Austrian-American
The story
Before 1945, Hollywood usually treated drunkenness as a joke, and serious treatment of addiction was difficult under the Production Code. Billy Wilder had just finished writing Double Indemnity with Raymond Chandler, a recovering alcoholic whose drinking returned during their tense collaboration, and Wilder later said he made his next film partly to understand Chandler. With his writing partner Charles Brackett, he adapted Charles R. Jackson's 1944 novel The Lost Weekend, about a failed New York writer, Don Birnam, on a desperate binge.
Ray Milland played Birnam, with Jane Wyman as his loyal girlfriend Helen. The film follows his cravings, lies and humiliations across a single weekend, from pawning his typewriter to stealing money and waking up in the alcoholic ward of Bellevue Hospital. Wilder insisted on shooting part of it on the streets of New York, hiding cameras so that Milland could walk up Third Avenue among real pedestrians, and the production was given rare permission to film inside the Bellevue ward. Miklós Rózsa's score was among the first to use the eerie sound of the theremin.
It was the first major American film to examine alcoholism seriously, as an illness rather than a comic weakness. The liquor industry campaigned against it before release, fearing it would revive support for Prohibition, but audiences and critics embraced it once the finished version with Rózsa's score was shown.
The Lost Weekend received seven Academy Award nominations and won four: Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay for Wilder and Brackett, and Best Actor for Milland. At the first Cannes Film Festival in 1946 it shared the Grand Prix, the festival's highest award, and Milland was named Best Actor. It is one of only four films, alongside Marty, Parasite and Anora, to win both Best Picture and the top prize at Cannes.
In 2011 the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry. Critics still describe it as remarkably prescient, and it remains a reference point for honest screen portrayals of addiction.
Why it matters
The Lost Weekend encouraged audiences to see addiction with compassion and helped open the door to serious films about mental and physical illness.
About Billy Wilder
Refugee from Nazi Berlin who became Hollywood’s sharpest writer-director, making Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot and The Apartment, and winning six competitive Oscars.
More about Billy Wilder
- Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity helped define film noirBilly Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), co-written with Raymond Chandler, became one of the defining films of film noir.
- Billy Wilder co-wrote the landmark film People on SundayIn 1930 a young Billy Wilder co-wrote People on Sunday, a low-budget film about ordinary Berliners on a day off that became a landmark of realist cinema.
- Billy Wilder stood up for blacklisted colleaguesIn 1947 Billy Wilder joined the Committee for the First Amendment, which defended Hollywood figures targeted by the House Un-American Activities Committee.
- Billy Wilder helped show Germans the truth of the campsIn 1945 Billy Wilder returned to Germany with the US Army's psychological warfare unit and supervised the English version of Death Mills, a film documenting the Nazi camps.
Sources
- Billy Wilder Wikipedia
- The Lost Weekend (film) Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.