After the war, audiences were eager for more realistic films dealing with real-life topics, and the best example of this demand was the success of Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend.

At the turn of the Second World War, change was in the air. The pre-war productions, with their costume, convention and millimeter-accurate aesthetics, were no longer in vogue. The war had come and gone, and with it a flood of horror, reality and subject matter in stark contrast to Hollywood.

If Rossellini’s Rome, Open City in 1945 is a good example of the revival of cinema and the change in film subject matter, Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend also marked a shift in the themes that audiences were looking for. Adapted from the novel by Charles Jackson, the film tells the story of Don Birman (Ray Milland), a writer who gradually drowns in alcohol, trapped in a vicious circle.

At the heart of the film is the theme of alcoholism, a subject often avoided in American cinema, and even worse, often idealized or glamorized, as Michael Curtiz did – perhaps unwittingly – with the character of Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) in Casablanca. For The Lost Weekend, Wilder doesn’t want to take any detours from the subject, and confronts it head-on, in all its ugliness, sadness and gradual decline. After all, in 1945, alcoholism was a very topical issue. With millions of American soldiers returning from the war, often without psychological help and having to readjust to society, the bottle quickly became a way out to forget that it was impossible to move on.

But alcoholism applies not only to soldiers, but also to American workers. Many journalists have asked author Charles Jackson if his novel was inspired by his own life. Although the author conceded at the time that there could be echoes of his drinking problems, he later revealed that the story was almost autobiographical.[1]

As we follow Don in his downward spiral, where every attempt to put aside another glass of alcohol to concentrate on writing ends in failure, his New York apartment becomes the place of all evils. A claustrophobic setting that becomes increasingly hellish as Don destroys his furniture to find the few bottles he has hidden in his apartment. Despair gives way to anger, then anger is calmed by alcohol, a short-lived calm that is then replaced by other evils, panics, cold sweats, nightmares, only to fall asleep and wake up in the chaos he himself has created, bringing despair once again.

Wilder is cruel to his own character, filming his inevitable relapse into alcohol, the chaos that comes with it, and letting his character use up his last savings – and steal – on booze. The film reaches its peak of cruelty when Don tries to sell his typewriter, Wilder filming the poor man cross New York in a vain attempt to sell what’s left of his hope, only to discover that all the stores are closed for the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur.

On several occasions, Wilder and his cinematographer John F. Seitz adopt an aesthetic that refers to Wilder’s past career as a German filmmaker, infusing his work with German Expressionism. This is most apparent in the hospital sequence and, above all, the hallucinations, where Wilder gives great prominence to light and shadow to express horror. The filmmaker plunges the apartment into darkness with a single light source, and for long minutes no dialogue is spoken. Only the images of the mouse nibbling through the hole in the wall, and the bat flying through the apartment, let us understand Don’s hallucinations. Once again, Wilder doesn’t treat hallucinations lightly; all that emerges is blood, death and Don’s scream, terrified and trapped in his own hell.

The uncompromising realism of its theme and the horror that emanates from it is the great quality of The Lost Weekend. Wilder never ceases to give us a glimpse of hope, only to crush it under the irresistible weight of a liberating drop of alcohol. Right down to the ending – which had to be changed to please the studios – the filmmaker ends his work with a darkly tinged hope. Don promises his lover Helen (Jane Wyman) that he’ll stop drinking and write. But it’s only a promise, a new hope that can be drowned the very next day. The film looks at and treats its theme rawly, without embellishment, and is also an appeal to a society. As Ray Milland’s character says at the end of the film, “ And out there in that great, big concrete jungle… I wonder how many others there are like me: Poor, bedevilled guys on fire with thirst. Such comical figures to the rest of the world as they stagger blindly towards another binge another bender another spree.”

The harshness of Wilder’s approach did not deter the public, as The Lost Weekend became one of the biggest box-office hits of 1945, and won Wilder the Oscar for Best Picture and Best Director. The film’s success and the public’s demand for realistic works gave rise to several films dealing with previously unspoken social issues, such as anti-Semitism with Crossfire in 1947, and insanity with The Snake Pit in 1948.

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[1] WOOD Tom, The Bright Side of Billy Wilder, Primarily, Doubleday & Company, Inc 1970, p.164.

PHILLIPS. D. Gene, Some Like It Wilder : The Life and Controversial Films of Billy Wilder, University of Kentucky, 210, pp. 113-114.