Before Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend, on-screen alcoholics tended to be figures of fun. Maybe they were a little pathetic, but mostly they were amusing; characters designed to generate laughter with their booze-fueled antics. In adapting Charles R. Jackson's semi-autobiographical novel, Wilder put all thoughts of comedy behind, in stark contrast to effervescent entertainments, like 1959's Some Like It Hot. Ray Milland (Dial M for Murder), in an Oscar-winning performance, plays 33-year-old New Yorker Don Birnam, an aspiring novelist suffering an epic case of writer's block. With his inability to hold down a job, he'd be living on the streets if it wasn't for his enabler of a brother, Wick (Phillip Terry), who ensures that he has a roof over his head. And Don is not without his charms. One night at the opera, where he grows increasingly itchy during a performance of La Traviata's "The Drinking Song," the cloakroom attendant, who had mixed up the claim tickets, gives him the leopard-print coat belonging to Time magazine editorial researcher Helen St. James (All That Heaven Allows' Jane Wyman, the essence of warmth and compassion).
At first, Don is anxious to get his coat back so he can bust open the bottle of rye in the pocket, but after he drops it, the idea of attending a cocktail party with a beautiful lady starts to seem a lot more appealing. The entire sequence plays out as a memory he shares with solicitous bartender Nat (Howard Da Silva) of their first date three years before. Though they've remained together since, Helen knows he's a drinker, and she knows he's been trying to quit. Where most anyone else might have walked, she refuses to give up on him. When Don and Wick prepare for a weekend getaway, she thinks things are looking up, but when Don gets so drunk he misses the train, his dark night of the soul begins. Miklós Rózsa's Theremin-dusted score combined with John Seitz's chiaroscuro cinematography lends the proceedings noirish flair. Don starts by keeping money intended for the housekeeper to buy more rye. Then, he hocks his typewriter, ends up in the drunk tank, and hallucinates a bloodthirsty bat flying around the apartment he tore apart while searching for more booze.
He's like a caged animal starved for food, culminating in one of the silver screen's most anguished howls. After hitting rock bottom, though, he realizes there's nowhere to go but up, and the film (unlike the novel) ends on a note of optimism. In his frank and informative commentary track, critic Joseph McBride, a recovering alcoholic, details its many admirable qualities, including Doris Dowling's turn as a wisecracking call girl, but wonders if it isn't all too "one note." It’s certainly an unrelenting experience, and the Oscar-winning Wilder doesn't let in much light, but The Lost Weekend, 1945's Best Picture winner, helped to shift public perceptions of alcoholism from moral failing to chronic disease, and it's a beautifully crafted, undeniably affecting film. Highest recommendation.