I watched The Lost Weekend today. I"m trying to watch every single Best Picture winner.
I thought this film was the 1940’s equivalent of Reefer Madness. Certainly not a film worthy of an Oscar nomination, much less a win. This movie must have been a propaganda piece for AA. Don Birnam goes on a binge, which of course must include robbing at gunpoint, DT’s, stealing from people at a bar, stealing from the housekeeper, and thoughts of suicide. The musical use of the theremin in the soundtrack was the only interesting part of this movie. The acting was wooden at best, Jane Wyman phoned it in as the so called love interest. Of course, we have the happy ending where Don the writer takes over Don the drunk and begins to write the great American novel.
1945 certainly produced better movies than The Lost Weekend. 1945 in film I’ll suggest Spellbound as a better Oscar winner for Best Picture.
Reefer Madness was pure propaganda, fear-mongering, and with obvious Z-level production values.
Lost Weekend is overwrought but nowhere in the same league. Some of the acting is decent, some dated. Billy Wilder has good dialogue but the interior monologue stuff is where things get ham-fisted. Ray Milland won an Oscar for playing against type since he was mostly known for romantic comedy leads, and while the efforts across the board are sincere, it plays as hokey now but didn’t then (as opposed to Reefer, which nobody ever took seriously).
There were many many drunks in the movies up until then, but alcoholism was rarely ever addressed outright (except in terms of Temperance League, Prohibition morality), so this was new, “serious cinema”. Lofty, idealistic, but pretty simple-minded in retrospect.
Honestly, though, Spellbound is almost as bad in how it handles psychiatry. Other than the Dali dream sequence and a score my Miklos Rozsa (who also did Weekend), the film is a clunker.
My Best Picture vote goes to Fritz Lang’s brilliant (non-nominated) Scarlet Street. Jean Renoir’s The Southerner (which got a Director but not a Pic nod), John Ford’s They Were Expendable, and Elia Kazan’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn would also be deserving, and among the actual nominees that year, Mildred Pierce.
As I mentioned this earlier this year in a thread on dated movies, The Lost Weekend is a product of its time. Like MovieMogul said in his post, it was one of the first American films to deal with alcoholism as a disease and not in a judgmental fashion that tried to blame everything on the drinker’s weak character. Also, it was one of the first in a series of “message” pictures of the late 1940s and 50s that tried to tackle such controversial issues as racism, anti-Semitism, drug abuse, mental illness, and teenage delinquency. Most of these movies might’ve been relevant when they were released but now come across as compromised, clichéd, preachy, and heavy-handed. That’s probably the main reason why **The Lost Weekend’s **reputation has suffered over the long-term. As for me, I think it’s not a bad movie but I wouldn’t put in among Billy Wilder’s top five films.
The Lost Weekend was about an affliction that could be suffered by the Only People Who Mattered at the time, affluent middle-aged men. Of course any movie that pulled out all the hankies and gave it the full sob sister treatment would be Oscar material. Reefer Madness was about a drug used by Negroes and poor men, not just poor, but musicians! It was fit only for the hysterical rantings that Reefer Madness is the equivalent of.
I didn’t think “The Lost Weekend” was bad at all. Nor was it too overwrought. I’ve lived with an alcoholic, and also with potheads. “The Lost Weekend” hit close to home. “Reefer Madness” was just ridiculous.
That said, Best Picture of the Year…?
Haven’t seen the Ford or Kazan movies, but “Scarlet Street” and “Mildred Pierce” were great and either would have gotten my vote over “Lost Weekend.” “The Southerner” I didn’t care for.
Uh, this. Nothing that happens to Don is really all that outrageous. He steals and lies. He has the DTs. He falls. He ends up at the Bellevue Alcoholic Ward, which was (or is?) a real place. These are all things that have happened to actual alcoholics. On the other hand, I am unaware of anyone being driven insane by marijuana use and diving out of a window as a result. Of course the story is told in dramatic fashion and it all happens in the space of one weekend, but it’s clear that this is someone who has been a severe alcoholic for years and things have reached a boiling point. There’s no indication that taking one drink will set you on the road to ruin, unlike the characters in Reefer Madness whose lives start to fall apart after one joint.
The acting is wooden? Eh, I’m not fond of either Jane Wyman or the guy who plays the brother, but there’s no universe in which Ray Milland’s work here could be considered “wooden”. I’ve heard the ending criticized as overly optimistic before, but I never go away from it thinking that Don is magically cured. He’s chosen not to kill himself that day, or to drink for that morning. He starts his novel - we don’t actually know if he’ll succeed. We know he’s tried to quit drinking before. He’s giving it another shot, and good luck to him.
ETA: Also, if it’s a propaganda piece for AA, it’s a very bad one - considering it never mentions or even alludes to AA at all.
Danny Peary, in his book Alternate Oscars(Delta, 1993), agrees with Movie Mogul on Scarlet Street, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and They Were Expendable, and wouldn’t have even nominated Weekend. In his review, he says that Weekend is “a strong, well-made picture…but Milland’s writer is so unpleasant…that it’s hard to care about him.” (page 79).
He liked Expendable as the best picture, and Boris Karloff in The Body Snatcher as the best actor.
I didn’t much care for Lost Weekend, and think of The Southerner and especially Scarlet Street as better movies. I even like Bells of St. Mary’s better.
Although I haven’t seen The Lost Weekend I was going to mention Wine and Roses. It’s nearly a generation latter, Hollywood-era wise (1962) and it still holds up today as a realistic tragedy/cautionary tale without falling into ‘scared straight’ propaganda…