THE LOST WEEKEND

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 374, 23 August 1946, Page 31

THE LOST WEEKEND

(Paramount)

F you're the drinking ; type, I suggest you have ‘a stiff one to steady your nerves before seeing this film, because they'll probably need steadying after

you've seen it, but you'll likely be on the water-wagon by then. For The Lost Weekend is, among many other things, a most effective piece of temperance propaganda. I hope that doesn’t make the film sound horribly dull. It is certainly horrible, but never dull. You may not enjoy it, you may wish you had gone to a nice cheerful murder-mystery instead, but I doubt if many people will agree with C. A. Lejeune that The Lost Weekend is just boring. I can understand the picture not being to her taste, but how she, or anybody else, can fail to recognise the terrifying realism of Ray Milland’s portrait of Don Birnam the hopeless drunkard, or the courage and power of Billy Wilder’s direction, just beats me. And in saying this I am not overcome with awe of the film’s reputation: I certainly didn’t put my shoes from off my feet before entering the theatre because of the prospect of seeing a production which gained four Academy awards. It just so happens that it earned them. Eg * a HE Lost Weekend is not, of course, a perfect work of art. I haven’t read Charles Jackson’s long novel on which the film is based, but I understand he spends a fairly large part of it elaborating the reason why the hero is a dipsomaniac. The reason given in the film clearly isn’t adequate: it is not enough to be told merely that Birnam is a frustrated author who becomes paralysed by the fear that he won’t be able to set his thoughts on paper whenever he sits

at his typewriter. That feeling of hopelessness at the sight of an empty white page waiting to be filled is common enough (I have it myself about once a week), but fortunately it doesn’t by itself send authors and journalists-or film critics-off on a five-day binge. That is one of the faults in the film. The other is the unpersuasive attempt to snatch even a faintly optimistic ending from the pit of misery and degradation into which the story has descended, For it is basic in the narrative that Birnam is a hopeless sot. Protestations of reform occur at regular intervals along the circumference of the vicious circle round which he revolves. He has sworn to give up drinking many times before, and just as many times before he had failed; why should we believe that reformation will be any more lasting on this occasion than on any other? In fact, we don’t believe it, and I’m pretty sure that the film doesn’t gain anything in box-office value from the half-hearted attempt to convince us. a * Ea YET, although The Lost Weekend for these reasons is not a perfect work of art, I think it is still a work of art. The film has integrity. It is life-like. It deals with common human experience in terms which all of us can recognise as valid. As I have said, I don’t think everybody in the theatre was enjoying the show, yet it held them in their seats. Horror films, of course, have always a certain popularity and The Dost Weekend is a naturalistic horror story if ever there was one: there is a clinical ruthlessness about its analysis of the hero’s predicament. So it may be that what grips the audience is merely a kind of morbid fascination. But I think there is rather more to it than that. If The Lost Weekend were (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) not a work of art it would be received by many people as a comedy in rather dubious taste, After all, nearly everybody laughs at drunks; they are stock funny figures of stage, screen, fiction, and real life. And indeed, a good deal of laughter does greet the early sallies of the hero in search of whisky, his weaving walk, his frantic subterfuges to escape the vigilance of his brother and his sweetheart, his desperate attempts to get credit, in the same way as it would greet the boozy antics of a W. C. Fields, or of somebody washed up on the local streets after the six o’clock rush is over. But although the camera maintains a mood of almost ironic humour throughout Birnam’s five-day drinking marathon, you can pretty soon begin to detect a change in the quality of the laughter. What there is can before long be recognised as mostly the reaction of strained nerves, and even this ceases almost entirely when Birnam makes his nightmare Odyssey through the streets of New York trying to pawn his typewriter for a few drinks (it is a Jewish holiday and the pawnshops are ll closed), when he crashes down a flight of stairs and wakes up in the D.T. ward of the hospital, and when finally he has his own screaming fit." This isn’t funny, it is terrifying and pitiful. Because it comes at least within hail-ing-distance of the classic requirements of great tragedy, because it achieves its effects without fuss and is good cinema, because it gives Ray. Milland the chance to contribute one of the screen’s few really ‘memorable portraits-Birnam is disgusting, tricky, selfish, even a mean sneak-thief, yet you cannot shake off your sympathy for him-because of all this, The Lost Weekend, I repeat, fully deserved its quadruple Academy Award.