Don't Make a Scene: The Lost Weekend

The Story: The scene that everyone remembers from Billy Wilder's "The Lost Weekend" is the hallucination scene in his room late in the movie with the mouse in the wall, and the attacking bat, and Miklós Rózsa's weird theremin theme that ends with Ray Milland's alcoholic writer screaming at the top of his lungs while blood runs down the walls.

Good stuff, that.

But not for here. That scene is mostly visual with...well, with NO words, and without the squeeks, the whooping and screeches, there's no way to do justice to it.

But, this scene popped out at me. In fact, when it came on, I sat upright on the couch, as we see Don Birnum change. An infusion of rye and he becomes a completely different person—gifted, articulate, fun. Before we'd only seen the watched-over Birnum, the dry Birnum, shifty, paranoid, diffident and surly. But in his element, hanging on to the lip of a glass, he's the man he wants to be...and never can be, sober.

Ray Milland's Oscar-winning performance was stiff before this, but here he's wild and over-the-top—and more than reminds one of another Billy Wilder creation five years down the cinematic road, Norma Desmond from "Sunset Boulevard"—another character drunk, but on themselves. For Norma, her memories are her scotch, and she comes alive only in their presence. In fact, it's not too much of a stretch seeing writer Don Birnum in Hollywood, ducking into Norma's driveway to avoid the cops...probably, they'd have quite the party, and things might have turned out better than they did for Joe Gillis.

The Set-Up: Aspiring writer Don Birnum (Ray Milland) has been going through "the treatment"—trying to quit drinking. This week-end, he's supposed to further his sobriety by going upstate to get out of New York and spend some time in the fresh air. But all he can think about is his next drink. His brother Wick (Phillip Terry) and his girl (Jane Wyman) are off to a show (at Don's insistence), but they'll leave for the train station at 5:45. Left to his own devices, Don has found some money that Wick left for the cleaning lady, and he's gone to the liquor store and stopped off at Nat's pub (run by Howard Da Silva) to do a little pre-functioning before his trip away.

Action!

Don drinks his drink, puts down the glass.

DON (To Nat) Nat, weave me another.
NAT You'd better take it easy.
DON Don't worry about me. Just let me know when it's a quarter of six.
NAT Okay.
He pours.

DON And have one yourself, Nat.
NAT Not me, Mr. Birnam.
DON I often wonder what the barman buys, one-half so precious as the stuff he sells.
Nat has poured the drink. Don points at it.

DON Come on, Nat. One little jigger of dreams.

NAT Nope.
DON You don't approve of drinking?
NAT Not the way you drink.

DON It shrinks my liver, doesn't it, Nat? It pickles my kidneys. Yes. But what does it do to my mind?

DON It tosses the sandbags overboard so the balloon can soar. Suddenly I'm above the ordinary. I'm competent, supremely competent. I'm walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls. I'm one of the great ones.

DON I'm Michelangelo moulding the beard of Moses. I'm Van Gogh, painting pure sunlight. I'm Horowitz playing the Emperor Concerto.

DON I'm John Barrymore before the movies got him by the throat.

DON I'm a holdup man -- I'm Jesse James and his two brothers, all three of them.

DON I'm W. Shakespeare.

DON And out there it's not Third Avenue any longer. It's the Nile. The Nile, Nat, and down it moves the barge of Cleopatra.

DON C'mere! Listen:

DON "Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggar'd all description."

During the last two lines he has picked up the jigger of rye. THE CAMERA is on the wet rings which the wet glass has left on the bar. Gradually the music swells under the Shakespearean quotation and drowns it out.

In two QUICK DISSOLVES we see the five rings, then six, then nine. Over the last, the light has changed.



"The Lost Weekend"

Words by Charles R. Jackson and Charles Brackett & Billy Wilder (and W. Shakespeare)

Pictures by John F. Seitz and Billy Wilder

"The Lost Weekend" is available on DVD from Universal Home Video.

The Lost Weekend

"The Lost Weekend" (Billy Wilder, 1945) Don Birnam (Ray Milland) is an aspiring writer, drunk and sober, caught in a self-defeating loop of dependence and neurosis. His dependence on, and devotion to, alcohol has put him into a tail-spin of false confidence and self-loathing where his dreams are only out of reach because he can't pick himself off the floor. His "rye" attitude drowns his dreams and feeds his nightmares and without it, he's brittle, paranoid and living in the future, waiting for the shot-glass aimed at his destruction.

Sounds like so much fun. Sounds like a "speech" or a lecture coming on. Sounds like one of those movies "for your own good." Sounds like I'd rather have a drink. Fortunately, Billy Wilder's in charge, and yes, it's preachy at times, but most of the time, it's tough as nails and doesn't hold back on what a louse Birnam is without alcohol, and how pathetic he is with it. It's not "Pity-Party: The Movie." Wilder makes it clear that Birnam is his own worst enemy and the alcoholism is just a symptom. At movie's start with Birnam barely through a week of sobriety and packing for a trip in the clean country upstate New York with his brother (Phillip Terry), it's all he can do to keep from eyeing the bottle he has hanging out his apartment window. Milland's performance is brittle, officious—like Cary Grant without the stick pulled out. But, once his brother and girlfriend (Jane Wyman, pathetically co-dependent) are out of the way, Milland's eyes go snaky looking for alcohol in his apartment's old familiar places. Then, once he's got a burn going on, Milland is in full glory as an actor—an amazing performance, eerily reminiscent of Gloria Swanson's Norma Desmond four years in the future (and also directed by Wilder).

There are joys aplenty in this film, not just from some cracker-jack writing, but also Wilder's direction—putting Milland in front of a subtly discombobulating projection-screen for his long "wild turkey" chase to find a liquor store open on a Jewish holiday, the nightmare sequence of the alky ward and the subsequent "screamin' meemie" sequence in his apartment. There are also great performances by Howard Da Silva as a particularly wary bartender, and a wonderfully creepy performance by Frank Faylen, who is eerily complacent telling Birnam about the tortures of DT's.

Part tract, part horror film, but without the absurd homilies or "Reefer Madness" hysteria, "The Lost Weekend" lets you off with a warning this time.

"The Lost Weekend" was a co-winner of the Grand Prix at the very first Cannes Film Festival (Ray Milland won Best Actor), and it went on to win Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Actor. Only two films in history have won both the Palme and the Best Picture Oscar. Premiere Magazine voted it one of it's "25 Most Dangerous Movies."*

All that, and it has yet to be chosen for the National Film Registry.

(What are they? Drunk?)

* Paramount was pressured by both the alcohol industry AND temperance societies not to release the film. It did so on a very limited basis to critical acclaim, encouraging the tee-totaling studio to take a chance and open it in more theaters.