Lost Classic – The Lost Weekend
We live in a society dominated by healthism. Yet this modern puritanism suffers from a paradox: the more unrealistic the health guidelines, the more we gain tacit permission to ignore them. The sight of Leicester Square on a Friday night shows the Chief Medical Officer’s advice to be somewhat parochial. Programmes like Drunk Britain provide a release from these double standards; pricking the balloon of healthism, while reassuring us that our personal excess is not too excessive.
What did this spectrum look like in the past? Part of the titillation of old films is the drooping cigarette and ever-present cocktail. Period series like Mad Men neatly play on this frisson, teasing us with nostalgia for a life lived through the sybaritic filter of alcohol. Yet one question remains unanswered: if they drank too much by our standards, then what was too much by their standards?
A brutal answer is provided by The Lost Weekend. Hitting US cinemas in 1945 – written and directed by Billy Wilder – this slice of realism eviscerated America’s suspension of disbelief around drinking. It presents a pin-sharp psychological portrait of a failing writer and his fatal dance with hard liquor. We meet Don Birnam when he has been dry for ten days. He is truculent and manipulative, coldly playing on his brother’s and fiancée’s attempts at rehabilitation. “Just stop watching me all the time, you two!” he snaps. “Let me work it out my way! I’m trying!” When they find the hidden bottle, he quickly turns it to his advantage. “You think I wanted you out of the apartment because of that?” he snarls. “I resent that like the devil!” The brother snaps, and leaves town. The fiancée – hopelessly sunk in a bottomless pool of forgiveness – promises to return later.
Left alone, Don springs into action. When the old housekeeper passes for her wages, a demonic light comes into his eyes. “Money?” he says. “What money?” Thus equipped, he hits the streets in a state of gleeful complicity with himself. He is well known to the local tradesman – but, like tradesman the world over, they are also businessmen. “I can’t stop anyone, can I?” says the liquor-store owner. Soon Don is playfully hiding the contents of his brown paper bag under an innocent covering of fruit. The local barman’s weary resistance – “Your brothers says he ain’t paying for you no more” – also crumbles at the sight of ready cash. About to swoop on his first glass of rye, Don quickly composes himself and lights a cigarette. Then he swoops anyway.
Immediately, the poles switch. We see the other Don; voluble and eloquent, carrying everything before him. “Why don’t you lay off for a while,” says the barman, as he refills the glass. But Don is in his element now, lost in a visionary euphoria. “It pickles my kidneys, yes. But what does it do to my mind? It tosses the sandbags overboard so the balloon can soar!” His newfound lyricism pervades everything. “Out there it’s not Third Avenue any longer. It’s the Nile, and down it moves the barge of Cleopatra!” he rhapsodises, sliding into Shakespeare. A fellow regular – sassy working-girl Gloria – is mesmerised. “Glad to have you back with the organisation,” she quips pointedly.
And so begins the “Lost Weekend” of the title. Don drinks, and begs, and drinks again. With each glut of shame, the chasm of his self-loathing gapes wider. He steals from his neighbour’s purse in a restaurant, manically replacing the money with a rose. He stares at his typewriter but there is nothing to write; and is soon stumbling through the morning light in an attempt to pawn it. The production used hidden cameras to film the street scenes – not to underline not how strange the sight, was but how normal. Billy Wilder had recently seen Raymond Chandler fall off the wagon in just the same way: the film was something of an attempt to bring the issue to light. “He’s a sick person,” pleads Don’s fiancée. “He needs our help!”
Soon Don awakes in the terrifying surrounds of the local alcoholic ward, filmed on-location in Bellevue Hospital. We – and more so the contemporary audience – are hit with the realisation that Don is not just an individual case: he’s a microcosm of an endemic problem. “This is Hangover Plaza,” says a knowing male nurse. “Come later, there’s apt to be a little floor show around here.” And so the viewer is introduced to the acute mental torture of delirium tremens. The ‘DTs’ are often passed off as something of a joke (by 1989, it had even become the name of a beer). Not so the reality. “Delirium is a disease of the night,” says the nurse. “Good night…” Don later flees from what he sees taking place. Only when his own delirium sets in does the full horror of his situation become apparent. It took another nine years for an account of the same condition to appear in British cinema, in Hobson’s Choice.
Unsurprisingly, the The Lost Weekend faced intense negative pressure from the drinks industry: ranging from claims it would lead to reinstatement of prohibition to alleged mob pressure to destroy the negative. But instead it took the 1946 Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Director. It remains one of the few films to maintain a 100% critics rating on the Rotten Tomatoes review aggregator. And yet its title is far from a household name. Even as the norms of the 1940s have been left behind, Don’s self-confessed “moral anaemia” is perhaps still too real a warning for modern viewers reared on the enabling fictions of the health lobby.