75 Years Ago: The Lost Weekend
Today in 1945, Billy Wilder released his prescient portrait of substance abuse
Yesterday I watched two movies about addiction released 75 years apart.
The first was Belushi, a new documentary about the late comedian. It’s a good biography, stuffed with funny people being vulnerable, including Harold Ramis, Penny Marshall, Chevy Chase, and Candice Bergen. But the scene-stealer is another addict — Carrie Fisher. Fisher, who was briefly engaged to Dan Aykroyd, while he and Belushi were making The Blues Brothers, delivers the line that could substitute as the tagline:
Drugs are not the problem. Sobriety is the problem.
What she means is, for addicts, the gaps between drinks are interminable, because that is when you trapped alone with yourself. Don Birnam, the boozehound protagonist of The Lost Weekend, the second movie in my addiction double feature, says it this way:
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation. I can’t take quiet desperation!
Directed by Billy Wilder, The Lost Weekend, which debuted 75 years ago today, was pioneering in at least two profound ways….
First, it adopted the style of film noir (expressionistic, moody, hardboiled) but removed all the content traditionally associated with film noir (murder, femme fatales, detectives). Much like the Western would become detached from the West, Wilder foresaw how the moody style of film noir could be applied to new subject matter, beyond crime and dames. Despite being black and white, the film feels decades ahead of its time. Scenes of the protagonist enduring delirium tremens in rehab resemble what Hitchcock later did in The Birds. And the hallucinatory soundtrack uses a theremin, an instrument that would soon become associated with science fiction.
The second innovation was simply to make addiction a topic at all. Drunks had been common characters in movies and books, but addicts were new — and there is a difference. It was said that Wilder wanted to make The Lost Weekend to find an explanation for Raymond Chandler, after enduring his hopeless self-destruction during the making of Double Indemnity the year prior.
The film spooked the liquor industry. Contending it would lead to a reinstatement of prohibition, the liquor lobby hired a gangster to offer Paramount $5 million to not release the movie. Believe it or not, people continued drinking.
MORE ANNIVERSARIES
10 Years Ago Today: Adele released the single “Rolling in the Deep.”
25 Years Ago Today: Ted Turner launched CNNfn, a 24-hour financial news cable network. It folded in 2004.