Better In Your Head?--THE LOST WEEKEND

 

Spoiler Alert: the best Scotch tastes like wood chips and rancid butter.

THE BOOK-Written by Charles Jackson, released 1944

THE MOVIE-Directed by Billy Wilder, written by Billy Wilder & Charles Brackett, released 1945

THE STORY-Rather than face five days in the country with his brother, Don Birnam chooses five days in the city with his bottles. 

MIND THE GAP-44 years old, four novels in the can, zero published. Maybe I oughta chuck the whole mess down ta brown town. Maybe I oughta chug the last few miles with all-new wheels. No no. Lotsa late-blowing litter on the streets of literary history. Charles Jackson, for example, didn't see The Lost Weekend hit shelves until after age forty. Quality aside, publishers didn't see dollars in the story of a bright young alcoholic wandering Manhattan. Add in a world war, and tales of the woeful individual just didn't pique interests as they might during more relatively peaceful times. Farrar & Rinehart took a chance, then a victory lap, when The Lost Weekend won praise from readers and critics.

Yes, October is the "best damned month of the year."

Lack of 'stache notwithstanding, Ray Milland is a knockout reproduction of the merrily-regressing Donny Drinkslots. His silence shakes the soul as deeply as his firewater-logged wails. Don Birnam is far from the comedic drunk popular on screens at the time. He's no lazy lush, no ready recipient of feeble pity. He is an exhilarating presence, more handsome than is healthy, talented and troubled in a way uniquely his (though it nudges every elbow it comes across). 

The poor decisions that make self-conscious screen-acting so painful to witness--the pompous utterances, the outsized gestures, the exaggerated expressions--work wondrous for Milland. His kaleidoscopic conveyance of piteousness compares favorably with any of the countless depictions of "pathetic dejected tippler" which followed. Still, he can only play what lays, and the familiar gent across the table is hitting the nuts like a junkie squirrel. Jackson's extended internal ruminations are condensed into bolts of personality screwed and loosened as story demands. Bisexuals are magic, but no one in the '40s wanted to hear such a stirring truth. Flashbacks attempt to justify the elevated presence of girlfriend Helen and sell the idea that Don is just one good gesture away from kicking the habit. Totally fine, but still furiously treacly.

Fire up the theremin 'cuuuuzzz...hey hey hey hey, Birnam's on the way!

BETTER IN YOUR HEAD-The Lost Weekend is a heady tale, tidily-told. Jackson's novel is eminently compelling; Wilder's film is compulsively watchable. Their legacies, though, are hardly equal: a raved-about work of realism overlooked by the big boy boards and committees who bestow tactile hosannas here, an all-time classic beloved by the Academy (Best Picture, Director, Actor and Adapted Screenplay) there. I'm keen on blaming literary gatekeepers who've done TLW a disservice throughout succeeding generations by not celebrating its quality and significance, allowing it to shrink inside a mound of dust. Cinephiles, by contrast, refuse to let Billy Wilder's triumph die.

Jackson himself swore the reworking improved on his novel in virtually every aspect, save for the ending, a hackneyed chunk of hopeful diamond that, in my eyes, damages the overall experience. Further, turning Don's lady into an unflappable liberator of her libation-reliant lover doesn't necessary harm the movie...but it annoys me, regardless. 

So, give me the hard-earned evocation of big-city claustrophobia. Give me inessential dream sequences. Give me the powerful simile, the precise metaphor, give me another shot, gimme just one more.