 |
| Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend (1945). |
“It’s like the doctor was just telling me—delirium is a disease of the night, so good night.” – Bellevue Nurse Bim, in The Lost Weekend.The Lost Weekend, released November 29, 1945. Paramount Pictures. Directed by Billy Wilder, Produced by Charles Brackett, Screenplay by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, based on a novel by Charles Jackson. Cinematography by John Seitz. Edited by Doane Harrison. Music by Miklos Rozsa. Duration: 101 minutes. Featuring Ray Milland and Jane Wyman, Phillip Terry, Howard Da Silva, Doris Dowling, Frank Faylen. Wilder has explained that part of what originally drew him to this material was having worked with Raymond Chandler on the screenplay for Double Indemnity, subsequent to Brackett’s brief vacation. Chandler had been a recovering alcoholic during that stint and claimed that the stress and tumult of his working relationship with Wilder (actually not that much different from Wilder’s relationship with Brackett) caused him to start drinking again to survive the collaboration. Wilder has claimed that he made the film, about a drunk with chronic writer’s black, at least partly in order to explain Chandler to himself.
One’s Company, Two’s a Crowd: that could be the business card logo of struggling novelist Don Birnam in The Lost Weekend, but also of his real life alter ego Charles Jackson, author of the novel on which Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett based their Academy Award-winning 1945 cinematic study of the struggle to outrun your own shadow. This unsettling masterpiece of internalized noir is an example of a certain brand of dark cinema at its finest, and when it was shown recently on the TCM network we got to see exactly why that is: it’s a kind of exotic corporate merger between personal and professional angst, exploring two competing compulsions, writing and drinking, and it takes no prisoners in exposing the raw nerve inhabiting and inhibiting the urge to tell stories. Ironically, it also demonstrated to Brackett and Wilder that, at least for the time being, they were stronger working in tandem than apart, despite the fact that they could barely stand being in the same room together.
If nothing else, their separate vacations away from their usual collaborative routine did result in two very important occurrences: first, the creation of a Wilder solo masterpiece in Double Indemnity (sans Brackett, who deplored the project as too sordid for words and had to let Raymond Chandler handle the dirty work in his stead), which had the corollary impact of showing them both just how much at least some of their joint magic depended on their other creative half. The lesson would also later prove instructive when they accomplished, with great difficulty, their crowning masterpiece together five years later, Sunset Boulevard. Second: the breather also firmly cemented their mutual awareness of how important great screenplays were to making great movies, as well as how crucial a great novel could be to making a great screenplays. A deep love of shimmering words and taut writing was for them the key to any film’s success. Indeed, Wilder later quipped that great writing was the only thing they ever had in common, and he shared their belief that language was essential to cinema and was now even more clearly a rebus than ever, which they embodied going forward. The smartest artists working in Hollywood all knew the crucial value of both a finely crafted screenplay and also the interactive give-and-take relationship between a great screenwriter, talented producer and gifted director. The Lost Weekend is a sterling example of all three of these colliding domains.
The importance of writing stellar screenplays, and how to survive the attempt to do so in the dream factory of Hollywood, has been a rich area for research and scholarship, with James Park’s short book Learning to Dream: New British Cinema (Faber & Faber, 1984), taking a forceful approach to appreciating these working relationships between art and commerce: “The director plays a central role in the creation of a stylistically coherent and visually interesting film, but the contributions of many people are essential. The main concern for the new directors is to find ways to become more effective by maximizing the potential of all the collaborators in a film project.” And one of the core techniques for maximizing that potential is to learn to find a way not to murder your chief writing collaborator. While still tense after their trial separation during Double Indemnity the year before, both Brackett and Wilder were willing to overlook personal slights in order to achieve their shared objective, especially with a piece of work as riveting as their caustic ode to beating both alcoholism and writing, The Lost Weekend.
Park further elaborates on this notion when his observes, “The notion of the complete auteur is a sterile one, in that it denies the specialist skills that a writer can bring to a film. The director who writes his or her own script has the advantage of being able to conceive a structure which is inherently appropriate for realization as cinema.” Writer-director Bill Forsyth touched on the same issue when he stated, “I feel more like a filmmaker when I am writing because there are no restrictions on how you imagine something happening. There is less time to be actually creative when you are filming, and in a sense the production process is a series of disappointments. The film first comes alive when you put your fingers to the typewriter. The film is being made as you write it.” This was an insight which was certainly top of mind for Brackett and Wilder as they returned to the fold together and wrote in unison, in that very old-school style, eyeball to eyeball.
 |
| Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend (1945). |
In Brackett and Wilder’s case, however, one was also the film’s producer, and there was a decided bonus to having him be as cognizant and appreciative of the language as the director, who in their case was also chiefly a writer at heart. Being the producer, however, did present other challenges for Brackett in his dealings with not just his co-writer but his director, the impetuous Billy. It’s yet another aspect of their peculiar personality dynamic factoring into the overall forward flow of their adaptation of the Charles Jackson alcoholism story: a personal component, where the parallels in their life experiences were abundantly evident in their approach to making it. The other personal ingredient left out of the film, but which was a strong part of the novel, was the fact that Jackson was gay in a repressive time, as was Charlie Brackett, a closeted gay man in Hollywood whose wife was herself an alcoholic.
Believing as I do that the best designation for film noir is that of decadent melancholia, a movie like The Lost Weekend strikes me as the perfect melodramatic narrative vehicle for both men seeking to explore its hidden storytelling depths. They did so with considerable tenderness embedded in the nocturnal rawness of the noirish architecture of the New York bars and streets trodden by Ray Milland as the hapless Birnam. This despite the fact that there was no murder in the plot, apart from Birnam’s own lamentable attempted murder of himself in slow motion via booze; no femme fatale to deceive him, but instead a tirelessly supportive girlfriend portrayed by Jane Wyman; and no detective to discern any underlying crime, apart perhaps from Milland’s primary confessor, the patient bartender portrayed to great effect by Howard Da Silva.
Axel Madsen observed that Lost Weekend’s “vision of New York remains the most unsparing ever recorded on film. Here is a nightmare of litter-strewn streets, a cluttered apartment looking onto a desolate cityscape, the elevated train clanging up Third Avenue in the dirty light of a summer morning.” Yet the critic Pauline Kael had her own usual unreserved feelings, not only about Lost Weekend, but also, almost inexplicably, about what she perceived or imagined to be images and stories indicative of the “distinctive cruel edge” which she identified as the special domain of the Brackett-Wilder writing team. Cruel or not, the film was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won four: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay. It also shared the Grand Prix at the first Cannes Film Festival, making it one of only three films—the other two being Marty (1955) and Parasite (2019)—to win both the Academy Award for Best Picture and the highest award at Cannes.
 |
| Jane Wyman and Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend (1945). |
Both the editors of the film journal The Dissolve, and Maurice Zolotow in his fine profile Billy Wilder in Hollywood (Limelight, 2004), appear to concur that there was a plethora of personal content being reflected in their adaptation of the dismal nightmare that haunts troubled writer Don Birnam, a role played so powerfully and believably by Ray Milland. Matthew Dessem of The Dissolve observed general echoes of the character in Brackett’s history: “Brackett’s family had a history of alcoholism and one aspect of the infamous New York Algonquin Room Round Table was being surrounded by drunks. His wife, daughter and gay son-in-law were also alcoholics.” And Zolotow reports that by 1944, Charles and wife Elizabeth rarely went out together because she got so plastered when they did. When the two men reunited that spring of ‘45, both Wilder and Brackett wanted to make a movie that treated alcoholism seriously, in contrast to Hollywood’s usual stock character of the comical drunk.”
Meanwhile, Zolotow’s take is equally personal and also applicable to both partners: “It is evident to me that Brackett was writing himself in the characters of Don Birnam’s brother and Jane Wyman, and that Wilder was writing Wilder in the opposing constellation of sardonic characters—Howard Da Silva’s bartender, Doris Dowling’s hooker, Frank Faylen’s homosexual Bellevue Hospital nurse.” On the other hand, Ed Zikov, author of The Life and Times of Billy Wilder, while finding some appeal in Zolotow’s interpretations, goes even further into the hyper-personal underpinnings there in the film for all to see: “The Lost Weekend’s appeal to the two screenwriters was much simpler and also more complicated. Both Brackett and Wilder were Don Birnam. They were writers after all, and while neither Brackett nor Wilder was a terminal drunk, they each bore a familiar burden of self-contempt—familiar to writers, anyway.” It also must have been equally sobering to get to write and direct this particular follow-up to Double Indemnity, co-written under hideous circumstances, for Wilder, in coping with the challenges of a zonked-out or entirely absent lush of a novelist such as Raymond Chandler.
 |
| Ray Milland and Howard Da Silva in The Lost Weekend (1945). |
For Brackett’s part, he also had the distant memory of his own friendships with expatriate Yanks in Europe, heavy self- destructive drinkers such as Fitzgerald and Hemingway, among others, whom he had profiled vividly in his early novel American Colony. More recently there was, of course, Charlie’s first wife, Elizabeth Fletcher Brackett, a reclusive perpetual drinker whom he had to institutionalize once, but to no avail. He also had another private interest in the Charles Jackson novel, and the adapted screenplay of it, in the form of that author’s distressing but powerful portrayal of a seriously closeted gay man. Don Birnam’s primary motive in his drinking was to dull the pain of his own true identity. In this context, it has been widely reported that Brackett often tried to secure acting jobs for his son-in-law James Larmore, also by many accounts his secret lover, including a little character role in Lost Weekend.
But Wilder had a serious allergy to Larmore, seeing in him, quite accurately, just another unreliable drunk himself. And making an additional point of expression on the subject, Wilder apparently stopped going to the Bracketts’ dinners on Sunday because he dreaded running into his partner’s double-duty son-in-law/lover. For his part, Brackett could never understand Wilder’s reluctance to help an acquaintance out with a small role, observing that Billy often extended such boons to his own girlfriends (among them actress Audrey Young, whom he met during the production and married in 1949, remaining with her until his death in 2002). Brackett and Wilder soldiered on, their work continuing apace and with their usual ups and downs (including screaming matches) progressing well through the summer of 1944, and also including, of course, the usual squawking from the Hays censorship office about ill-advised or unsavory subject matter, which pretty much described this dark script in its entirety.
Originally Wilder wanted José Ferrer for the role of the alcoholic writer but he declined, possibly due to the unflattering nature of the character. Wilder’s first choice for the female lead, Olivia de Havilland, also declined due to contractual agreements that prevented her taking on new work, and thus entered whispery Jane Wyman. Her character, anxiously trying to help Birnam understand his perceived battle between two separate Dons, is generous enough to declare, “The Don who drinks is the same person as the Don who writes. I’d rather have a drunk Don than a dead Don.” She was almost an angel in the midst of an angst-drenched noir nightmare, all of it concocted in the twitchy mind of her poor literary boyfriend. Most of the film was shot at the Paramount Studios in Hollywood, but Wilder also insisted that a sense of realism could only be achieved by location shooting in New York, including the notorious alcoholic ward of Bellevue Mental Hospital. Once the film was finished and shown to preview audiences, Wilder was appalled to discover that some viewers were laughing (at first) at the intense and overwrought emotional pitch of Milland’s performance. They were apparently not quite prepared for the deep degree of existential dread associated with a condition more commonly portrayed in Tinseltown for laughs.
Paramount even considered canning the film entirely, after a concerted public relations campaign and open letter from the liquor industry objecting to its tone and attempting to undermine its release by claiming, outrageously, that the picture would inspire anti-drinking groups to reinstate Prohibition. Legend has it that the liquor industry even sought the help of notorious gangster Frank Costello to offer Paramount five million dollars to sell the negative so it could be destroyed. The film was placed temporarily on the shelf by unimaginative executives who were always afraid of too much reality in their pictures’, and they took far too literally the audience preview reactions (to a first cut minus the music score) which amounted to “It was a good film, except for all the parts about alcoholism.” Once the chilling Miklos Rosza music score was applied, however, something in the story seemed to suddenly click into place and rendered it a work of dark cinematic art.
 |
| The Lost Weekend (1945). |
One of my favourite lines from this internalized noir saga is directed by Birnam to Nat, his bartender of choice, who moves to wipe away the circles of whisky left from Birnam's glass on the counter: “Don't wipe it away, Nat. Let me have my little vicious circles. You know, the circle is the perfect geometric figure. It has no end, and no beginning.” Kind of like the novel the troubled writer is desperately trying to write, tellingly titled The Bottle. Andrew Johnson has written cogently about the struggle which the film depicts so starkly: “Towards the middle of the film, his girlfriend and brother are questioning him as to why he drinks so much, why he relies on it. And here's the point I'm getting at: Birnam says, ‘Somebody began to look over my shoulder and whisper . . . 'he's not good enough!' To me, that's the foundation of the entire film.”
Indeed, while the harrowing scenes of alcoholism are predominant in the movie, it all basically boils down to the often illusory fear that he's just not good enough to accomplish what he, the erstwhile writer, had the nerve to think he could undertake. That, plus, of course, the pressures of concealing his true identity as a gay man in a repressive era. This strikingly honest and haunting film was placed on the National Film Registry’s Library of Congress list for its importance cultural significance, which noted, “Director Billy Wilder’s unflinchingly honest look at the effects of alcoholism may have had some of its impact blunted by time, but it remains a powerful and remarkably prescient film.” This was indeed a brilliant darkness, but with a bright light at its heart: the brightness of Wilder, Brackett and Milland, each of whom richly deserved the Oscars that were bestowed on them for their illuminating efforts.
No comments:
Post a Comment