Tagline: The screen dares to open the strange and savage pages of a shocking bestseller!
The Lost Weekend movie storyline. Based on Charles Jackson’s 1944 novel by co-screenwriters Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder and filmed in NYC. A classic, melodramatic, realistically-grim and uncompromising “social-problem” film of the 1940s, about the controversial subject of alcoholism, told partially in flashback. Rather than join his brother Wick (Terry) on a weekend outing to the country, talented New York aspiring novel writer Don Birnam (Milland) – a chronic alcoholic with writer’s block – spends a ‘lost weekend’ on a wild, self-destructive drinking binge.
Eluding his persistently supportive girlfriend Helen St. James (Wyman), he desperately trudges down Third Avenue on Yom Kippur attempting to find an open pawnshop to hock his own typewriter for another drink. In Bellevue Hospital’s alcohol detoxification ward, he awakens to shrieking inmates suffering the DT’s, and in his apartment experiences hallucinations of a mouse attacked by a bat. He narrowly avoids committing suicide in the ‘optimistic’ ending.
The Lost Weekend is a 1945 American drama directed by Billy Wilder and starring Ray Milland and Jane Wyman. The film was based on Charles R. Jackson’s 1944 novel of the same name about an alcoholic writer. The film was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won four: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay).
It also shared the Grand Prix at the first Cannes Film Festival, making it one of only two films to win both the Academy Award for Best Picture and the highest award at Cannes. In 2011, The Lost Weekend was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
The Lost Weekend (1945)
Directed by: Billy Wilder
Starring: Ray Milland, Jane Wyman, Phillip Terry , Howard Da Silva, Doris Dowling, Frank Faylen, Mary Young, Anita Sharp-Bolster, Lilian Fontaine, Lewis L. Russell, Frank Orth, Andy Andrews
Screenplay by: Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder
Cinematography by: John F. Seitz
Film Editing by: Doane Harrison
Costume Design by: Edith Head
Set Decoration by: Bertram C. Granger
Art Direction by: Hans Dreier. A. Earl Hedrick
Music by: Miklós Rózsa
Distributed by: Paramount Pictures
Release Date: November 29, 1945
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