“Suddenly I could see the whole thing – the tragic sweep of the great novel, beautifully proportioned. But before I could really grab it and throw it down on paper, the drink would wear off and everything be gone like a mirage.” – Don Birnam in The Lost Weekend (1944)
It’s been 70 years since the publication (by Farrar & Rinehart) of the groundbreaking novel The Lost Weekend in 1944, written by Charles R. Jackson and praised as the seminal addiction study in American literature and “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of alcoholism,” a precursor to such works as Augusten Burroughs’ Dry and David Carr’s The Night of the Gun. Paramount paid $50,000 for the rights to adapt it for the screen.
The protagonist of the celebrated film The Lost Weekend (directed by Billy Wilder), released the next year, on November 16, 1945, is Don Birnam (a superlative Ray Milland), a writer who has never achieved the success he expected and has drowned his frustrations in rye whiskey. His brother Wick (Phillip Terry) and his girlfriend Helen St. James (Jane Wyman) have done everything possible to rehabilitate him, but it has been in vain and Don has no real hope of recovering. The film focuses on a weekend when Don is making a feeble attempt at writing whilst he recalls the beginnings of his relationship with Helen.
Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett’s script conveys perfectly the feeling of irreversibility cast by clinical alcoholism, a terrifying spiral of self-destruction that leads Don to continue drinking and cheating without caring about anything else. The film’s relentless depiction of Don’s moral decline explains why it has survived particularly well through today. Although Jackson reckoned Wilder’s sharp talents as responsible for improving on his novel on several points – a more sympathetic protagonist, more witty banter – he nevertheless complained that Wilder had drastically altered his original ending, having Birnam redeemed and beginning to write an autobiographical novel of his tortured long-lost weekend instead of the far bleaker alcoholic relapse depicted in the book.
Wilder admitted to composing the screen version of Don’s story as a way of addressing Raymond Chandler’s peculiar influence, and also as an homage to F. Scott Fitzgerald.
At any respect, the movie was a huge hit and garnered four Oscars, including Best Actor for Ray Milland. Although previously he had played a mental patient in Fritz Lang’s The Ministry of Fear, Milland had been reluctant to accept this challenging role, considering the story very depressing. Brackett had commented on the novel: “It had more sense of horror than any horror story I have ever read – lingering like a theme in music.”
Jackson continued to write sporadically over the next decades, publishing his final novel A Second Hand Life in 1967, an account of another kind of addiction (sexual) voiced by a nymphomaniac heroine. Sadly, Jackson never completely escaped the grips of alcoholism and his private torments, committing suicide in 1968.
Enhanced by John F. Seitz’s low-key lighting, Wilder’s mise-en-scène uses some objects as key dramatic signs. For example, the typewriter is the most important object of Don’s (the writer), so when he decides to sell it, he’s willing to bury definitively his future as a writer, defeated by his other part (the alcoholic). Paramount convinced Wilder that the only way they could sell such a film was with a matinée idol in the lead, so the audience would not be revolted by the sordid experience. Jackson had Robert Montgomery in mind to impersonate his tortured character. After Wilder’s first choice, José Ferrer, was rejected, other famous actors – Cary Grant, Alan Ladd – refused to tackle such a risky role. Encouraged by his wife Mal, Milland committed thoroughly to fleshing out what would be the most affecting character of his film career.
For the role of Helen, Jackson liked Jean Arthur – who had played opposite Milland in Mitchell Leisen’s Easy Living – but the part (based on Jackson’s wife, Fortune‘s editor Rhoda Booth) was assigned to Jane Wyman, who offers one of her most memorable performances.
By the time the novel was reprinted in 1963, Jackson had confessed it was autobiographical and only a couple of “minor incidents were pure invention” (Jackson did not pawn his girlfriend’s expensive coat or stand up a goodtime girl as shown in the film). In this light, the parallels between Birnam and Jackson are astounding.
In 1952, Jackson had attempted suicide and was confined to Bellevue Hospital. After his release, he went on an alcohol and paraldehyde binge while suffering from continuous writer’s block. In 1953, he joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and his wife got a job at the Yale Center of Alcohol Studies. Literary critic Philip Wylie termed Jackson’s novel “the most compelling gift to the literature of addiction since De Quincey,” referring to Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822).