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Rating: Billy Wilder is one of the many artists who left Europe in the early thirties to escape from Hitler, and like those who had already emigrated in the twenties (just think of Lubitsch and Sjostrom), he would exert a profound influence on American cinema. Their culture and the dramatic experiences they lived through led them to see life in a less simple and optimistic way than directors like Vidor or Ford himself, who were American to the core. A complex and refined sensitivity, lively yet at the same time pessimistic and devilishly sharp.
"The Lost Weekend" is one of his dramatic films shot in 1945 based on a successful novel he had read on a train. Together with his trusted collaborator of the time, screenwriter Charles Brackett, he secured the rights and made a variation that opened the doors of Paramount, which was not exactly enthusiastic about the sad subject. It is the story of an alcoholic but, while in Charles Jackson's novel the protagonist drinks to reject his homosexuality, Wilder's Don Birnam is a writer who, like many failures in Hollywood, seeks solace in the bottle from the crushing of artistic aspirations. This variation is somewhat the film's limit, almost as if Wilder were more interested in the missed writer than in the alcoholic.
But from a visual standpoint, the film remains impressive precisely because of Wilder’s European background, which leads him to provide a proof of total realism, especially in the outdoor scenes. The writer Don Birnam, having lost his stock of liquor confiscated by his girlfriend and brother, who also ensure that the bars he frequents do not extend him credit any longer, wanders stumbling along Third Avenue looking for a pawn shop to barter his precious typewriter, and Wilder's usual sarcasm has him find all of them closed for the Kippur festival! The same hallucination scene, when he locks himself in at home with a bottle stolen from a store, directly descends from the expressionist influences of German cinema. From the white wall, between heavily contrasted shadows, Birnam believes he sees a rat coming out of a crack and being horrifically killed by a bat. Many have seen in this scene another proof of Wilder's sarcasm. In the years when television was about to take its first steps, Birnam sits in the armchair and watches on his white wall at home the end of cinema (the rat) devoured by television (the bat).
The film's preview was a disaster, entirely due to Paramount's replacement of Miklòs Ròsza's dramatic musical score with an absolutely unsuitable stock score that clashed with the film's scenes. When Wilder's pressures led to a second preview with the right score, "The Lost Weekend" was a success, winning four Oscars for best film, best director, best screenplay, and best actor: Ray Milland.
Billy Wilder would continue his partnership with screenwriter Charles Brackett for other dramas until "Sunset Boulevard," then in collaboration with I.A.L. Diamond, he would delight us with the second phase of his magnificent career made up of comedies as brilliant as they were bitterly caustic towards American bourgeois morality.
Norma Desmond in "Sunset Boulevard," referring to the silent film just projected, at some point says: "Still wonderful, isn’t it?" Well, after so many years, we can without any doubt say the same about Billy Wilder.
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