See, four Oscars – I forgot to mention Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett won best screenplay as well.
It’s been a harbinger of things to come for a long time… Billy Wilder wins Best Director for “The Lost Weekend” at the Golden Globes.
OSCARS – THE LOST WEEKEND
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Great movie, especially daring for 1945 when drunks were largely portrayed as witty sophisticates a la marvellous William Powell’s Nick Charles, or else as comedic figures (still a staple in 1980, witness the very funny Arthur with Dudley Moore and a priceless Gielgud, but then Arthur is really a thirties comedy with a few sh*ts thrown in). Wilder generally didn’t throw the camera around but many of his movies look great particularly in black and white. Film Noir may not be a genre more a mood, a mode, a movement unaware that it was a movement but Wilder was a master of it. I think the photography here is particularly evocative while the delirium tremens scene is one of those occasions on which Mr W really lets himself go – all in service of the story and the mood.
Ray Milland (a welshman like James Mason), then a romantic lead was an interesting choice and gives possibly his best performance (tho’ he’s good as the suave creep in Dial M for Murder – and in X The Man With The X-Ray Eyes!), and, hey, he has great support from Jane Wyman – then still married to Reagan, I think and years from turning splendid Queen Bitch in Falcon Crest – and Howard Da Silva (before the poor fellow was a blacklist victim). Acidic Mr Wilder was a so very versatile, and this one of his most humane films. Fantastic choice. Days Of Wine and Roses with Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick is, I think, another good and good-looking monochrome picture on the subject. On the other hand I loathe Kiss Me, Stupid which mistreats the female characters played by Felicia Farr and (a very good) Kim Novak while Dean Martin is pretty horrible as a drink-lovin’ parody of himself yet Ray Walston and Cliff Osmond are worse as monsters. Ick. Perhaps my least favourite Wilder except for Novak’s Polly (Vertigo aside, her best work, she’s very sympathetic). Er, sorry to blither on. I’m boring myself!