Product Description

Billy Wilder creates a searing portrait of an alcoholic. Don Birnam is a writer whose lust for booze consumes his career, his life, and his loved ones.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5683 in DVD
• Brand: Universal
• Released on: 2001-02-06
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Black & White, Closed-captioned, DVD-Video, Full Screen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: Spanish, French
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 101 minutes

Amazon.com essential video
"I'm not a drinker--I'm a drunk." These words, and the serious message behind them, were still potent enough in 1945 to shock audiences flocking to The Lost Weekend. The speaker is Don Birnam (Ray Milland), a handsome, talented, articulate alcoholic. The writing team of producer Charles Brackett and director Billy Wilder pull no punches in their depiction of Birnam's massive weekend bender, a tailspin that finds him reeling from his favorite watering hole to Bellevue Hospital. Location shooting in New York helps the street-level atmosphere, especially a sequence in which Birnam, a budding writer, tries to hock his typewriter for booze money. He desperately staggers past shuttered storefronts--it's Yom Kippur, and the pawnshops are closed. Milland, previously known as a lightweight leading man (he'd starred in Wilder's hilarious The Major and the Minor three years earlier), burrows convincingly under the skin of the character, whether waxing poetic about the escape of drinking or screaming his lungs out in the D.T.'s sequence. Wilder, having just made the ultra-noir Double Indemnity, brought a new kind of frankness and darkness to Hollywood's treatment of a social problem. At first the film may have seemed too bold; Paramount Pictures nearly killed the release of the picture after it tested poorly with preview audiences. But once in release, The Lost Weekend became a substantial hit, and won four Oscars: for picture, director, screenplay, and actor. --Robert Horton

Customer Reviews

"ODAP Highly Recommends This Movie"
Yes, ODAP recommends this. Who is ODAP? ODAP is the name of that little monkey on my back. Odap IS--Our Devilish Alcoholic Personalities. There are many kinds of alcoholics and in this movie Ray Milland plays the binge drinker, on a bender. He does this with great skill. As an alcoholic myself, and one who has seen alcoholic friends in this exact mental thunderstorm, it is difficult to see how anyone could "act this" unless his blood/alcohol content was almost at a lethal level. A great job on the acting and a great job on the message. Alcoholism is a fatal disease unless arrested. We feel for this man and his predicament. We feel for the people he injures emotionally and otherwise. And we are GLAD. Glad that people who have never witnessed the complete horrors of alcoholism can get an education, to understand the physiology of the DTs, and to hope they have a plan of action if ever stricken with alcoholism or if residing withing the concentric circles surrounding an alcoholic. "Lost Weekend" gives a window through which to glimpse the hell.

The Lost Weekend
The is an amazing movie in that it takes a subject that is problematic for our nation, and somehow synthesizes its complexities it into a powerful, moving film that shows how the belief of one person can be the catalyst of hope for one whose life is drowning in substance abuse.

still the classic
Why was this movie not made mandatory viewing in every school in the 50s Well, we all know the reason. But it would have saved a lot of lives. Still the most vivid and moving protrait of alcoholism around. Not for the squeamish, but its a lot better to watch this than to watch someone bleed out from cirrhosis..Should be shown with every beer commercial on TV....show the bikini clad maidens after 10 years of alcoholic drinking..