The Lost Weekend
by Billy Wilder
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DVD details
Actor: Doris Dowling, Howard Da Silva, Jane Wyman, Phillip Terry, Ray MillandDirector: Billy Wilder
Brand: MILLAND,RAY
Cinematographer: John F. Seitz
Writer: Billy Wilder
Producer: Charles Brackett
Writer: Charles Brackett
Writer: Charles R. Jackson
DVD: 2 Layers, Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled)
Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC
Picture Format: Pan & Scan, 1.33:1
Running Time: 101 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2001-02-06
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Universal Studios
DVD Reviews of The Lost Weekend
DVD Review: The Lost Weekend
Summary: 5 Stars
I remember this movie from long ago...it still has a strong impact. I'm using it with my substance abuse clients.
Product was in great condition.
DVD Review: Should be required viewing...
Summary: 5 Stars
Before I begin my review, the readers should know that The Lost Weekend is my number 1 all-time favorite film. So if this review sounds biased, it is---positively so.
To re-hash the plot would be redundant as so many reviewers have already done so. I will concentrate my review on the protagonist: writer Don Birnam. The movie opens (and closes) with an aerial shot of a NYC apartment window and a bottle suspended outside. Don and his brother Wick are packing for a long weekend in the country and Don is trying to figure out how he is going to smuggle his bottle along. Priceless is the disdain with which Don responds to Wick touting the countryside, with its fresh air and clean, crisp well water! The very thought of having to drink water sets Don off into a nasty and biting rejoinder. Needless to say, Don doesn't go and the result, told partially in flashbacks, is one man's descent into the deepest, horrific depths of alcoholic hell.
Every time I think about this film I get that crazy background sound in my ear---that eerie, high-pitched howling that Don Birnam (aka Ray Milland in his Best Actor, Oscar-winning performance) must have piercing his alcohol-saturated brain after downing two quarts plus of cheap rye. He becomes Don Birnam. Absolutely believable! Surrounded by a fine supporting cast and expertly directed by Billy Wilder, his is a performance for the ages. I can't say enough about it. Never would Ray Milland achieve such notoriety again. Sad. He was an amazing actor and it just goes to prove that talent, combined with brilliant directing is a sure-fire combination for success. Every aspiring actor should watch this film.
I have on more than one occasion contacted the people at the Criterion Collection requesting that they restore this classic. It deserves their treatment. I give it my highest recommendation.
DVD Review: great movie - poor DVD
Summary: 3 Stars
This is a good movie, in the hands of a fine director and cast. Unfortunately it is a cognac in a cheap rye DVD transfer.DVD Review: Hollywood Horror Story About The World's Most Available Drug.
Summary: 5 Stars
Terrifying Best Picture winner of 1945 is this classic movie that may feature Ray Milland's all time greatest performance.
Milland stars as a chronic alcoholic who is controlled and tormented by the spectre of the brew. He originally is supposed to take a weekend with his brother until his addiction catches up to him and he fails to meer up with his brother, ending up stranded in his apartment with no one but his desire for alcohol.
His weekend becomes a nightmare as he recounts his past and what led him to this point and the extremes that he'll go to further his addiction. At one point he ends up in an asylum and escapes, only to steal from a liquor store and lose his mind when he holds up in his apartment, suffering from creepy hallucinations.
His devoted girlfriend, beautiful Jane Wyman, is the only thing that holds him together and ultimately gets him through his personal hell.
A truly first rate film that melded the scenery and feel of the rising art of Film Noir with a true human drama, this was a landmark in mature cinema. While far from a "good time" film, this is a brave little picture that attacks a deep and troubling issue and presents it with sensitvity and intelligence and emerges as one of the absolutely best films of the 1940s.
Any true film buff owes him/herself a glance at this film classic.
DVD Review: Lost Weekend DVD
Summary: 5 Stars
I was extremely satisfied with my purchase and the ordering process from Amazon. The price was commensurate with the product, it was easy to buy on-line and the product arrived quickly and in perfect condition.
Description of The Lost Weekend
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."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
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