There is a saying in Hollywood that a director is only as good as his last picture. Although Double Indemnity would not be released until the fall, the buzz about the picture in the film colony was enthusiastic, a point in Wilder’s favor. Furthermore, De Sylva was in Wilder’s corner. Consequently, the board of executives at the meeting finally green-lighted the project. Their decision was ratified by Barney Balaban, president of Paramount, whose office was at the studio’s headquarters in New York City. Balaban, who had run a lucrative chain of theaters in the greater Chicago area before taking over at Paramount, was a canny judge of potential film projects.
The Lost Weekend (1945)
After the conference, Wilder commented to a journalist that The Lost Weekend was not going to be the ordinary Hollywood fare. “Hollywood is in a rut,” he said. Speaking of the run-of-the-mill movies the studios churned out, he noted that Hollywood was a slave to formula. “They don’t make pictures, they remake them.” The Lost Weekend, he continued, would be the first mainstream film to take alcoholism seriously.5
Prior to this movie, drinking was primarily employed on the screen as comic relief. “In those days an alcoholic was something you roared with laughter about,” Wilder explained.6 The drunkard would be a comedian like W. C. Fields, who would get plastered in a bar, then bump into the furniture and put on his hat backward as he left. But Don Birnam, the writer in The Lost Weekend whose addiction to liquor leads him into the wretched world of the alcoholic, is not a comic drunk, Wilder said: He does not stagger; he is a dignified man. In fact, there is nothing at all funny about Don Birnam.
Asked if he modeled Don in the screenplay for The Lost Weekend on Raymond Chandler, the alcoholic writer he collaborated with on Double Indemnity, Wilder replied, “Not consciously; I may have had him in mind subconsciously. But many screenwriters back then were heavy drinkers.” As a matter of fact, Wilder said that he had another American writer with a serious drinking problem in mind when he wrote the script: F. Scott Fitzgerald.
For Brackett, The Lost Weekend had some painful parallels in his own family. His wife Elizabeth had suffered from alcohol dependency for more than a decade and had not profited from hospitalization. In addition, one of Brackett’s daughters, Alexandra, was a heavy drinker; she would eventually be killed by falling down a flight of stairs while in an alcoholic stupor.7 In the script of The Lost Weekend, Don tumbles down a staircase, but his fall is not fatal.
When Charles Jackson published the novel in 1944, he was often asked, “How much of Don Birnam is you?” Jackson would reluctantly concede that there was some resonance of his own drinking problem in the book. By the time the novel was reprinted in 1963, however, Jackson was prepared to admit that it was decidedly autobiographical. In point of fact, only a couple of “minor incidents were pure invention.”8 For example, Jackson did not pawn his girlfriend’s expensive coat.
Literary critic Philip Wylie has termed the novel “the most compelling gift to the literature of addiction since De Quincey,” referring to Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822). Some commentators on Jackson’s book have described it as more of a case history than a novel. On the contrary, Don’s addiction is dramatized with the novelist’s skill, rather than merely analyzed as a clinical study. Said Brackett, the novel has “more of a sense of horror than any horror story I ever read.”9
Wilder researched the subject of alcoholism before beginning to fashion the screenplay. He not only consulted with Jackson but visited Alcoholics Anonymous, where he talked with alcoholics and physicians. “When I researched it,” said Wilder, “I realized that the novel was no exaggeration, but an accurate picture of an alcoholic.”10 Wilder and Brackett proceeded to turn out a screenplay that was an unflinching portrayal of dipsomania. For good measure they engaged Dr. George Thompson, an expert in alcoholic studies, as a medical adviser on the script.
The writing team decided to stick primarily to depicting Don’s wild weekend, keeping flashbacks to Don’s past life to a minimum (there are only two flashbacks in the film). Some of the deletions Wilder and Brackett made in the novel’s plot were at the behest of Joseph Breen. For example, Jackson’s intimations that Don drinks to excess because he cannot acknowledge his repressed homosexuality could not be brought up in the movie. The industry’s censorship code decreed that explicit references to “sex perversion” were prohibited. Consequently, “any filmic adaptation of plays or novels that had homosexual content . . . had to be revised to eliminate the offending subject matter.”11 In the book Don is nagged by memories of his “passionate hero-worship of an upperclassman during the very first month at college, a worship that led, like a fatal infatuation, to scandal and public disgrace.”12 Don was expelled from his fraternity for writing a love letter to the student he idolized. But this episode is not mentioned in the screenplay. “Look,” said Wilder, “I think I had enough problems already, making an alcoholic a sympathetic character,” which was hardly standard movie fare at the time. “If, on top of that, he also was a homosexual . . .”13 Therefore, in the script, Don Birnam, a once promising novelist, turns to drink to assuage the frustration and depression he experiences as a result of his failure to produce a salable piece of fiction.
Actually, Breen was less concerned about the portrayal of Don than he was about the depiction of Gloria, a woman who hangs around the bar that Don frequents. “The characterization of Gloria as a prostitute is definitely unacceptable,” Breen pronounced; he suggested that Wilder make her a “hostess” at the bar.14 Wilder was sure that, although Gloria seeks to ingratiate herself with Don and other male customers, nowhere in the script was she designated as a whore. He therefore judiciously ignored Breen’s complaint about Gloria, and Breen let the matter drop.
The Lost Weekend was to some degree influenced by the years that Wilder spent in Berlin during the heyday of the expressionist movement, which made a significant impact on German cinema. The bizarre dream sequence that Wilder wrote into his script for the 1931 German film Emil und die Detektive smacked of expressionism. In The Lost Weekend, when Don’s liquor supply runs out, he spies the shadow of a whiskey bottle, which he has earlier stashed in the chandelier, and the magnified shadow of the bottle falls across his face, signaling how alcohol has cast a shadow across his whole life.
The Lost Weekend is another superlative example of film noir. Wilder, in consultation with cinematographer John Seitz, planned to employ expressionistic lighting, which readily lends itself to the ambience of film noir. “The nighttime hours predominate in film noir,” Foster Hirsch explains, as we have seen in another noir classic, Double Indemnity. So in the present film Wilder conjures up, with the help of Seitz’s low-key lighting, the grim, isolated atmosphere in which the alcoholic exists: dimly lit, claustrophobic sets with elongated shadows looming on the walls and archways. As Joan Didion notes, the Wilder world “is one seen at dawn through a hangover, a world . . . of stale smoke, and drinks in which the ice has melted; a true country of despair.”15 In sum, “the character’s breakdown is presented in a vivid noir style,” typified by Seitz’s expressionistic lighting.16
Because Jackson’s novel was so tightly constructed, Wilder and Brackett found that adapting it for film was relatively simple. In fact, Brackett stated, “The Lost Weekend was the easiest script we wrote, thanks to the superb novel.”17 They finished the rough draft in July 1944, having spent only two months, rather than the usual four months, on the preliminary draft. They had plenty of time to rework the script, since shooting was scheduled to commence in late September.
While revising the screenplay, Wilder got involved with casting. He wanted José Ferrer for the male lead—a curious choice. Admittedly, Ferrer had made his mark in Othello as Iago on Broadway in 1942, opposite Paul Robeson as Othello. But Ferrer had not yet appeared in a film, so he was an unknown quantity to the mass audience. Hence De Sylva nixed Wilder’s choice of Ferrer. “Take a leading man,” De Sylva advised Wilder, “because then the audience wil
l feel with him, even when he slides into degradation. They will wish that he would reform.”18 So Wilder selected Ray Milland, a Paramount contract player who specialized in light comedies like The Major and the Minor. Still, Milland had earned his spurs as a serious actor by playing a former mental patient in Fritz Lang’s The Ministry of Fear, which he had made earlier that year.
De Sylva gave Milland a copy of the novel with a note attached: “Read it. Study it. You’re going to play it.” Before he finished the book, Milland had misgivings about playing an alcoholic on a bender. He was put off by the “depressing story,” he writes in his autobiography. More important, he saw that “the part was going to call for some pretty serious acting,” and he was not sure that he was equipped to do it. Furthermore, Frank Freeman assured Milland that playing a disheveled drunkard on a spree would be career suicide. But Milland’s wife, Mal, convinced him to give it a try.19 Andrew Sarris points out that both Double Indemnity and The Lost Weekend involved “a casting coup,” in which Fred MacMurray and Ray Milland were persuaded by Wilder “to switch type from glossy leading man to gritty semi-villain.”20
Wilder also opted to give Jane Wyman a chance with a meaty dramatic role, that of Helen St. James, Don Birnam’s long-suffering girlfriend. Wyman usually played secondary roles in comedies like Brother Rat (1939) at Warner Bros., so she too would be cast against type. Jack Warner was pleased to loan Wyman to Paramount for “that drunk film,” since she was not in demand at her home studio.21 The Lost Weekend proved to be a turning point in Wyman’s career, for it established her as a serious actress. For the part of Helen’s mother, Wilder selected Lillian Fontaine, the mother of Joan Fontaine, who would also be in his next movie, The Emperor Waltz.
Wilder targeted Howard Da Silva for the role of Nat, the understanding barkeep, in The Lost Weekend. Da Silva was a character actor with a long list of credits, including Sergeant York (1941). Wilder’s choice for the role of Gloria, the bar girl at Nat’s tavern, raised some eyebrows in Hollywood. He chose his mistress, Doris Dowling, a twenty-three-year-old starlet who had been marking time at Paramount. As Dowling tells it, one day when she and Wilder were lunching with Charles Jackson at Lucy’s, Jackson hazarded that “it was too bad that I wasn’t a more common type, so I could play Gloria.” Wilder never looked up from his plate; he just replied, “She is.”22
By September Wilder had assembled both his cast and crew. In addition to John Seitz, film editor Doane Harrison and composer Miklos Rozsa were back on board. Wilder insisted to the studio that he would have to do some location work in New York to give the picture documentary-like realism. Production designer Earl Hedrick, a newcomer to Wilder’s production team, scouted locations around New York that would be suitable for the picture. Shortly before filming began, Milland went on a crash diet of toast and boiled eggs to assume the look of a haggard alcoholic who habitually forgets to eat.
Wilder and Brackett arrived in New York on September 24, 1944, with a film unit of twenty cast and crew members. Principal photography started on October 1. Wilder shot about a third of the film on location in New York, just as he had filmed Double Indemnity in part around Los Angeles, to get away from the studio back lot. In The Lost Weekend, “we used P. J. Clarke’s bar at the corner of Third Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street,” Wilder said, “because that is where Charles Jackson did his drinking; and that is where his friendly bartender, called Nat in the movie, worked.”
Wilder got some exterior shots of the apartment house between Second and Third avenues on East Fifty-fifth Street where Charles Jackson lived during his drinking days. Axel Madsen writes that this motion picture’s “vision of New York remains among the most unsparing ever recorded on film. Here is a nightmare of litter-strewn streets, a cluttered apartment looking onto a desolate cityscape, the elevated train clanging up Third Avenue in the dirty light of a summer morning.”23
Pauline Kael notes that some scenes in the movie are indicative of the “distinctive cruel edge” that was the Wilder-Brackett writing team’s specialty. In this regard she points to Don’s “long, plodding walk along Third Avenue in an attempt to hawk his typewriter, when the pawnshops are closed on Yom Kippur.”24 Wilder explained that he shot this scene in New York “because there was simply no other way to reproduce Don’s thirty-block trek up Third Avenue.” The sequence was shot in a single day, on a Sunday, when all the pawnshops would be closed. Milland trudged up Third Avenue from Fifty-fifth Street to 110th Street, lugging a typewriter. John Seitz recalled that he captured this particular scene as unobtrusively as possible, by means of a hidden camera, “so that people on the street would not know we were there. All these pedestrians walking leisurely by” added to the documentary feel.25 The camera was hidden along the route in the backs of delivery trucks, behind huge packing crates on the sidewalk, and in the windows of empty stores.
Wilder enhanced the film’s realistic atmosphere by photographing a sequence in Bellevue Hospital in which Don is forced to spend the night in the hospital’s alcoholic ward. To prepare for this scene, Milland had Wilder arrange with the hospital authorities for him to check himself into the alcoholic ward a few days before. “I was given hospital pajamas and a threadbare terrycloth robe, and assigned to a narrow iron bed,” writes Milland. “The place was a multitude of smells, but the dominant one was that of a cesspool. And there were the sounds of moaning; two of the inmates had to be restrained, strapped to their beds.” During the night Milland was awakened by a new arrival, a hysterical man whom the guards were attempting to subdue. “Suddenly the room was bedlam,” Milland remembers; “I knew I was looking into the deepest pit.”26
Milland bolted from the ward when no one was looking and attempted to hail a cab on Thirty-fourth Street. But a policeman, who recognized the Bellevue bathrobe Milland was wearing, grabbed him and hustled him back inside. He was able to convince the attendant on night duty to allow him to notify Wilder of his predicament. Wilder soon showed up, brandishing documentation that proved that Milland was no derelict but a movie star making a film. Milland was duly released, and Wilder utilized the very same ward to shoot the Bellevue scenes a few days later.
The officials at Bellevue subsequently regretted allowing Wilder to film on the premises, claiming that he had made Bellevue look more like a jail than a hospital. Director George Seaton said that, when he later asked Bellevue’s managing director for permission to shoot some scenes there for The Miracle on 34th Street (1947), “the hospital manager practically threw me out. He was still mad at himself for having given Wilder permission to shoot at the hospital.”27 Ed Sikov writes that the hospital manager complained that Wilder had given him a bogus copy of the script: “He showed me one script, which I approved, but then he filmed a different script!”28
Wilder finished filming on New York locations by October 19, 1944, and filming resumed at the studio in Hollywood on October 23. Production designer Earl Hedrick built an exact replica of P. J. Clarke’s bar on a soundstage at Paramount to serve as Nat’s bar in the film.
Wilder sometimes described the shooting period as a battle, which made some journalists wonder how agreeable he was when working with actors. He would reply that he always tried to be flexible and listen patiently to actors’ suggestions—except when they wanted him to alter lines in the script. Wilder explained that the dialogue that the director takes out to satisfy an actor may be “very important,” while what he substitutes on the spur of the moment may be “plain stupid.”29
Principal photography wrapped on December 30, 1944. By April 1945, Harrison had finished his preliminary edit of the film with Wilder’s collaboration. The studio arranged a test screening at a Santa Barbara theater. Wilder stood in the back of the house before the screening began; when the house lights dimmed, a hush of expectation fell over the audience.
The picture plunges into the world of the alcoholic with the very first shot. The camera pans across the New York skyline and pauses outside the window of Don’s East Side apartment, where a l
iquor bottle dangles from a rope attached to the windowsill. The camera then glides through the window and focuses on Don as he moves about his bedroom. Don casts a furtive glance in the direction of the bottle from time to time, hoping that it will not be noticed by his fiancée, Helen, when she visits his apartment shortly. Don plans to spend the evening having a drink or two but not drinking to excess. This is surely not a realistic expectation. As his long- suffering brother, Wick (Phillip Terry), tells him later in the film, for an alcoholic like Don to assume that he can drink moderately is the same as believing that “he can step off a roof and expect to fall only one floor.”
Later on in the evening, Don stops in at Nat’s bar for a few drinks. Gloria makes a pass at Don, whom she fancies. “You do like me a little, don’t you, honey?” she is fond of saying to him. She has genuine feelings for him, but he usually ignores her to chat with Nat. He explains to Nat that, when he is sober, he is troubled by the nagging fear that he will never succeed as a writer, and drinking makes him feel supremely self-confident. In due course Don relates to Nat how he met Helen, his faithful fiancée. With that, Wilder launches into a flashback, showing Don at a performance of Verdi’s La traviata at the Metropolitan Opera House.
The chorus raise their glasses for a toast and burst into a drinking song, “Libiamo, ne’ lieti calici” (Let’s drink from the joyful glasses). The shot of the chorus dissolves to a shot of a row of coats on a rack in the cloakroom. Then the camera focuses on Don’s trench coat; by means of a double exposure, Don’s coat becomes transparent, making the whiskey bottle in one of the pockets visible. Don craves a swig of whiskey, so he walks out on the opera to retrieve the bottle from his coat. Wilder’s portrayal of Don’s fantasy demonstrates the influence of German expressionism on the director. In fact, this scene, with its emphasis on visual imagery, could have been transplanted complete from the German silent cinema.
Some Like It Wilder Page 11