The Lost Weekend (Wilder, 1945): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 3.50pm
This film is part of the Discomfort Movies season and also screens on July 21st and 29th.
Time Out review:
A scarifyingly grim and grimy account of an alcoholic writer's lost
weekend, stolen from time intended to be spent on taking a cure and
gradually turning into a descent into hell. What makes the film so
gripping is the brilliance with which Wilder uses John F Seitz's
camerawork to range from an unvarnished portrait of New York brutally
stripped of all glamour (Ray Milland's frantic trudge along Third Avenue on
Yom Kippur in search of an open pawnshop is a neo-realist morceau d'anthologie)
to an almost Wellesian evocation of the alcoholic's inner world (not
merely the justly famous DTs hallucination of a mouse attacked by bats,
but the systematic use of images dominated by huge foreground objects).
Characteristically dispassionate in his observation, Wilder elicits
sympathy for his hero only by stressing the cruelly unthinking
indifference to his sickness: the male nurse in the alcoholic ward
gleefully chanting, 'Good morning, Mary Sunshine!', or the pianist in
the bar leading onlookers in a derisive chant of 'somebody stole my
purse' (to the tune of 'Somebody Stole My Gal') after he is
humiliatingly caught trying to acquire some money. A pity that the
production code demanded a glibly unconvincing ending in which love
finds a way.
Tom Milne
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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