"The Lost Weekend" is obviously a reference to what can happen to the confirmed alcoholic when they feel compelled by their bodies to embark on the mother of all benders. As this is an addiction - or a disease, however you prefer to label it - gaps in time tend to occur quite frequently. The drunk will not remember nor care about the depths they have sunk to, but Wilder the dispassionate observer is able to capture all of the squalor on film for his audience.
Cravings and detox afford the potential for some memorable scenes which have a definite 'nightmarish' quality about them, as when he hallucinates, or desperately tries to hawk his possessions for money to buy booze. The acting is good enough to mostly elicit concern from we the viewer. Its only real flaw from my perspective was that, being one of the first to address such a stigmatized issue, at times the story seemed to be more about the illness than the character - a problem which had lessened considerably by the time we got to treatments such as "Leaving Las Vegas", for example. Still, it's worth a look if you want to see an early film that genuinely tries to be daring and different, or if you're searching for proper hard evidence that Billy Wilder was capable of producing an awful lot more than just fluffy screwball comedies.
Cravings and detox afford the potential for some memorable scenes which have a definite 'nightmarish' quality about them, as when he hallucinates, or desperately tries to hawk his possessions for money to buy booze. The acting is good enough to mostly elicit concern from we the viewer. Its only real flaw from my perspective was that, being one of the first to address such a stigmatized issue, at times the story seemed to be more about the illness than the character - a problem which had lessened considerably by the time we got to treatments such as "Leaving Las Vegas", for example. Still, it's worth a look if you want to see an early film that genuinely tries to be daring and different, or if you're searching for proper hard evidence that Billy Wilder was capable of producing an awful lot more than just fluffy screwball comedies.