Rent The Lost Weekend (1945)

Message in a Bottle - The Lost Weekend review by Count Otto Black

Considering it was made in 1945, this is an astonishingly frank portrayal of what it's like to be a hopeless alcoholic, and Ray Milland gives the performance of his life as the utterly wretched central character, right from the opening scene where, with twitchy desperation, he tries to convince his wearily skeptical brother that he really is staying on the wagon this time, a promise the audience knows he isn't even going to try to keep because the very first shot of the movie has shown us his cunningly concealed bottle.

The trouble is, it's very hard indeed to feel any sympathy for the person in whose company we spend almost every minute of the film. He's the reason why it's a terrible idea to go into a bar on your own; somebody like this will inevitably sit next to you and subject you to his "I coulda been a contender" monologue that all the regulars have heard a thousand times, and it will soon become obvious that he never coulda been anything except a pub bore. Our hero's personal tragedy is that his teenage ambition to be a Great Writer didn't work out, self-pity drove him to drink, and now he's got two things to feel sorry for himself about. He's 33 years old, he's been living on his brother's charity since dropping out of university, and he spends his days telling bored bartenders what a Great Writer he'd be if only he could remember all the purple prose booze inspires him to spout when he's sober enough to type.

He's a noisy, tedious drunk who does mean-spirited things and doesn't really seem to care about anyone except himself, and I didn't care whether he sobered up and wrote a Great Novel or staggered in front of a bus and died. I also found it completely implausible that a girl like the one played by Jane Wyman would have stuck with this whining wretch through three years of broken promises (oddly, there's another character in the film who seems far more likely to have put up with such behavior, but is wasted as the setup for a contrived plot point which ends up being all about our sozzled hero). There's some superb acting going on here, and as a pseudo-documentary about substance abuse it pulls very few punches, but my complete lack of empathy with the main character or concern about his fate left me feeling that I was watching a film which was technically great without really getting emotionally involved in it, to the point where, during moments that were supposed to be intensely dramatic, I found myself wondering how come an alcoholic who will sell anything he can get his hands on to buy his next drink lives in such a well-furnished flat.

Whiskey Galore - The Lost Weekend review by NO

Powerful drama with Ray Milland acting his best although you lose any sympathy for him as the character keeps repeating his addiction.Good black & white photography.

We have seen similar films since with the theme of drunken writers but for its time this was original & one of the best.

Agree with the above - The Lost Weekend review by CP Customer

Just watched this last night, thought it initially sounded like an interesting movie when I was looking through my 1001 movies to watch list, but it is a bit average, it's likeable and it has a few moments, and you can see there's definitely people like this in real life, but he isn't someone you rally behind and you do begin to question how he would get such a nice caring girl and a nice flat etc. some of it doesn't really add up. It was still a decent watch though, maybe the film was made more to see the horrors of being an alcoholic, Jane Wyman was really good and there was some great acting like the above said, just the story doesn't really add up in the end. It's just so hard to believe a person like this could ever have become a great writer, he just seems to lack ambition.