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The Lost Weekend

Oscar™ Best Picture - Winning Movies

The Lost Weekend

1945

Billy Wilder

Ray Milland, Jane Wyman, Phillip Terry, Howard Da Silva ...

7.9

10,609

Drama Don Birnam (Ray Milland), a would-be writer, is a long time alcoholic who is dissatisfied with his life. His brother Wick (Phillip Terry) and girlfriend Helen St. James (Jane Wyman) manage to keep him sober for 10 days, but he arranges to get away from them and goes on a self-destructive three-day binge.

	Author	Review
United Kingdom	Kim Newman Empire	"Painfully sincere and uncompromising look at alcoholism for a film released in 1945, with a superb central performance (…) Rating: ★ (out of 5)"	POS
United States	Bosley Crowther The New York Times	"A shatteringly realistic and morbidly fascinating film (...) An illustration of a drunkard's misery that ranks with the best and most disturbing character studies ever put on the screen"	POS
United Kingdom	Philip French The Guardian	"The film is uncompromising in its depiction of the lies, self-deception and degradation that alcoholism leads to, and its confrontation of the fact that the only solution is abstinence."	POS
United Kingdom	Tom Milne Time Out	"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 (...) to an almost Wellesian evocation of the alcoholic's inner world"	POS
United States	Jonathan Rosenbaum Chicago Reader	"Today it's less impressive but not without its virtues, including the location photography of lower Manhattan, the performances..."	POS
United States	Variety	"The psychiatric study of an alcoholic, it is an unusual picture. It is intense, morbid — and thrilling. Here is an intelligent dissection of one of society’s most rampant evils"	POS
United States	Kate Cameron New York Daily News	"[Milland's] playing of the role of Don Birnam is a terrific piece of artistic acting (...) Wilder has created a tense and suspenseful atmosphere (...) It is a horrible but fascinating spectacle."	POS

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