It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Having apprehended the précis of what the film is about, one's knee-jerking question might be, what is the allure of watching a congenital soak drinking himself to stupor over a weekend's spell if the viewer is fortunate enough not being subjugated under such a distasteful spell? Surely Billy Wilder's THE LOST WEEKEND, a prestigious Hollywood classic and Oscar's BEST PICTURE winner, can dissipate this nagging doubt, because alcoholism is just one of many a jones scourging our human race, more or less, everyone can find some connection with the story, and Wilder sensibly attest that the battle cannot be won without the cooperation of own's volition and the external succor. Ray Millard plays a New York writer Don Birnam, driven by his execrable addiction to the brink of self-destruction, and Mr. Millard's Oscar-winning performance is a tour-de-force with a capital T. It is a daunting task a priori, Don is not necessarily a character who can rally audience's compassion prima facie, a coward he is, indeed, shirking from a resolution of fighting back, apparently he doesn't deserve redemption, not least a virtuous girlfriend like Helen St. James (a saintly Wyman), who has been nothing but supportive for three years by his side. Don's ordeal is a vicious circle which he has no strength to shuck off, Mr. Millard viscerally points up his painful struggle, poignant self-pity, undignified resignation (when he deigns to pilferage, scrounge and coercion on multiple occasions to slake his craving), plus a vestigial ghost of hope through the utter misery shrouding Don's downward spiral. Maybe we shouldn't root for Don after all? It is not hard to conjecture Mr. Wilder's would stick to his gun until the finale (as in his pièce-de-résistence ACE IN THE HOLE 1951), since Don's ominous undoing is primed like such an inexorable force rushing in the homestretch, to a certain point, it even seems audience would be okay with a totally tragic denouement in this cautionary tale, which actually makes the far too convenient magic cure near the finish-line feel contrived and compromised, a quibble might be deemed as a blemish on the film's otherwise intact integrity, again, it is not the happy ending per say which rouses one's demur, but is the wholesome process how that ending is presented. In this case, it is unsatisfactory by half. Visuals-wise, Wilder tactfully interlaces some expressionist panache onto the movie's monochromatic sheen, the most striking specimen is the moment when Don is temporarily locked up inside a drunk ward (where Frank Faylen makes an impressive cameo as a male nurse), the horror and despair does creep against the shadows of iron bars and its aural cacophony into a spectator's core, not to mention the bat-assaulting-rat figment in Don's delirium later, burnished by Miklós Rózsa's nightmarish and eerie string score, which, sometimes, is truly unsettling as our sonic cues of inner-anguish and self-abandonment. There is irony too, the "Champagne Aria" from LA TRAVIATA which tantalizes Don's thirst is a hoot, so is Don's desperate attempt to hock his typewriter on the day of Yom Kippur, for all its intents and purposes, THE LOST WEEKEND is a transfixing social critique in its essence, but laden with some less savory footnotes, for instance, that game-changing kiss sweeping Gloria (Dowling) off her feet is so damn an exemplar of male wish-fulfillment, Wilder and his screenwriter Charles Brackett should've known better, no well-adjusted woman could enjoy a moribund man's booze- macerated kiss, not even it is from someone who is as good-looking as Mr. Millard, that is what this reviewer can vouch for.

You'd love to write off The Last Weekend. "Oh, another of those 40s 'social issues' pictures, fraught with contrived scenarios, posturing affectations instead of performances, and a gentle, comforting blanket of artifice throughout." You watch it, and chortle to yourself that it's done well enough for the time, but cute, and showing its age. You, you think, chest puffed, have weathered Requiem for a Dream, Trainspotting, Leaving Las Vegas and more. This quaint 1940s addiction drama won't leave much of a mark on you.You'd love if that were all true.Then it hits you. The film ended 15 minutes ago, and you're still staring down at the floor, in a numb, foggy daze. Every time you close your eyes, you're ravaged by visions of bats crawling out of the walls drooling streaks of blood, or enigmatic, overlapping rings of liquid, like the Olympics emblem turned aquatic pentagram. You hum tunelessly to drown out the frenzied, feral screeches of a sanitarium at night. Your stomach turns at the thought of snapping yourself out of it with a stiff...drink.The high, the haze, of Billy Wilder's masterpiece have worn off. Welcome to the hangover. You let the sordid weight of the picture cascade over you over and over again, like waves dissolving a sandy shoreline to nothingness. You gulp back sin and regret. And, feverishly, you remember. You remember Billy Wilder, coughing up a lung blacker than any noir tryst here. He takes a pot shot towards melodrama and horror movie, and, in the gutter between, hits jackpot. It's a simple story of a simple addiction, taking wonderful, terrible flight in the trace details, with every second shot lined with liquor bottles looming like tombstones, or cascading from the ceiling light fixture like a Bat-signal of blissful betrayal. If you'd gone drink-for-drink with Don Birnham, you muse, you'd have been dead before the first third. And you say a silent prayer for the countless real-life Don Birnhams who have tried and succeeded. You remember that script - too raw, too honest, to not be gutted from the shameful autobiography of its writer, Charles Jackson, who understood the conniving, the ingenuity, the bargaining, bartering, begging, and gamut of lawbreaking rationalized away in the Sisyphean quest for another drink all too well. That pace - creeping indiscernibly from early pleasantries, the eloquent, airy monologues, the guilty laughs, into a steadily tightening vice of claustrophobic, fatalistic despair. The shame of being caught in an unthinkable act, and braying "This isn't me!" more to yourself than your abhorring audience. A lurch all too familiar to those who have added their own barrage of vicious circles to the local watering hole's table top. And that bit where it all goes black, though this sleep has only swirling nightmares to offer. You remember that theremin - more eerie here than any of its usual otherworldly creature feature companions by being as distressingly real as they are reassuringly false. And you remember Ray Milland, all right. Too charming a firebrand not to love, too weaselly, willfully self-destructive not to loathe. He seduces and betrays us and himself over, and over, and over again, and over, and over, and over again we crawl back to him, entranced by his flashing, manic eyes, his glib, sharp tongue, and his crumpling of the deepest ebb of despair. We spare a thought for Jane Wyman, resiliently chipper in the face of a black hole, Philip Terry, charm dulled into flat affect by relentless disappointment, and Howard Da Silva, the warmly roguish angel and devil on the shoulder at once. But it is Milland's ghoulish face, leering like Norman Bates yet pleading like one of his victims, that you fight to expunge from your pounding skull. And is it all a nightmare, to be shaken awake from by a deus-ex-typewriter Hays Code ending as disingenuous as it is jarringly chirpy? Or is this merely another red herring, with another liquor bottle always dangling out the window, or behind the book case, biding their time until the despicably opportune moment presents itself? Only time will tell. But, let's not forget that a circle is the perfect geometric shape. No end. No beginning. One thing is indisputable: whether you bury it fearfully or binge it with the unquenchable ferocity of a Don Birnham, you'll never forget this Lost Weekend. You'll try. But you won't. Delirium is a disease of the night, my friend. Goodnight. -9/10

I'm almost ashamed to admit that I watched this film with low expectations, even after watching Wilder's masterful Sunset Boulevard and Double Indemnity, and reading such glowing reviews on this film, but I was completely blown away by The Lost Weekend. It is a bleak work of realism, but also a fantastic work of art.Ray Milland delivers one of the best performances in film history as an alcoholic who also happens to be a struggling writer in New York. We follow him on four days of his life, as his serious addiction begins to take its toll on his mind and body. Ultimately, many of the supporting actors and actresses are almost drowned out due to Milland's strong on screen presence, but thankfully provide the character development required for the story to continue.Billy Wilder's direction is impeccable. The camera work is fluid, the scenes expertly filmed with a dark, noirish feel to it in order to evoke the mental deterioration of Don Birnam. The music is haunting and undeniably central to the film, with its eerie sound effects and dramatic score. The Lost Weekend has withstood the test of time and continues to do so. Released in 1945 amidst controversy for its serious examination of alcohol abuse, The Lost Weekend hasn't lost any of its power, and is quite simply of the greatest psychological dramas of all time.

The Lost Weekend takes a surprisingly frank look at alcoholism for a 1940's film. Unlike a lovable alcoholic as in the Pulitzer Prize winning play "Harvey" of the same era, Don Birnam is an alcoholic who lies to and uses everyone who loves him, like real alcoholics, because his next drink is the most important thing to him.There are many intriguing scenes in this movie. There is a scene where Birnam tries to steal a lady's purse and gets thrown out of the bar in humiliation. There is a scene in Bellevue. There is a scene where Birnam gets the DT's.The end, where Birnam suddenly quits drinking and starts writing his novel is perhaps the only hard to accept scene in the movie. It is not that unrealistic—some alcoholics do recover—but it is hard to imagine Birnam quitting without "falling off the wagon" again. Perhaps it is hard to imagine any real alcoholic successfully quitting, because it is so hard for them to do so.