The Lost Weekend (1945)
96 %
Reviews Counted: 26 Fresh: 25 Rotten:1 Average Rating: 8.1/10
Consensus:
Director Billy Wilder's unflinchingly honest look at the effects of alcoholism may have had some of its impact blunted by time, but it remains a powerful and remarkably prescient film.
Runtime: 1 hr 41 mins
Synopsis: Ray Milland stars as alcoholic writer Don Birnam in Billy Wilder's first unabashedly dramatic film, and one of the first to deal in such painstaking detail with the disease of alcoholism. Don shares an apartment in New York City in the 1940s with his brother Wick (Phillip Terry) who has his... [More]
Genre: Dramas
Starring: Ray Milland, Jane Wyman, Philip Terry, Howard Da Silva, Doris Dowling
Director: Billy Wilder
Screenwriter: Charles Brackett
Producer: Charles Brackett
Composer: Victor Young, Miklos Rozsa
Screenwriter: Charles Brackett
Producer: Charles Brackett
Composer: Victor Young, Miklos Rozsa
Buy It On DVD
Reviews
Bold, sobering, intelligently written and acted with great skill by Ray Milland.
Comment
02/20/08
Painfully sincere and uncompromising look at alcoholism for a film released in 1945, with a superb central performance.
02/20/08
It is intense, morbid -- and thrilling. Here is an intelligent dissection of one of society's most rampant evils.
02/20/08
Top Critic
It still makes one of the strongest statements about alcoholism, though time has taken away some of its edge.
03/19/07
Top Critic
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.
02/09/06
The changes made in adapting the book to the big screen are instructive: In the novel, Ray Milland's alcoholic Don was a troubled bisexual, but in the movie, he's a writer suffering from a creative block.
12/12/05
A marginally effective Wilder film. Self-important and bloated at times, The Lost Weekend is less meaningful than it wants to be.
09/08/04
A landmark film in terms of Hollywood's treatment of adult subject matter as fair game.
10/01/03
More realistic than sentimentalized Hollywood crowd-pleasers like Harvey, and more accessible than complete downers like Leaving Las Vegas, The Lost Weekend is, to me, the definitive film on the subject of alcoholism.
09/18/03
Top Critic
Milland's DTs are visually frightening and unnerving, because of the odd score set to Theramin that's usually used for B space movies.
08/30/02
Related Forums
THE LOST WEEKEND - Ray Milland's tour-de-force performance is worth owning this one!!
by: REEL_REVIEWER 2/25/05
by: REEL_REVIEWER 2/25/05
THE LOST WEEKEND - Ray Milland's tour-de-force performance is worth owning this one!!
by: REEL_REVIEWER 2/25/05
by: REEL_REVIEWER 2/25/05
THE LOST WEEKEND - Ray Milland's tour-de-force performance is worth owning this one!!
by: REEL_REVIEWER 2/25/05
by: REEL_REVIEWER 2/25/05
THE LOST WEEKEND - Ray Milland's tour-de-force performance is worth owning this one!!
by: REEL_REVIEWER 2/25/05
by: REEL_REVIEWER 2/25/05
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