Over the decades, there have been many movies made about men struggling with alcoholism: Night Into Morning (1951), Days of Wine and Roses (1962), Arthur (1981), Under the Volcano (1984), When A Man Loves a Women (1994), and Leaving Las Vegas (1995 ) – to name a few. But Billy Wilder’s landmark The Lost Weekend, which was awarded the Palme d’Or in 1946, was the first.  The movie— adapted from Charles Jackson’s novel—portrays a struggling writer’s (Ray Milland) dark descent into the depths and terrors of his addiction.

Delbert Mann is perhaps most known for his film noir, Sunset Boulevard (1950), which won three Academy Awards. Yet, the seeds of Mann's experimental and cinematic techniques that helped to make him famous, are found in The Lost Weekend. The stark black and white scenes, which were shot in the streets of New York, moved from realism to abstraction: Wilder perfected deep-focus techniques to take advantage of low-lighting and to isolate significant objects in the room. He often filmed scenes through bottles and other glass objects; this along with Milland’s performance of hallucinatory and drunken rants, gave the film its moments of poetic revelation. Never had the American public seen such a passionate film or a character that plunged them into the heart of a serious social problem.

When Paramount released The Lost Weekend, they were nervous about its reception: Temperance advocates tried to ban the movie because they thought the movie, perhaps, further glamorized drinking; Lobbyists from the liquor industry also objected, terrified, naturally, that liquor sales would plummet. Nevertheless, the movie was released and received unanimous critical acclaim. The Lost Weekend instantly became one of the most popular films of the 1940’s (and the liquor industry is still going strong, though I can’t say the same for the Temperance movement).

(Picture: Director Billy Wilder, Ray Milland, Doris Dowling on the set of LOST WEEKEND, 1944)