Synopsis
The Lost Weekend (1945) is Billy Wilder's drama, and you can watch it online on iFILM. It stands among the first Hollywood films to look at alcoholism head-on, with no excuses and no comic softening.
Don Birnam is a failed New York writer who has stayed sober for ten days. His brother and his girlfriend want to take him out of the city for the weekend, away from temptation. Don slips the trip — and tips into a four-day bender that drags him from his favorite bar to a pawnshop, an alcoholic ward and his own hallucinations. Ray Milland doesn't play the drunk for laughs; he plays a man whose craving has hollowed out everything else.
Wilder shot it with documentary harshness: Manhattan at night, a bottle hidden in a light fixture, the dread of the DTs creeping in. The studio feared audiences couldn't stomach that kind of realism, yet the film walked off with the year's top Academy Award and shared the inaugural grand prize at Cannes. It rewards anyone who values honest, unsweetened psychological drama from the old Hollywood. Stream The Lost Weekend (1945) online on iFILM.
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