The Dry January film
One is still going: Ray Milland (left) as Joe Birnam in the bar
Quelle: picture alliance/United Archives
Many people abstain from alcohol in January. The movement is called “Dry January”. If you don’t have the last kick to take part, you should watch Billy Wilder’s “The Lost Weekend”. The Liquor lobby even sent a gangster to destroy the film.
In a train, legend has it, Billy Wilder decided to adapt the now-forgotten Charles R. Jackson’s novel The Lost Weekend while en route from Chicago to Los Angeles while in Europe the Second World War came to an end. And in one gulp, the anti-hero Don Birnam empties glass after glass in the finished film. The plot also has a violent trait. Although the three or four acting characters in the film are mainly standing around in a room or a bar, you watch them breathlessly, as if you had just choked on a hard liquor. “The Lost Weekend” tells the story of a person’s downfall, of his gradual drowning in alcohol. The dialogues are crystal clear, biting and bitter.
Ray Milland, who plays Birnam with James Stewart charm, once explains to the bartender in his favorite New York pint why he keeps reaching for the bottle: “Most people live lives of quiet desperation. I can’t stand the quiet despair.” And becomes poetic: The alcohol “throws the sandbags overboard so that the balloon can rise”. Suddenly he is above everyday life. “I’m walking a tightrope across Niagara Falls. I’m one of the greats. I am Michelangelo shaping Moses’ beard. I’m van Gogh painting pure sunlight. I’m Horowitz playing Beethoven’s Fifth.” He’s also Jesse James, Shakespeare and Cleopatra. You slowly begin to understand him. And to have a pity for him that is almost as great as his self-pity for wanting to be a writer, but unfortunately only having made it into a person who dreams of being a writer.
The brother gives up, the girlfriend fights: Scene from “The Lost Weekend”
Quelle: picture alliance/Everett Collection
His brother, who has taken good care of him for years, soon gives up on him. Anyone who lets whiskey bottles dangle outside from the windowsill so that nobody discovers them seems determined to lead a life hanging by a thread. On the other hand, his girlfriend, a charming provincial woman who works as an editor at Time magazine, will “fight, fight, fight” for him. Successful: The film won the first Palme d’Or at Cannes and also all sorts of Oscars, including that for best actor. The liquor lobby is said to have sent a gangster who is said to have offered the then unimaginable sum of five million dollars to the production studio if it would burn the negatives.
But that didn’t achieve anything except the nice joke that Billy Wilder could now tell everywhere, that he would have burned the film for five million immediately. Luckily he only distilled it – into a masterpiece.
It’s Dry January right now, and many people are abstaining from alcohol for a month. Alternatively, one could consider abstaining from Netflix, detoxing from audiovisual fast food. Instead, you get a nice BluRay of “The Lost Weekend”. The film in which the alcohol flows freely cannot be streamed.