The two best-remembered films of alcoholism of the 20th century are “The Lost Weekend” and “Days of Wine and Roses.” The first concludes with a repaired relationship and should be viewed by anyone in recovery with a wary eye. The second concludes with a failed relationship and should be viewed by anyone in recovery with open arms. Both pictures are vivid illustrations of the cunning, baffling and powerful disease of alcoholism.
BEEZY-WEEZIES, SCREAMING MEEMIES
Charles Jackson’s first novel, “The Lost Weekend,” was written in 1944 and set in 1936 Manhattan. Don, its 33-year-old would-be novelist, has three wrenching days of sobriety and is talking his brother into leaving his East 55th Street apartment so Don can “be alone there for a while.” He’ll spend the weekend shuffling between the apartment and a Second Avenue bar, another Greenwich Village watering hole, a desperate walk up to Harlem trying to find an open pawnshop to sell his typewriter (on Yom Kippur), two separate falls down flights of stairs, and the alkie ward of a major metropolitan hospital. His sometime girlfriend, a Time magazine staffer named Helen, finally hauls him to her Bleecker Street flat, where he eats, takes a bath and cries himself to sleep. The next morning he steals her leopard jacket, pawns it, buys six pints of whiskey for $27 and locks himself back in his brother’s apartment.
The novel is a textbook study of a conniving, manipulative, chronic drunk. No one has ever written so brilliantly of “hours of headache, butterfly-stomach, and (crowning irony!) nausea of the thought of another drink. The jitters, the ginters, the booze-blues, the hooch-humps, the katzenjammers, the beezy-weezies, screaming meemies, snozzle-wobbles, bottle-ache, ork-orks, woefits, the morning after.” Jackson, a brilliant, tortured bisexual and alcoholic who spoke at an open AA meeting in Hartford in 1944, committed suicide in 1968.
Billy Wilder’s 1945 movie won Oscars for Best Picture, Director, Actor (Ray Milland playing Don), and Screenplay (Wilder with Charles Brackett, whose family had a history of alcoholism). The film faithfully piles on much of Don’s ferocious bender, and even includes the classic line (from the novel), “for the alcoholic, one drink is too many and 100 is not enough.” But the film commits Hollywood’s most common mistake: It lets Jane Wyman as Helen talk Don out of his suicidal tangent and back into a sober, normal life.
WILLPOWER TRAP, WRIT LARGE
The message this movie sent out to 1945 America was that all it takes to sober up a falling-down drunk is the love of a good woman. This was Hollywood’s path out of alcoholism, sometimes substituting an enabling child for the adult, from D. W. Griffith’s “The Struggle” in 1931 through Elia Kazan’s “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” in 1944. The late Caroline Knapp (author of “Drinking: A Love Story”) salutes “The Lost Weekend” for being “heartbreaking stuff, the door to a culture’s dirty little secret blasted open. The concept of alcoholism as a disease hasn’t yet been articulated. Drunks were considered comical or morally weak, pathetic either way. ‘The Lost Weekend’ made them human, which stamps it as a brave movie and an enduring one.” True enough. Still, “The Lost Weekend” is a seductive and potentially risky movie for any drunk counting days to take to heart.
SAD BUT TRUE
“Days of Wine and Roses” was written by JP Miller as a live 90-minute television drama for “Playhouse 90” in 1958; it was directed by John Frankenheimer and starred Cliff Robertson as Joe, the hard-drinking San Francisco public relations man, and Piper Laurie as Kirsten, the corporate secretary with a fondness for chocolates and Brandy Alexanders. Miller adapted his teleplay into the 1962 motion picture with Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick, strongly supported by Charles Bickford as Kirsten’s father and Jack Klugman as the recovering alcoholic who becomes Joe’s sponsor. (In 1963, Bantam published a paperback novelization of Miller’s screenplay by David Westheimer, though Miller’s name appears on all subsequent printings. A stage version followed which switches the setting to Manhattan and begins with Joe’s qualification to his AA home group on 13th Street.)
Thus “Days of Wine and Roses” was first and foremost a mass-market television and movie drama. It followed several events of considerable social significance – the huge second printing (1955) of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, and the subsequent decision by the American Medical Association to change its designation of alcoholism from an illness to a disease. “Days of Wine and Roses” became the right movie at the right time.
The first 40 minutes or so are slow going. Director Blake Edwards takes his time developing Joe and Kirsten’s courtship and marriage, the birth of their daughter, and the slippery slope of their drinking. Henry Mancini’s melodic and Oscar-winning score (which slides in the lushly romantic title song) glosses over a lot of bad behavior. But one of Joe’s clients dies of acute alcoholism, and when Joe and Kirsten’s lives start to crash they crash hard – Joe’s destruction of his father-in-law’s greenhouse, the terrible first hours of his hospital detox, his slip after four months and the break-in at the liquor store, a second detox and return to AA.
In the final scene, Kirsten, still drinking and looking like the ravaged alcoholic she has become, knocks on the door of the apartment where Joe and their daughter live. It’s a clean, modest home and Joe is sober a year. Still denying her alcoholism, still unwilling to ask for help, still unable to stop drinking, Kirsten asks to be taken back. Joe turns her down. She walks away. For 1962 this is a bold, brave, commendable ending. “Days of Wine and Roses,” along with “I’ll Cry Tomorrow” (1955, with Susan Hayward playing showgirl Lillian Roth) were two of the first Hollywood films to truly balance “the illness” against a program of recovery.
LIFE MIRRORS ART
Ray Milland followed his Oscar win in “The Lost Weekend” by reprising his role – this time as a recovering alcoholic in AA – in George Stevens’ virtually unseen movie, “Something to Live For,” released by Paramount in 1952. He plays Alan Miller who is happily married to Edna (Teresa Wright) but makes the mistake of 12th-stepping Jenny, a drunken actress (the beautiful Joan Fontaine) and starts an affair with her, briefly losing his sobriety. The cleverly knit ending has Alan, sobered up after having ended the romance, taking his wife to the successful Broadway opening of his former lover’s play. (Milland played yet another drunk in the more routine 1951 MGM film, “Night Becomes Morning.”) For their part, Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick never returned to “Days of Wine and Roses,” though both battled alcoholism in their later years. Lots of twists in troubled lives, on and off the big screen.
Kurt Brokaw is Associate Teaching Professor at New School University, teaches film and literature at the 92nd Street Y, and is senior film critic of The Independent.
