Dr. Richard Smith - The Lost Weekend

Billy Wilders film The Lost Weekend (1945) revolves around character Don Birnam, a writer who drinks and a drinker who writes, who sets forth on a four-day bender after evading a country weekend with his brother. In his paper, Space and Action in the Interior Field, Dr. Richard Smith analyses The Lost Weekend as a film of action.

Although this is a film about a writer and a drinker, Smith points out that there is very little drinking or writing that takes place. There is no clear identity forms by the actions of the writer or the drinker. The drinkers’ actions do not construct the identity of an alcoholic, nor do the writers produce that of a writer. While the writer attempts to write, he is interrupted by thoughts of a drink. On the other hand the drinker, after a temporal shift moving from periods before drinking to periods of having had a drink, is consumed by his work as a writer and begins to explain passages from his novel. Words that should be written leave the mouth that was meant to receive the drink. The novel remains on the lips when it should be channeled through the hands. The hand does not anchor the natural order of the body.

Smith places emphasis on the hand and eye movements of Don Birnam, in particular in the opening scene of the film where Don successfully avoids departing on his planned weekend away. Don is packing his suitcase, his hands are busy folding clothes into place while his eyes remain fixed on the window where he has hidden a hanging bottle on alcohol. It is the window, Smith argues, that is the point of movement. The point of bilateral symmetry is between the window and the interior of the apartment. While the hands of the either the writer or the drinker remain working in the frame of the camera, the eyes tend to wander out of frame in an attempt to grasp the unreachable – that is either a drink or the means with which to write. However, this changes when the writer is presented with the opportunity of grasping alcohol the position of the camera changes. The camera is where Dons’ attention lies and the bottle is with in his grasp and in his eye line. This is exemplified when he is about to purchase two quarts of rye the camera is placed between two bottles. Scenes such as this demonstrate the dual spatial operations of The Lost Weekend. One field of space determined by the movement of the face, in particular the movement of eyes and mouth and one that is acted out by the motor movement of hand gestures. This is coupled by fields of space that are enacted with in the frame and those that reach out of the audience’s sight. It is these shifts in space, dictated by Don Birnam’s motor actions that make The Lost Weekend, for Dr. Richard Smith, a film of action.