Distillers feared #TheLostWeekend’s unsparing look at alcoholism would reignite Prohibition. Liquor interests hired mobster Frank Costello to offer Paramount $5 million to kill the film. Wilder later joked that if they’d offered *him* the money, he’d have gladly burned the print. #TheNoirCollective

Don is now willing to rip apart his entire apartment just to find that elusive bottle. Whereas I previously called Milland’s performance “animalistic,” now his hulking posture resembles that of a monster. The metamorphosis will continue… #TheNoirCollective #TheLostWeekend

You know, one drink would really get me started on page one. #TheNoirCollective

Ugh, alcohol kiss. I doubt Don has brushed his teeth any time recently.

#TheLostWeekend #TheNoirCollective

(2/2) This was Wilder’s plan for reimagining French noir for US audiences. Keep the fatalism, but show people undone not by hopelessness, but by hope. Expose “American exceptionalism” as a lie – but one we cling to. See Sunset Boulevard. See Ace in the Hole. See #TheLostWeekend. #TheNoirCollective

As film historian Imogen Sara Smith notes, “Every country inflects noir with its own accent. In French noir, people succumb to exhaustion & melancholy. In American noir, they’re undone by ambition & desire, convinced they can have what they want if they grab it hard enough.” #TheNoirCollective (1/2)

The girlfriend is kinda an enabler
#TheNoirCollective

That length of Indian fabric tacked up by Don’s couch & the art on the wall speaks to Don’s pretension of a being an artist.

#TheNoirCollective
#TheLostWeekend

(5/5) As such, Don is the prototype for all the noir protagonists driven by dreams of money or power or fame, or just the lure of a living wage. Because even when they see the deck stacked against them, they can’t seem to surrender.

They can’t quench their thirst.
#TheNoirCollective #TheLostWeekend

(4/5) That duality – the way our homegrown optimism both buoys and batters us – underscores so much of American noir, and it’s crucial to #TheLostWeekend. Don Birnam is the failed face of the American Dream. Once he felt assured of success; now he can’t grasp why it’s eluded him. #TheNoirCollective

(3/5) Brackett and Wilder tie Don’s drinking to the promise he had that’s lain unfulfilled, to the sense of hope drummed into us at an early age (we live, after all, in “the land of opportunity”) that – no matter how bad things get – we can’t seem to abandon. #TheNoirCollective #TheLostWeekend

(2/5) But Brackett and Wilder wisely treat Don’s unfinished novel as a MacGuffin. Instead, they tie his drinking to his sobering quest for direction, for purpose, for achievement – and in doing so, they give the film a universality that the novel lacked. #TheNoirCollective #TheLostWeekend

In drafting their screenplay, Brackett and Wilder were lucky and shrewd. In the novel, the writer drank because he couldn’t face his homosexuality. That would never fly with the Breen Office, so they made it a case of writer’s block that drives Don to drink. #TheNoirCollective #TheLostWeekend (1/5)

A standing ovation from me for THAT innovation! #TheLostWeekend #TheNoirCollective

Writer as alcoholic was a stereotype for a good, long time. #thenoircollective