June 22 Billy Wilder

Happy Birthday Billy Wilder, Paul Frees and Meryl Streep

TCM celebrated Billy Wilder’s birth with a 3 film marathon and an interview. One of my favorite films is Sunset Boulevard. When ever I watch a Billy Wilder film I find inspiration in writing. I am not a good writer, but I have decided to start writing short stories again.

I wanted to see something that I had never seen before so I watched The Lost Weekend. It is an amazing film directed and screenplay adapted by Billy Wilder. Ray Milland plays a writer who lives with his brother and is an alcoholic. Ray is going away with his brother, but decides at the last minute not to go. He takes $10 that is for the cleaning person that his brother had hidden and buys 2 bottles of alcohol, which he buys fruit to cover the stems of the bottles and goes to a bar. The passage of time and drinks is done by the condensation rings on the bar. It is abstract art. He drinks one bottle and hides the other, forgetting where he hid the bottle and desperately searching the house.

During an opera wine is being passed around on stage by waiters. Ray watches the trays and drinks move around the stage. He licks his lips. He remembers he has a bottle in his coat and leaves the performance. The coat check ticket he has is for a ladies coat. He has to wait until the end of the program for the owner of the coat, Jane Wyman. The bottle drops out of the pocket and shatters.

The music is dramatic, mysterious and there is a touch of sci-fi which is almost eerie. What really comes through is the desperation of the character. The lying, cheating, stealing and the personality change that Ray goes through. The ups and down of addiction. How friends and family make excuses for what is really going on. The scenes about DT and showing the hallucination that Ray has are really informative and scary. When Ray has the DT and he sees a mouse in a hole in the wall and a bat flying around the room, it took a few passes for me to realize what was going to happen. When the bat got the mouse, the mouse started squealing and a line of blood flowed down the wall I had to close my eyes. It is a simple moment, not overly violent, but captivating.

Howard Da Silva as a bartender has a great line "One drink's too many, and a hundred's not enough."