The Lost Weekend (Paramount) follows its dipsomaniac hero to the hangover end of a five-day drunk. A naturalistic horror picture, it is a nightmarish look at the life of a specialized urban type: the fear-paralyzed writer turned alcoholic. In some respects, the picture is a better temperance tract than Charles Jackson's best-selling novel from which it was adapted.
An unemployed writer, Don Birnam (Ray Milland) tricks his girl and his brother into leaving him alone in a Manhattan apartment for a long weekend of solitary drinking. His brother, who supports him and knows his drinking habits, has left him no money, no whiskey and no credit with any neighborhood bar or liquor store. Milland, a gentlemanly alcoholic given to reciting from Shakespeare in cultured tones, leaves his dim, disordered room only to cadge money or drinks to get him through his marathon bender.
On one of his sallies he babbles the story of his life to a sympathetic bartender; on another he gets caught trying to steal a woman's purse in a nightclub. He makes an almost interminable march up Third Avenue, trying to hock his typewriter on a day when all the pawnshops are closed. He tumbles down a flight of stairs and wakes up in the city's alcoholic ward. The proper amount of ironic humor is observed in all that happens to the boozing hero, but the humor only relieves and does not lessen the cumulative horror of his predicament.
Director Billy Wilder's technique of photographing Third Avenue in the grey morning sunlight with a concealed camera to keep the crowds from being self-conscious gives this sequence the shock of reality. Other attempts at authenticity of detail are equally rewarding. The apartment Don lives in—not too flossy and not too shabby—looks exactly as the interior of a remodeled Manhattan brownstone should look. Don's girl friend (Jane Wy-man), who also plays the role of a TIME researcher, seems qualified for the job: she is bright, courteous, indefatigable and impervious to rebuffs.
The Lost Weekend has its faults. Readers of the novel will note two outstanding ones: the necessary flatness of the flatly hopeful ending and the oversimplification of Don's reasons for drinking. But most of the picture is acted and directed with honesty. Ray Milland is convincing and often disturbing in his hangovers, his delir ium tremens, his melancholy. Weekend sustains its interest legitimately: it does not try to dazzle with highly polished studio tricks or with classical pretensions. By sticking strictly to its business — telling an interesting story in the straightest possible way — it becomes one of the year's best pictures.
My Name Is Julia Ross (Columbia) sets out to frighten its customers — and does a pretty expert job. A young girl (Nina Foch), looking for employment in London, finds herself eagerly — ah, too eagerly — employed as secretary to a re spectable-looking old lady (Dame May Whitty). It soon appears that she has been hired as a full-time victim in a family of determined killers. Kept on a diet of Mickey Finns in the locked room of a lonely, cliffbound house with a dizzying view of the sea, she has every reason to feel insecure.