The Lost Weekend
The Lost Weekend
Having cunningly contrived his own abandonment, Don Birnam begins the five-day alcoholic bender that may, just may, be the one that ends it all…
Subject of Billy Wilder's classic Hollywood movie, which won four Oscars, among them best picture and best director, The Lost Weekend captures the atmosphere of Manhattan in the late 1930s - huge tenements, small smoke-filled piano bars, teeming streets beneath rattling elevated railways - with a haunting, cinematic vividness. And in Birnam, his gifted, cursed and endlessly self-defeating anti-hero, Charles Jackson creates a figure of Dostoevskian complexity and power.
Marvelous and horrifying…the best fictional account of alcoholism I have read. - Kingsley Amis
His character is a masterpiece of psychological precision. - New York Times