Ray Milland In The Lost Weekend – A Defence Of A Great Performance | The Great Acting Blog

In Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend, Ray Milland delivers one of the great Hollywood performances. He plays Don Birham, a writer so plagued by self-doubt that he addicts himself to alcohol in order to cope. The action takes place over four days: Milland is supposed to go away with his brother for the weekend, but instead he steals the housekeeping money and goes on a bender.

Milland’s performance is completely overwhelming. He swings from agitated sobriety to manic worrying, from bar-room bullshit to alcoholic  bliss, from desperately wretched to hallucinogenic terror, and all done with precision, truth and intensity. Note perfect, if you will.

However, the performance’s journey out into the world was not a happy one. At a preview screening, the audience laughed at Milland, they thought he was ‘overwrought’. This so panicked Paramount Pictures that they considered shelving the film for good. Imagine being Milland for a moment: you’ve just delivered what you think is one of the great screen performances, then you learn that the audience laughed at it and now it may never even see the light of day. Next, the critics took their knives to Milland, attacking his performance for not being a ‘realistic’ depiction of alcoholism.

At the preview screening however, it turns out that the disaster had nothing whatever to do with Milland – the film was shown not with Miklos Rozsa’s original soundtrack but with a temporary upbeat jazz soundtrack. This had the effect of skewing Milland’s work. When the film was shown with it’s correct soundtrack, the audience saw Milland’s performance for the masterpiece it was.

Being “realistic” has got nothing whatever to do with acting. It’s irrelevant. What counts is whether a performance is true or false: true to the actor himself yes, but true to the aesthetic integrity of the piece. What does this mean? That the actor must meet the specific demands of the form he is working in. In Milland’s case, The Lost Weekend employs noir aesthetics with a dash of horror, and he acts accordingly.

 

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