Reviewers Suffer Lost Evening With "Lost Week End"

Starting from a background of obviously artificial skyscrapers, the film moves through a quasi real story to end with the same skyscrapers in a bathetic finish. The production is based on a novel (unprocurable at the moment) which is alleged (see advts.) to be strange, powerful and terrifying. The film is not. In a story, presumably a tragedy, the producer has not the courage (or is not allowed) to end it and so does the next best thing and provides no ending at all.

The plot, if you could call it such, is briefly this. Don Birnam (Ray Milland) is a dipsomaniac. His brother, who has been trying for six years to keep him on the straight and narrow, decides, not before time, that he has had more than enough, and leaves him for a weekend. His girl friend, on the other hand, who has had only three years of it, decides to stick around. Mr. Birnam then indulges in a drunken orgy, after ninety-nine minutes of which the picture ends.

For the first half-hour the picture was tolerable, and although not absorbed, we were moderately interested, but as the action progressed our ennui increased and finally became "overwhelming. At times we experienced some of that frustration and craving that beset Birnam, but a succession of over-lengthy scenes, each with the same recurring theme, each with the same drunken meanderings, each with the same whining music, soon killed any interest it might have had for us.

Ray Milland won an Academy Award for his performance in this picture. If this is the most outstanding acting of the year we hesitate to think of the standard upon which these awards are based. We do not wish to imply that Mr. Milland's performance was in any way a failure. In the main it was efficient and sincere. Occasionally it rose out of its rut of sheer complacency and became deeply moving, as in the scene where Birnam and the audience suffer the hallucination. Mostly, however, the cold efficiency of the acting left us unmoved, while in several critical situations it failed completely and the audience was inopportunely amused. Of the other characters we would mention Phillip Terry, as Don's brother, who, with his upright dignity, forbearing manners and restrained exasperation, provided a striking contrast to the acting of Milland; and the cloakroom attendant whose performance well displayed that officialdom and lack of initiative shown by many minor public employees.

Whichever way one looks at the picture it is a failure. Socially its value is negligible—the evils of drink could have been portrayed twice as effectively in one quarter the time. Artistically it leaves much to be desired—the scenery is unimaginative and uninspired. Considered as a tragedy it fails, being in many of its dramatic climaxes farcical and comical. Economically it may well be a success.