For well over a year, I've looked for The Lost Weekend on my Roku, but I've never been able to find it. Then last Saturday night, I stumbled across it on TCM. I was pretty stoked. I was able to watch the first half hour before Marie and kids started coming in from the four corners of the universe, forcing me to silence it, and eventually turn it off, to pretend I would rather hear about their days than continue watching it.
I really enjoyed what I saw, which isn't surprising since I saw the fun stuff, like this monologue by the main character, Don Birnam, as he starts drinking for the weekend:
It shrinks my liver, doesn't it, Nat? It pickles my kidneys, yeah. But what it does to the mind? It tosses the sandbags overboard so the balloon can soar. Suddenly I'm above the ordinary. I'm competent. I'm walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls. I'm one of the great ones. I'm Michaelangelo, molding the beard of Moses. I'm Van Gogh painting pure sunlight. I'm Horowitz, playing the Emperor Concerto. I'm John Barrymore before movies got him by the throat. I'm Jesse James and his two brothers, all three of them. I'm W. Shakespeare. And out there it's not Third Avenue any longer, it's the Nile. Nat, it's the Nile and down it moves the barge of Cleopatra.
Heady stuff, that. I hope to emulate it, to an extent, this evening at Michael's graduation party.
Related: "The Art of the Lost Weekend," from Modern Drunkard Magazine.
