The Lost Weekend is largely a cautionary tale about the dangers of alcoholism. We follow our main character, Don, in his desperate quest to find more whiskey, all while dodging his well-meaning brother and girlfriend's attempts to help him. This description makes it sound more gripping than it is. What it really is is hard to watch, the entire spectacle is so pitiful. You feel so desperately sorry for everyone involved (as you're meant to).
What struck me partway through the movie as I listened to Don describe how he turned to the bottle was that, at least in my armchair psychologist's opinion, what was really going on was that he had what we would call today severe anxiety, and was using alcohol to manage it. As a young man he was told he had talent as a writer, and he couldn't take the internal pressure to produce something great so to silence that little voice that told him he was going to fail he began drinking. I think we've all heard that little voice sometimes and have varying degrees of success in telling it to go fuck itself. In that was Don was very relateable even to someone who hasn't been impacted by alcoholism.
I'm going to refer to the particular run of music that played whenever Don felt the urge to drink "The Call of the Bottle." It got more insistent and more annoying the longer he went without a drink, and it reminded me of the screeching anxious violin theme from Psycho. Certainly it made its metaphorical point, if a bit overstated at times. Don't watch this movie with a headache--this score will definitely not improve it.
Propaganda? Yes. Nicely put together propaganda? Absolutely. It's not anti-alcohol per se, it's more about alcoholism, and it is well shot and well acted. It's just not exactly casual viewing. I felt like I was in an episode of Scared Straight that wasn't directed at me. I could appreciate what went into putting it together knowing that I was not the target audience. It says something about how rampant alcoholism must have been in the 1940s if this won 1945's Best Picture over more feel-good pieces like The Bells of St. Mary's.
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