Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

performance is full of understated tension as he goes on his alcoholic binge. Visual motifs
support this concept of a journey through a hostile and chaotic personal universe. The film
is frequently shot from an exceedingly high angle with a number of oblique shadows to
intensify the feeling of entrapment in a manner reminiscent of Witness to Murder (1954). 68
Beyond its great social impact, it is believed that this uncompromising film had a
tremendous influence on American attitudes towards alcoholism. Although perceived as a
rather categorical film by some critics, The Lost Weekend proved to be particularly
successful vis-à-vis the returning WWII veterans, who were themselves dealing with
difficult issues regarding their social reintegration, and alcoholism seemed to serve as a
means to help them back into civilian life. 69
Figure 53. Sunset Boulevard
68 Witness to Murder is a Roy Rowland film, dismissed because of its position late in the noir cycle, by which
time most of its formal devices – an innocent witness to murder, a hysterical victim to whom the city is
indifferent, and a woman trapped in a psycho ward – had become conventions. When it was released it was
promoted as “topping the thrills of Double Indemnity and Sorry, Wrong Number.” The photography is by
John Alton and it stars Barbara Stanwyck and George Sanders.
69 In the subsequent years that followed Wilder’s film, other similar postwar dramas that touched upon social
readjustment of war veterans were made, as is the case of Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives, in 1946, and
Litvak’s The Snake Pit, in 1948.
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