This Month

Wednesdays | 23 Movies

Movies have always derived entertainment value out of characters whose cravings and compulsions drive them to excessive, often comic behavior and wild scenes, whether it’s the “loveable drunks” of 30s screwball comedies and Arthur (1981), rowdy students in Animal House (1978) and Superbad (2007), the cartoonish gamblers of Guys and Dolls (1955) or the idolized druggies of Easy Rider (1969). But as this special TCM theme shows, many films have taken a darker and more, um, sober view of the subject.

Such films, with varying degrees of success, attempt to look past the sensationalism and go for a deeper examination of the tragedies and triumphs of addiction and recovery. This monthlong series, which includes several TCM premieres, showcases the range of these movies over the decades, running the gamut from the campy soap opera of Valley of the Dolls (1967) to the harsh, unflinching reality of Leaving Las Vegas (1995).

Substance abuse treatment programs often include many of these films in their lists of powerful screen stories on the subject but always urge viewers to seek guidance and more hard information, noting that for people dealing with addiction and recovery, some movies can be triggers. This warning is usually accompanied by a listing for SAMHSA (1-800-662-HELP, samhsa.gov), the national helpline providing free, confidential information and treatment referral.

Unsurprisingly, given Hollywood’s penchant for (not always clear-eyed) self-reflection, many of these stories are set within the world of show business, depicting the pitfalls of fame and fortune and the temptations that can lead to a life of addiction. Milland won a Best Actor Academy Award for his portrayal of an alcoholic writer in Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend (1945), which also won Best Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay. When the picture was selected for preservation by the Library of Congress in 2011, the National Film Registry noted its “uncompromising look at the devastating effects of alcoholism” and Wilder’s melding of “expressionistic film-noir style with documentary realism.”

Susan Hayward also does double duty in a pair of films that earned her Best Actress nominations. The tagline for I’ll Cry Tomorrow (1955) describes it as “filmed on location…inside a woman’s soul.” Hayward plays Lillian Roth, a real-life popular singer and actress of the 1920s and 30s (although the picture looks firmly set in the 1950s). Based on Roth’s best-selling autobiography, it traces her difficult childhood, rise to success and fall into alcoholism and her return to health and a renewed career after joining AA. Hayward’s first Oscar nomination came with her breakthrough role in Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman (1947), establishing her hallmark character of “the downtrodden woman struggling to make a comeback,” according to TCM’s Jeremy Arnold. In this story, fictional but said to be based on the marriage of Bing Crosby and his first wife Dixie Lee, Hayward plays an up-and-coming young nightclub singer who becomes an alcoholic after marrying a radio crooner and giving up her career. Famed cinematographer Stanley Cortez (The Magnificent Ambersons, 1942; The Night of the Hunter, 1955) placed lights inside his camera lens to simulate the flashing of lights within the brain of someone seriously drunk. According to Cortez, Hayward actually got drunk for a scene in which her character is having an alcohol-induced nightmare. 

That film is similar in some respects to A Star Is Born (1937), the earlier non-musical version of the story about the ill-fated marriage of an aspiring actress (Janet Gaynor) and a matinee idol (Fredric March) whose career hits the skids as hers takes off.

Drug addiction takes its toll on the characters in three other show biz-related tales. In The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), based on Nelson Algren’s 1949 novel, Frank Sinatra had one of his best dramatic roles as a would-be drummer trying to stay drug free after being released from prison. This was another project that producer-director Otto Preminger used to chip away at the Production Code that had held Hollywood in its grip for two decades. He decided to release it before getting the Code’s seal of approval, a move backed by United Artists, which had invested heavily in the production. When the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) denied an appeal to issue a seal, United Artists resigned from the organization. Major theater chains refused to ban the film, and even the typically hard-nosed Catholic Legion of Decency withheld the “C” (condemned) rating it usually gave to films without Code approval. As a result, the MPAA began to review and revise its rules, eventually allowing filmmakers greater freedom to depict formerly taboo subjects.

And of course, no look at substance abuse within the world of entertainment would be complete without the three hapless heroines of Jacqueline Susann’s potboiler Valley of the Dolls. The characters are rumored to be based very loosely on some real-life luminaries, including Judy Garland, 1940s blonde bombshell Carole Landis, Ethel Merman and Susann herself, going through barrels of pills, liquor and bad relationships. Susan Hayward even shows up as a Broadway diva in a role intended for Garland before her own addiction demons and erratic work habits got her booted from the cast.

Not surprisingly, illegal drugs factor prominently into the plots of more recent movies. Poet and musician Jim Carroll wrote about his heroin addiction in his 1978 autobiography The Basketball Diaries, made into a film in 1995 starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Carroll. The film was named in lawsuits brought by families of the victims of two school shootings because of a dream sequence that showed the protagonist, dressed in a black trenchcoat, gunning down six students in a classroom.

Heroin is also the central culprit of The Panic in Needle Park (1971), Al Pacino’s first lead role, and Danny Boyle’s black comedy-drama Trainspotting (1996), set in the most impoverished and squalid section of Edinburgh, Scotland. The critically acclaimed film was ranked #10 in the British Film Institute’s Top 100 British Films of the 20th Century and features several noted actors early in their careers, including Ewan McGregor, Johnny Lee Miller, Robert Carlyle, Kevin McKidd and Kelly Macdonald.

Across the Atlantic, cocaine takes over some promising lives and careers in two films released within a few months of each other. Bright Lights, Big City (1988) follows aspiring writer Michael J. Fox as he seeks refuge from grief and loss in the glitzy world of 1980s New York club life. Michael Keaton is a coke-addicted Philadelphia realtor in Clean and Sober (1988), resorting to embezzlement to pay for his habit and his stock market losses and eventually getting help in a 12-step program. Keaton won the National Society of Film Critics Best Actor Award for both this role and his far different one in the fantasy comedy Beetlejuice (1988). 

Gambling takes center stage on the final night of the series. An English professor (James Caan) is ensnared in The Gambler (1974), as is a journalist’s wife (Barbara Stanwyck) in The Lady Gambles (1949), not to be confused with her earlier picture Gambling Lady (1934), which treats gambling more as a profession than an addiction. George Segal and Elliott Gould make a winning team in Robert Altman’s unjustly overlooked California Split (1974), which Vincent Canby praised in The New York Times as “a fascinating and vivid movie, not quite comparable to any other movie that I can immediately think of.” And in Barbet Schroeder’s Tricheurs (English: Cheaters, 1984), less about gambling as a problem than as a game to be won by any means necessary, a man and woman team up to cheat the house using technology and bribery.

Schroeder also directed Barfly (1987), based on the life of iconoclastic poet Charles Bukowski, who wrote the screenplay and makes a cameo appearance. Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway give career-best performances as a couple brought together rather than torn apart by their drunken lifestyle.

There’s a special place in the hearts of Oscar voters for actors who pour themselves into stories of addiction and recovery. Wallace Beery won Best Actor (tied with Fredric March in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1931) as a washed-up alcoholic fighter trying to make a comeback for the sake of his adoring son in The Champ (1931), remade with Jon Voight in 1979. Shirley Booth won for recreating her stage role as the dowdy wife of an alcoholic (Burt Lancaster) in Come Back, Little Sheba (1952). And Nicholas Cage won his award for portraying a man determined to drink himself to death in the titular city in Leaving Las Vegas (1995).

James Mason did not get an award or even a nomination – a perfect example of the Academy getting it all wrong – in Nicholas Ray’s intense, frightening Bigger Than Life (1956) about a man driven to paranoid violence and delusions of grandeur on bigger and bigger doses of the then fairly new prescription drug cortisone. A box office failure on its release, it was dismissed by most American critics but taken up by the writers at the influential French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. One of those writers, future filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, called it one of the ten best American sound films.

Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick were nominated (but only the title song won) for their work in Days of Wine and Roses (1962) as an alcohol-addicted couple. Blake Edwards adapted a Playhouse 90 TV drama about a PR executive and his secretary wife who go from the traditional “two-martini lunch” typical of American business at the time to full-blown, self-destructive alcoholism.

The series also includes two films that veer closer to documentary. Distant Drummer: Flowers of Darkness (1972), narrated by Paul Newman, is a 22-minute short tracing the opium poppy from 4000 B.C. to the modern drug trade. Dusty and Sweets McGee (1971) is a virtually plotless look at young drug addicts in Los Angeles, based on interviews with actual addicts. Its one recognizable actor is Billy Gray, best known as son Bud on the 1950s sitcom Father Knows Best. Gray sued critic Leonard Maltin for identifying him in a review as a real drug user and dealer.