Hollywood and Hooch

The love-hate relationship between hooch and Hollywood has swung like a pendulum since the first image was put to celluloid. In family dramas liquor plays homewrecker, in Spring Break movies it acts as fuel for flight, to the hard-boiled P.I. it is the balm that gets him through the cold, hard night. In the first of a eight-part series, MDM walks you through some of the more memorable slurs that sing the praises, and warns the unwary, about that great dramatic vice--booze.

Casablanca (1943)Major Strasser: What is your nationality?
Rick Blaine: I'm a drunkard.
Captain Louis Renault: That makes Rick a citizen of the world.

Who can forget that famous exchange between cynical bar owner (Humphrey Bogart) and the evil Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt) This war-time classic, considered by many to be the greatest movie ever made, takes place in a nightclub where drinking in the only sure solace to the trapped legion of refugees. Below, in perhaps the most memorable line in movie history, Bogart slurs the words repeated by anyone who has ever watched an ex stroll through the door of his or her favorite bar.

Rick Blaine: Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.

The Lost Weekend (1945)
Even when movies are constructed to cast dark shadows on demon drink, rays of truth still shine through. Billy Wilder's Oscar-winning The Lost Weekend stands as a sublime example. In one of the greatest on-screen testimonials to the creative and self esteem-enhancing properties of alcohol, struggling writer Don Birnam (Ray Millard) explains to Nat the barman (Howard Da Silva) why he must drink, and heavily.

Don Birnam: 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 Michelangelo, 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 William 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.

Blade Runner (1982)
When hard-drinking blade runner Deckard (Harrison Ford) gets the bejesus beaten out of him by a crazed replicant, he takes to Tsing Tao Vodka (neat, no back) to beat the shakes. Eerily beautiful replicant Rachel (Sean Young) is on hand to set up the charged exchange.

Deckard: I get them bad. Part of the business.
Rachel: I'm not in the business. I am the business.

And every last-call Lothario can relate to Deckard, after squeezing a wide-open bar tab out of club-owner Taffy Lewis, getting stiffed by Rachel on the videophone.

Decker: I'm at a bar down in the fourth sector. Taffy Lewis is on line. Why don't you come down here for a drink?
Rachel: I'm sorry, Mr. Deckard. That's not my kind of place.
Decker: We'll go someplace else.
Click!

Blue Velvet (1986)
In this stylish and disturbing psychological thriller, Dennis Hopper does a brilliant turn as every cocktail waitress's worst nightmare.

Frank Booth: Heineken? Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!

And even ponies up a bit of toasting etiquette.

Frank Booth: don't toast to my health, toast to my fuck!

Barfly (1987)
In Barfly, arguably the finest and purest drinking movie ever made, every other line is a gem. In this scene the sheltered patroness Tully (Alice Krige) asks our antihero Henry Chinaski (Mickey Rourke) the eternal question and he comes back with an answer guaranteed to stir up your next AA meeting.

Tully: Why don't you stop drinking? Anybody can be a drunk.
Henry: Anybody can be a non-drunk. It takes a special talent to be a drunk. It takes endurance. Endurance is more important than truth.

And who could forget Henry and Wanda's (Faye Dunaway) first encounter?

Henry: That's it.
Wanda: That's what?
Henry: I'm broke. Can't buy another drink.
Wanda: You mean you don't have any money?
Henry: No money, no job, no rent. Hey, I'm back to normal.

And that most memorable of toasts that has since echoed in every dive in the land.

Henry: To all my frieeeeends!

Leaving Las Vegas (1995)
In this dark and remorseless tale of drinking taken to the fatal extreme, failed Hollywood agent Ben (Nicolas Cage) gives light to his idea of a dream date.

Ben: Maybe if you drank bourbon with me it would help. Maybe if you kissed me and I could taste the sting in your mouth it would help. If you drank bourbon with me naked. If you smelled of bourbon as you fucked me, it would help. It would increase my esteem for you. If you poured bourbon onto your naked body and said to me "drink this." If you spread your legs and you had bourbon dripping from your breasts and your pussy and said "drink here" then I could fall in love with you. Because then I would have a purpose. To clean you up and that, that would prove that I'm worth something. I'd lick you clean so that you could go away and fuck someone else.

I'm staggering home.