Movie directors love to have their characters drink. They use it to reflect glamor, as in James Bond and his martinis, shaken not stirred. There's a coolness factor associated with alcohol—just as there is with smoking—that they find seductive. The interesting characters always seem to have a drink in their hand. The teetotalers are depicted as squares and dullards. Cinematic drinking signals charisma, sexiness, success, and likeability. Here are the 10 greatest drinking scenes in film history.
Inglourious Basterds: The basement bar scene from Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 film Inglourious Basterds is 20 minutes of high tension. It's too long to work, but succeeds in the hands of a masterful director. The “good guys” are Allied soldiers disguised in Nazi uniforms who have the misfortune of finding themselves in a bar packed with real Nazi soldiers. A Gestapo officer, Major Hellstrom (August Diehl), becomes suspicious over one of their German accents, so he joins them with his beer at their table. The sense of menace is palpable, although the Major’s light-hearted on the surface. The lighting in the dark tavern and blocking of the scene amp up the edginess.
Hellstrom cajoles them into playing a drinking game with him, and then orders a rare whiskey for them to share. When his suspect, Lt. Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender), uses a foreign-looking hand gesture to signal for three glasses, Hellstrom knows he's a spy. Guns are soon blazing.
Tarantino, with help from a sly performance by August Diehl, stretches a rubber band, little by little, for so long that the tension becomes unbearable. When the payoff finally comes, it’s more powerful because of the wait.
Another Round: Danish Director Thomas Vinterberg, along with Lars von Trier, wrote the Dogme 95 manifesto, a pledge to eschew special effects and technology in favor of naturalistic storytelling and acting. Mads Mikkelsen, whose face has landed him roles as evil villains (Le Chiffre in Casino Royale), also has an intelligent, expressive face that helps him deliver a masterful, restrained performance as a man in midlife crisis in this 2020 Danish comedy/drama.
He and three of schoolteacher buddies feel stuck in a rut, so they decide that a little drinking while on the job will enhance their days, and even their job performance. That plan ends as expected, and this film is a journey to the inevitable denouement, but in this charming scene the boys are still in the joyful stage of their drinking. It takes place during the daylight hours at one of their homes. They think they've found the secret to a new kind of life as they quaff their whiskey, so overjoyed that they dance together to a Meters tune. It's like watching four little boys who just found a hidden cache of brand new toys. As the film progresses, the joy turns, little by little, into something darker, but it's so much fun to watch them before that happens.
Flight: There are funny drinking scenes, raucous drinking scenes, maudlin drinking scenes, violent drinking scenes, and joyful drinking scenes. This is in a separate, rare category. It's a depiction of the despair and self-degradation of addiction. There's lots of drinking going on in movies, but mostly they shy away from depicting the harsh reality of blackout drunkenness like the one in this 2012 Robert Zemeckis film where commercial airline pilot Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington) is boozing it up alone at home when his girlfriend walks in the door.
He's in such an incoherent state that all she can do is stand there and stare at him as he mumbles and drinks out of his whiskey bottle while watching a home movie of himself as a child. Unable to pronounce a single intelligible word, Washington conveys a state of inebriation rarely seen on film. Trying to stand up, he falls over a coffee table as the camera pans over a dozen or so empty beer bottles that end up on the floor with him. The scene lasts only about a minute, which is all it needs.
Leaving Las Vegas: Nicolas Cage plays Ben Sanderson in this 1995 romantic tragedy directed by Mike Figgis. It's one of Cage’s best performances (Elisabeth Shue’s is even better) because it requires no holding back. Sanderson’s an alcoholic who moves to Vegas to drink himself to death. In one scene he and Sera (Shue), the prostitute who’s his love interest, take a road trip and stay at a cheap motel in the desert. They drink by the pool and it goes well at first. But an inebriated Ben ruins the mini-vacation when he falls on a glass table and smashes it to pieces. Finding it funny, he repeats in a maniacal voice, “I'm a prickly pear!” The manager comes out and tells them to get out in the morning, and Sera’s left cleaning up the shards, a metaphor for what she does on a daily basis in the relationship. The power of this tragicomic scene is that the couple seems to have escaped, at least momentarily, from the darkness Ben brings to their everyday life. But things crash down to earth before that can happen, as there's no room for light in this story about suicide.
The Deer Hunter: Michael Cimino’s 1978 Vietnam war drama is, on one level, a three-hour ode to male bonding. The scene in the dive bar where the five buddies are drinking Rolling Rocks captures the essence of blue-collar camaraderie. Nick (Christopher Walken) is singing “Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You” along with the jukebox, with some of the others joining in for the chorus: “I love you baby…” Steel workers used to finishing the graveyard shift and going straight to the bar in the morning could attest to the realism of this scene. These bars would even cash their paychecks. Cimino, along with his stellar cast (Robert DeNiro, John Cazale, John Savage) paints a portrait of a group of hometown guys who’ll always be tight. He wraps it up with some comic relief at the end when Steven’s (Savage) mother, dressed as a babushka, storms into the bar and drags him outside, much to the delight of the rest of the crew, and a foreshadowing of things to come. The lightness of the entire scene is meant as a counterpoint to the horrors of war that three of these buddies are about to experience.
Barfly: Barbet Schroeder's 1987 black comedy, based on the life of booze-loving Charles Bukowski (with a screenplay by Bukowski), features an over-the-top Mickey Rourke performance as the author—“Hank Chinaski” in the film—who was a regular at a number of dive bars in downtown Los Angeles with names like The Sunset, Kenmore, Oasis, Crabby Joe’s, Snug Harbor, and Hank’s favorite, The Golden Horn. The memorable “all my friends” scene finds the usually broke Hank in an ebullient mood.
A rich and beautiful literary luminary has advanced him $500 for his stories while also taking him home to spend the night. Later, she comes back to The Golden Horn to find him and gets into a losing cat fight with his girlfriend Wanda (Faye Dunaway). Hank, who lives in fleabag hotels, now has a woman who’ll fight for him, his work is selling, and he has cash in his pocket. It's all he wants from a world whose conventions he's rejected. Walking around and pouring from a bottle of whiskey, he toasts his fellow barflies repeatedly with, “To all my friends!” The pure joy Hank’s experiencing, is exhilarating. Then, he glares at his nemesis, bartender Eddie (Frank Stallone), takes off his jacket, and heads outside to fight him again. Hank's perfect night is soon to be complete.
Casablanca: This is the most famous bar scene in cinematic history. A heartbroken Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) is trying to drink away his pain in the wee hours of the morning at his nightclub in Morocco—Rick's Café Américain. The only other person there is his house piano player, Sam. There's hopelessness in Bogart’s voice and eyes, for both himself and the rest of the world.
The Nazis were occupying Paris at the time, and his lost love Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) just walked into his club that evening with her husband. Rick makes Sam play his and Ilsa's song, “As Time Goes By,” which Ilsa had already had him play earlier in the evening. Sam doesn't want to play it, but Rick says, “If she can take it, so can I.” The camera closes in on his face, and he's lost in despair as he remembers her leaving him in Paris. This scene remains such an enduring cinematic artifact that references have been strewn all over popular culture since its release in 1942.
Sideways: In 2004, director Alexander Payne gave us a buddy/road-trip film that featured the wildest drinking scene ever. Struggling writer and wine enthusiast Miles (Paul Giamatti) takes his engaged, but single-acting old buddy, Jack (Thomas Haden Church), on a trip to wine country for pre-nuptials male bonding. Miles, who's being treated for depression, has submitted his novel to his publisher, and he's nerve-wracked waiting for news of its acceptance. The call finally comes from his agent, and it's bad news.
Crushed, Miles needs a strong drink, but he and Jack are stuck at a winery that pours only tasting portions. He chugs one portion, and then another, and then the bartender refuses his request to pour him a full glass. Miles grabs the bottle from his hands and pours it himself, but when the bartender takes the glass away, Miles tips up the spit bucket and pours the contents into his mouth and all over his shirt. Jack leads him out the door saying, “His mother just died.” There's humor, pathos, depression, and desperation all in a scene lasting less than three minutes.
Trees Lounge: The story of addicts who tell people to stop them from going off the edge, no matter what they say at the time, is familiar. Steve Buscemi, who directed this 1996 comedy/drama, used to be a bit of a barfly himself, so he has perspective. In this particular scene, Long Island alcoholic loser Tommy (Buscemi) tells the bartender to cut him off after one drink. The bartender gives him two drinks but reminds him of the self-imposed drink limit when he orders a third. Tommy reacts like a typical addict—he denies it.
The frustrated bartender offers him five dollars if he won't drink the whiskey he's just poured. Tommy declines, but agrees when it becomes $10, and then he pulls a fast one. He gulps down the shot and scurries out of the bar with a shit-eating grin. The theme of the scene is addiction and denial, but humor can be found in the darkest of circumstances.
The Shining: In this scene, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) has entered his psycho-killer stage in Stanley Kubrick's 1986 horror/mystery masterpiece about a winter caretaker at the isolated Overlook Hotel in Colorado losing his marbles. Jack’s unshaven, maniacal appearance stands in contrast with the bartender Lloyd who, while he has a ghoulish, robotic aspect to him, is impeccably turned out. The scene’s a showcase for Nicholson’s fondness for going over the top. His character's certifiably crazy, so there's no need for restraint. “Here's to five months on the wagon, and all the irreparable harm it's caused me,” he tells Lloyd, referring to dislocating his little son’s arm while drunk, which led to his abstinence.
This must be the eeriest bar scene of all time. The huge room is deserted, silent except for Torrance, drinking whiskey and fulminating with Lloyd listening and dropping a few generic comments. The look on his face after he takes that first slug of booze after five months on the wagon signals that the demon in him is back. Nicholson goes heavy with his collection of grins and eyebrow gymnastics while talking with Lloyd, and then his wife, Winifred (Shelley Duvall) runs into the bar in a frenzy, telling him that a crazy woman in the hotel just tried to strangle their son. Crazy Jack Torrance looks at her with contempt and says, “Are you out of your fucking mind?” Well, one of them is.