Tuesday, 25 September 2007
My Round: Ten Great Beer Moments in Film
posted @5:55 p.m. by Richard Kelly
Like a lot of English people, I’m really into beer. I just love the whole experience – thinking about it, paying money for it, drinking it; and those resultant sensations of euphoria, belligerence, and aching sadness. Novelist Matt Thorne has a great list in Ten Bad Dates called ‘Make Mine A Double: The Ten Best Screen Drunks’, so I thought I’d embroider on that theme a little here, with ten filmic moments that are specifically in praise of hops, yeast, and barley.
This list is entirely Anglo-American: I feel a bit guilty not throwing in at least a solitary German, or any of Aki Kaurismaki’s Leningrad Cowboys. But my memory’s not what it was, you understand.
10. ‘I’d sell my goddamn soul for just a... glass of beer.’
Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) in The Shining (US 1980, dir. Stanley Kubrick)
Be careful what you wish, eh? Grouchy caretaker Torrance has just walked into the most opulent bar a dry drunk could wish for, that of the palatial Overlook Hotel. There’s not even a queue for drinks. But there’s no barman, and no drinks either, for that matter. Thus, his fervent prayer, muttered into sweating palms. And then, as if by magic, Lloyd (Joe Turkel) appears...
9. ‘Give me – a keg – of beer…’
Scott (Michael J. Fox) in Teen Wolf (US 1985, dir. Rod Daniel)
The dream remedy for all under-age drinkers who can’t get served at their local bottle store: start to transform into a werewolf with a sore throat.
8. ‘You just wasted another fkin’ beer.’
Benny (Cole Hauser) in Dazed and Confused (US 1993, dir. Richard Linklater)
A major film in the beer pantheon, this – its main claim really being the stupendous beer-blast or ‘kegger’ at the Moon Tower. But Benny’s concern for stocks is a valuable point, echoed in selection #2 below.
7. ‘I’m not barmy, I’m a fighting pit prop that wants a pint of beer, that’s me.’
Arthur Seaton (Albert Finney) in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (GB 1960, dir. Karel Reisz)
In its day, this movie was as true to the rough stuff of life as the commercial cinema got, not least for the reason that (as director Stephen Frears has since drawn attention to) it was the first picture to authentically depict how a working-class English man drank a pint of beer in a pub, i.e. straight down in about twelve seconds flat.
6. ‘Lager!’
J.T. (Steve Sweeney) in The Firm (GB 1989, dir. Alan Clarke)
The Inter-City Firm (ICF) are a bunch of East London lads who have decent jobs and mortgages and family lives to manage. At weekends they drink to excess, haunt the vicinities of football grounds, and slash the faces of people they hate with Stanley knives. Early in Alan Clarke’s film we meet them as one charming bunch, post-Saturday-morning-kickabout, hogging the bar of an evil-looking strip-pub, and getting in an epic round. Steve Sweeney’s rasping call for ‘Lager!’ is the simplest and yet the most threatening of the numerous orders.
5. ‘You want another beer?’ / ‘I’d love one.’
Jackie (Gary Oldman) in State of Grace (US 1990, dir. Phil Joanou)
Oldman, star of the aforementioned Firm and director of drunkard classic Nil By Mouth, may have loved beer too dearly for certain stretches of his life, but the love has certainly informed the work, not least his long-hair slob of an Irish gangster in this underrated movie about New York’s notorious ‘Westies’. Jackie is rarely found not in charge of a frosty longneck or a frothy pitcher. Maybe the best bit, if the simplest, comes early on when his mate Terry (Sean Penn) asks him if he fancies one more bottle. The sincerity, the urgency in Oldman’s voice, in his face, as he replies in the affirmative – god, but it’s touching.
4. ‘It’s Miller time, motherfker.’
Sweet Dick Willie (Robin Harris) in Do the Right Thing (US 1989, dir. Spike Lee)
ML (Paul Benjamin), the most bitter among Spike Lee’s Brechtian chorus of Bed-Stuy street-corner bums, has just been arguing about Koreans buying up every grocery store in the neighbourhood, keeping down black-owned business. But Sweet-Dick Willie won’t hear of it. Wherever he gets his Miller is all much of a muchness to Willie.
3. ‘Pabst! Blue Ribbon!’
Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) in Blue Velvet (US 1986, dir. David Lynch)
Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) drinks Heineken. His girlfriend’s dad, Detective Williams, drinks Bud, ‘The King of Beers.’ But Frank doesn’t like Heineken. He likes Pabst. Cold Pabst, mind you.
2. ‘How do, Bob. I’d offer you a beer, but I’ve only got six cans.’
Terry Collier (James Bolam) in The Likely Lads (GB 1976, dir. Michael Tuchner, scr. Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais)
You might have to be a Geordie to love this one, or at least a fan of the writing team of Clement & La Frenais. But surely anyone can see the genius of ne’er-do-well Terry, fishing off a concrete pier with his plastic bag of carry-out at his side, greeting his best mate with a remark that will seem stingy only to those who have no concept of the depth of a man’s need.
1. ‘Worth waiting for...’
Captain Anson (John Mills) in Ice Cold in Alex (GB 1958, dir. J. Lee Thompson)
Some of us just have to make it through a working day to earn that cold pint. Others have to get across North Africa to Alexandria in a dodgy jeep, with a war on and all. Anson is an alcoholic, but no-one could begrudge him his relish in the cold one he puts away at the end of his arduous trek. Of course, he then fancies another... In a very good recent BBC documentary, actress Sylvia Syms revealed that Mills had to sink about six pints before the shot was in the can, and was a bit shaky on his feet come lunchtime.
Comments
a couple of other tender moments with pints. The poacher so feared in Withnail and I silently reaching over the bar at The Crow, pulling his own pint, and downing it in one without the slightest indication that money will change hands (although a rabbit does). Secondly, in The Thug by the Comic Strip Keith Allen's previously pompous cocktail quaffer, when asked what he wants to drink by his "sophisticated" girlfriend yells down the stairs "BITTER! PINT!"
Finally a film book for me! Looking forward to it!
Re Number 7, following on from the "fighting pit prop" line Albert Finney tells a confrere to "take those glasses off you look like a cock-eyed rent collector".
Eminently quotable film from the moment it begins with him on the production line saying "954, nine hundred and fifty bloody five". Proof positive the great british two fingered salute beats the colonial middle finger every day of the week.
One of my fondest alcohol-soaked movie moments is Walter ‘Gib’ Gibson (John Cusack) teaching Alison (Daphne Zuniga) how to shotgun a beer in the still (unbelievably) underrated The Sure Thing… Makes me nostalgic over the cool teenager I, um, never was…
Good call, Nev. Do you mean soaked literally? Because I think I was probably pathetic enough to try to imitate that shotgun trick, with a biro and the old short 'n' squat Budweiser cans that first went on sale in the UK around the same time as The Sure Thing's release. And, like they say in Dazed and Confused, it was all just a waste of effing beer.
"Mmmmm Beeeer"
(As usual Homer sums up what it's all really about)
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