The 10 best booze moments in cinema have one thing in common: they have nothing to do with Tom Cruise. They are:
1. Albert Finney in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, when he gets into a pint-chugging contest in a Nottingham pub and gets so bladdered he falls down the stairs.
2. Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend, telling the barman how being drunk is excellent for the imagination.
3. Robert Shaw in Jaws, singing on the boat and telling the lads about his bad history with sharks.
4. Kristen Wiig in Bridesmaids, harassing the steward and trying to get into first class while being right off her face.
5. James Stewart in The Philadelphia Story, as the reporter who gives Cary Grant what for at the wedding rehearsal dinner.
6. Jack Nicholson in The Shining, alone at the bar and alone in the universe with a creepy barman.
7. Paul Giamatti in Sideways, when he goes big on the pinot noir and shit gets emotional.
8. Gena Rowlands in Opening Night, as an actress past her peak sliding from tipple to topple.
9. Richard E Grant in Withnail and I, ordering the “finest wines available to humanity”.
10. Sean Connery in Goldfinger, ordering a martini like it’s the most natural occurrence in the civilised world, or the most civilised thing in the natural world, whichever you can shhay.
Of all the examples, high and low, the last one is probably the one that has earned a place in my daily life. It's true, I'm Scottish – "I cannot help it," as James Boswell once said – but the thing about 007's martini, and martinis in general, is that they can be shown to turn an otherwise damp evening into something on fire.
"After three I'm under the table," Dorothy Parker is said (sadly, probably fallaciously) to have said of martinis. "After four I'm under my host." But it needn't all be about bad behaviour. With most people, a well-mixed cocktail is a jag that oughtn't to be refused. It encourages the unpredictable, it nourishes inventive conversation, and inventive conversation, I submit to you, is one of those things that is sorely impoverished in 2022. When people refuse a cocktail, I often want to say: "Please take on. Not for you, necessarily, but for me, who has to deal with you." It's essentially a selfish proposition. I'm happy to pay for pairs of cocktails so that the person I'm with doesn't spoil the one I'm having.
Of course, the abstemious will rightly object, and so will the addicted, who deserve all our pity. But I grew up with an alcoholic and I would suggest that, as well as all the pain and all the reasons, an alcoholic is basically a boring drinker. The cocktail shaker is not his thing and neither is human company, really. Cocktails are the province of the eternal optimist and the wishful think. Just look at the names: Cosmopolitan, Mai Tai ("excellence"), Manhattan, Sex on the Beach. I must say I love a cocktail and I take what might be called a 1970s attitude towards them: I have an Abigail's Party-style faith in the sudden intervention of a freak concoction ("Vol-au-vent, anyone?") that promises, for a short period, to slow down the potential for most things to suck. I discovered a long time ago that cocktails are essential and their enemies must die.
A minority view, you might think. Yet infants in their nappies are these days gagging for special drinks. Every town that has a café, a bookies and a Covid-testing centre also has a cocktail bar, serving the kinds of deathless tonics you used only to get in Harry's Bar in Venice. If I had time, I'd list their names – OK, Crooners in Darlington, Bahama Mamas in Falmouth – but, the point is, people in Tory England have an increasing devotion to frenzied, exotic nights that involve hillocks of ice and litres of Bols Blue. To the average man and woman of devotion, it beats standing to attention in the Dog & Duck. Are we witnessing the end of Britain's role as the melancholy centre of Empire? I certainly hope so, and I've been celebrating – glass by glittering glass – at every leopard-skin-clad hostelry that'll have me in, my eyes like a couple of cocktail umbrellas spinning far into the night.
Truth be told: I thought I might open my own bar. Cocktails are the future and I'm Napoleon Bonaparte. After some consideration, however (and a frightening letter from the Inland Revenue), I decided just to open a cocktail bar in my own front room. It's very swish. It's called the Twilight Lounge and it's got a menu and everything. There are lights on the gantry and old bottles of stuff from, like Nicaragua, plus gins involving botanicals so obscure they would puzzle Erasmus Darwin. Every night, I open at six, working the shakers like Carmen Miranda on the maracas, my young wife on the velvet sofa, wondering why I didn't just buy a red Ferrari like a normal, mid-life saddo. And yet, magic is as magic does: the cocktails drop and the nights are cosy, and we're outgunning the onslaught of modern reality. Or that's what I like to say, as the ice melts and the heart warms.
For those who think this is a very unliterary activity, I draw your attention to a shelf of books in my lounge of love. Pride of place goes to The Cocktail Bar, an original by Charles, the legendary barman at the Savoy who tried, in fluid ounces, to set the world to rights. I have a soft spot for the new Claridge's – The Cocktail Book, but the best, most elegant, and most sparkling of such books on my shelf at the moment is Richard Godwin's The Spirits: A Guide to Modern Cocktailing. It's one thing to mix drinks, but another to know their joy by heart, and the author serves up truths like the veritable philosopher of the art form. Not many books, and certainly not the Bible, can offer to save your marriage, but The Spirits might do that and a little more. "No lover will think any less of you," he writes, "should you present them with a well-iced El Presidente when they walk through the door."
Andrew O'Hagan is an editor-at-large for Esquire and the author of, most recently, the novel Mayflies. This piece appears in the Winter 2022 issue of the magazine, out now.
Image: Michael Fassbender enjoys a drink as Erik Lehnsherr, aka Magneto, in X-Men: First Class (which, regretfully, did not earn him a place in O'Hagan's top 10).
