Once upon re-watching The Thin Man (1934), I made a point of counting the martinis that William Powell’s Nick Charles slung back during a single party scene. I can’t remember the exact total, but it was an amount more than sufficient to make an ordinary man’s Saturday night segue quite quickly into an unhappy Sunday morning.
This attention to imbibing may seem a curious pastime, but in my life as a film writer, I have made the drunk act something of an area of expertise (the double meaning is fully implied, as any regular reader of this stately column knows). The 1930’s were something of a golden age for connoisseurs, rendering up not only the Charles’s continuing adventures, but such boozy doozies as James Whale’s Remember Last Night? (1935). A murder mystery starring Constance Cummings and Edward Arnold, the film involves an assembled gang of Long Island socialites trying to recollect, through the fog of a blackout haze, exactly how it was that one of their party was bumped off during the previous evening’s spree—the first instance, to my knowledge, of the formula that recently yielded a hit with The Hangover (2009).
And then there is the matter of William Clause Dukenfield, late of Philadelphia. A rummy ex-vaudevillian with a penchant for ridiculous monikers, sporting a rosacea-splattered physiognomy that was a monument to wrecked health (“You’re as funny as a cry for help,” says a waitress in Never Give as Sucker an Even Break), viewing dowagers, Baby LeRoy, and small-town Babbitts alike through meager, suspicious eyes, slurring out an endless string of high-proof quotables in his petulant purr, W.C. Fields is one of a handful of Americans who proves that our national culture has not existed in vain. Watching Fields’s henpecked, subjugated husband in Man on the Flying Trapeze rolling up his socks before bed is a poem of domestic desperation, an eloquent answer to the question “Why I drink.”
Fields is the patron saint of the philosophical drunk, and his salutation, “Take your hat off in the presence of a gentleman,” should always be remembered when uncapping a fresh bottle.
Aside from Nick, Nora, and Fields, perhaps the great screen tippler of the 1930s was Will Stanton, a Hal Roach player who made a career of comic slurring and putting on coats wrong-sleeve first. Stanton’s raison d’etre can be seen to good advantage in the charming 1932 Me and My Gal, in which director Raoul Walsh gives him free reign to perform his act on a studio recreation of the docks of New York… and perform it, and perform it, and perform it, tumbling into the brine to be fished out by Spencer Tracy’s beat cop not once but twice. Mr. Stanton’s imdb entry is worth a perusal: The same year as Me and My Gal, he appeared as “Drunk (uncredited)” in Any Old Port! and Lovers Courageous, while further along were such roles as “Drunk on Train” (Arizona to Broadway), “Drunk on Bus” (Cross Country Cruise), “Drunk Soldier” (The Man Who Reclaimed His Head), “Drunken Prisoner” (Baby Face Harrington), “Drunk at Fight” (The Irish in Us), and “Drunken Waiter” (The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo)—all in the space of four years! After this, the demand for Mr. Stanton’s services subsided slightly, although he remained available to dust off the old weave in 1944’s Shine on Harvest Moon (reprising his role as “Drunk (uncredited)”) and 1946’s Renegades (as “Barfly”)
I am certain that there are jolly instances of “getting tight” in the American cinema of the 1940’s—a ready vision of smirking bedroom eyes over clinking highball glasses before illicit, implicit film noir sex springs to mind—but when one thinks of booze in postwar pictures, one mostly thinks of hard times and broken men. There is that whimsical Irish boozer Jimmy Dunn playing the whimsical Irish boozer father in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), Ray Milland haunted by slithering hallucinations in The Lost Weekend of the same year, Tyrone Power reduced to geekdom for a nightly bottle at the end of Nightmare Alley (1947), Humphrey Bogart’s creatively impotent screenwriter Dixon Steele in In a Lonely Place (1950), Paul Newman’s literally impotent ex-jock in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), Dean Martin ready to fish a silver dollar out of the saloon spittoon for a drink at the beginning of Rio Bravo (1959), and Robert Stack’s spoiled, rotten scion to an oil empire in Douglas Sirk’s Texas-set Written on the Wind (1956).
The most terrifying tragic drunk of all, being that he’s the most hideously recognizable, appeared in another Lone Star melodrama of the same year as Written. The film is George Stevens’s Giant, and the drunk is James Dean’s Jett Rink, who, in the course of the film, goes from wildcatting Texas trash taking a daily pint of rye under the sun to a nouveau riche oil baron, living perpetually squiffed behind his sunglasses. There is a scene in Giant that never fails to inspire me with obscure terror, in which Dean’s Rink sits alone at a table in his new hotel complex with Carroll Baker’s Luz, the much-younger woman he is courting. He’s completely gone, and she doesn’t know quite enough about drink to understand where he’s got off to, and is trying like hell to carry the conversation along, to think well of him and follow the train of his derailed thoughts. It is wonderful to imagine oneself as a Nick Charles when in one’s cups, but the truth may be nearer to the cataleptic one that Dean shows us in the last vision of Jett Rink, a crooked, wasted thing “not even worth hitting.” I think of an exchange from Whit Stillman’s ensemble comedy Metropolitan (1990), involving the group’s designated toper, Fred (Bryan Leder):
“I think I’ll be going now. I have nothing to say, and I’m completely boring without a drink.”
“It’s only midnight. You can’t go.”
“I’m sorry, but without cocktails, staying up all night loses its charm. Besides, I haven’t had anything amusing to say since I stopped drinking.”
“Did you have anything amusing to say before you stopped?”
“I know, but it seemed amusing. Now it doesn’t.”
“Well, you were asleep.”
“Was that it?”
So completely does Dean reveal the depths of the human catastrophe of alcoholism in Giant that everything else can seem an afterthought. It is a relief, then, to re-encounter the rosy Will Stanton drunk act of the 30s in the late 1960s, in the person of Dean Martin’s buddy, the “Lovable Lush” Foster Brooks. While a staple on Dean’s Celebrity Roasts, Brooks never made much of a splash on the big screen, aside from a role in Academy Award honoree Hal Needham’s Cannonball Run II (1984). And he recorded his “drunk pilot” act for posterity in Jerry Lewis’s swansong, Cracking Up (1983).
Jerry was, of course, a painkiller man, so let us turn to Jerry Lee Lewis, who will undoubtedly be celebrating his 77th birthday this month with strong waters, to play us out. Bottoms up!
Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.