Hollywood Cocktails

"Let there be dancing in the streets, drinking in the saloons, and necking in the parlor." Otis B. Driftwood (Grouch Marx)
-A Night at the Opera (1935)

 The first generation of film makers, actresses and actors produced some of the most memorable films ever made and paved the way for all movies that would follow. The scenes, lines and images of the early movies are etched in our memories and the elegance, chivalry, love and laughs are rarely found in the films of today.


Many scenes in the early cinema took place in bars and cocktail lounges and it seems almost every halfway well-to-do character had a liquor cabinet or wet bar in their trendy apartment. Cocktails were found in all parts of the daily lives of the characters on screen. In The Seven Year Itch, Marilyn Monroe seems a little odd when she dunks potato chips in Champagne and her neighbor, played by Tom Ewell, explains his solution for replacing the meals his wife failed to cook for him: "I'm perfectly capable of fixing my own breakfast. As a matter of fact, I had two peanut butter sandwiches and two Whiskey Sours." We also find advice on bartending in movies like The Thin Man in which William Powell instructs his bartender on the 'finer' art of shaking. "The important thing is the rhythm. 

Always have rhythm in your shaking. Now a Manhattan you always shake to fox-trot time, a Bronx to two-step time, a dry martini you always shake to waltz time." And who could forget Humphrey Bogart's most memorable words in Casablanca to Ingrid Bergman, "Here's looking at you, kid," as he fixes her a Champagne Cocktail made of dry Champagne, Brandy, a sugar cube and bitters.
All of these great moments in cinema history can be relived anytime you wish as you sit down for a quite evening with your favorite cocktail, "shaken, not stirred." To find more insights on cocktails in the cinema, check out Miss Charming's website, she is the leading expert in this subject.

"My nerves could use a drink."
Frances "Francie" Stevens (Grace Kelly)
-To Catch a Thief (1955)