The Best Booze-Filled Movie of All Time
For when you’re in need of a good comfort-watch—and a few drinks.
Nothing provides a great escape from reality like a really good movie.
Even better is a movie strongly centered around cocktails, lending the viewer permission, or even encouragement, to indulge in the same while watching.
The best, however, is a classic movie full of witty zingers and crazy plot twists, careering from grand party to grand party with plenty of madcap adventures in-between.
You think I’m talking about The Thin Man, don’t you? It’s a great one, to be sure: a 1934 murder mystery that spawned way too many sequels of varying quality. The most popular glass shape of the current cocktail revival gets its name from the movie’s two lead characters, Nick and Nora Charles, who are rarely seen without a drink in their hands. (The movie was released just six months after the repeal of Prohibition, and the two characters drink as though they’re making up for lost time.)
We’re introduced to them, in fact, at a bar, where Nick has been drinking when Nora walks in. He orders a round for them both.
“How many drinks are you in?” Nora asks him.
“Counting this one, six martinis,” Nick replies.
“All right, well, you bring me five more martinis,” Nora instructs the server. “Line them up right here.”
Immediately prior to Nora’s entrance, Nick had just been mansplaining to the bartender how to shake cocktails. “The important thing is the rhythm,” he says. “Always have rhythm in your shaking. Now, a manhattan, you shake to fox-trot time. A bronx, to two-step time. A dry martini, you always shake to waltz time.”
And if those instructions stopped you in your tracks and you thought “What kind of absolute nonsense is this? And how dare you shake rather than stir my martini or Manhattan!” you’re my kind of people, and there’s a better movie for you. Step right this way.
Meet Auntie Mame. Or, rather, Auntie Mame, the 1958 romp set mostly in the 1920s and ’30s, adapted from a Broadway play that was based on a book that was, purportedly, inspired by a real woman who lived a wild life in Greenwich Village and died in 1985.
The movie’s Mame is a wealthy, bohemian eccentric who throws grand parties every night and doesn’t allow suddenly finding herself the guardian of her orphaned nephew get in the way of living her life to the fullest.
Mame is played by the glorious Rosalind Russell, in perhaps the best role of her illustrious career, for which she won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Oscar. Her character wears fabulous costumes, goes on marvelous adventures, and exhorts her charges to “Live, live, live! Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death!”
She’s the epitome of glamour, equal parts aspirational and inspirational.
For cocktail nerds, in particular, Auntie Mame is the superior pick.
There are just as many sharp bons mots hurled in this movie as there are in The Thin Man, and every bit as much drinking happening. (Although Auntie Mame was written two decades later than The Thin Man, it’s set at around the same time and reflects the drinking habits of that era.)
And yet, the drinks portrayed in Auntie Mame are so much more in line with modern standards.
A short way into the film, Mame’s precocious nephew, at all of ten or so years old (it’s ambiguous), has proven a quick study: Having lived with his aunt for two weeks, he’s shown offering a drink to a visitor.
“Would you care for a martini?” he asks. Without waiting for an answer, “Dry or extra-dry?”
“Sit down, Mr. Babcock,” he instructs, rolling over the bar cart. “I’ll make ‘em like I do for Mr. Woolcott.” He places some ice in a mixing glass, adds a generous pour of gin, and stirs. “Stir, never shake,” he says. “Bruises the gin.” He deftly rinses a small martini glass with Dolin dry vermouth, then adds the chilled gin. “Would you care for an olive?” he asks the guest. “Auntie Mame says olives take up too much space in such a little glass.”
I’d happily drink one of his martinis.
Quite a bit later, an ill-conceived daiquiri—it’s made with honey and is, apparently, undrinkably sweet—becomes a recurring joke in the film. “I’ve just come from the most terrible party,” a character sulks, a solid half-hour after we encounter the original undrinkable daiquiri. “They served nothing but daiquiris made with honey.”
(I, of course, have made one just to see how bad it actually tastes. My advice: Don’t.)
That said, the drinking in Auntie Mame is also a little more sensible than in The Thin Man.
In the latter, the characters seem to reach for a slug of booze at any hint of a celebration or setback. They gulp room-temperature neat gin like water, seemingly incapable of dealing with life’s vagaries without a BAC presumably well above .20%.
In Auntie Mame, however, drinking is reserved mostly for festive occasions…even if those occasions do happen every night. “Two weeks I’ve been here,” the housekeeper grouses to a visitor, “and they’ve had 13 cocktail parties.”
“Only 13 in two weeks, huh?”
“They had to call one off. The bootlegger couldn’t come that day.”
Mame may throw plenty of parties, but we scarcely see her take a sip throughout the film. The two characters who do drink to excess are portrayed as cautionary tales: There’s Agnes, who, on the one night she shrugs off her teetotaller mantle and throws caution to the wind, ends up making some extremely questionable life decisions. And then there’s Mame’s best friend, Vera Charles, the film’s token lush (it occurs to me as I type this that perhaps these two films exist in the same cinematic universe, and Vera is related to The Thin Man’s two Charleses), whose frequent dalliances with drink aren’t exactly portrayed as something to emulate.
It's funny how beloved this film has been over the decades by those who know it, yet how overlooked it remains by many. The internet is full of “This movie changed my life” tributes to the movie. (Is it the parties? The fashion? The travel? The witticisms? The glorious embrace of life with open arms? I’m among those whom it influenced at an early age, and for me it was a combination of all of the above.) From what I’m told, it’s become a minor gay cultural touchstone.
And yet, almost no one I’ve mentioned the film to, even self-proclaimed movie nerds, has been familiar with it. Auntie Mame was nominated for an Oscar in six categories and won the Golden Globe for best comedy (in addition to Rosalind Russell’s win for best actress), and yet it has somehow spun out into near-oblivion in the ensuing decades.
I’ve seen various lists of “best drinking movies of all time” published by various outlets, and it somehow appears on none of them. (One even left off The Thin Man as well—an eyebrow-raising omission.)
So allow me do you a favor and introduce you to this delightful romp, complete with cocktails.
My suggestions, so you can drink along with the film’s characters, are as follows:
Start with a glass of Champagne (or whatever you like, really; an Americano also works)
Stir up a dry martini about 25 minutes into the film
Pour yourself some bourbon about an hour in
Have another glass of Champagne by about 1:25
Shake up a daiquiri (with or without honey) by about 1:50
The movie is about two and a half hours long, so that should last you the whole film.
For me, the martini and daiquiri are non-negotiable; the rest are optional depending on your tolerance and how committed you are to getting fully in your cups.
Don’t go overboard, though, or you may end up like Vera—who upon being presented with a recounting of Mame’s adventures exclaims, “You know, I’ve been to so many wonderful parties here, Mame! Now I’m going to find out how they all ended.”
***
Auntie Mame is available for purchase on Prime or free (with ads) on Tubi.