Thanks to Raquel Stecher’s Out of the Past blog, I recently became aware of two books published by Turner Classic Movies based on the same premise as my Drink & a Movie series: that cocktails and movies are natural partners! The first, Eddie Muller’s Noir Bar by TCM personality Eddie Muller aka “The Czar of Noir,” came out last fall and features a selection of movies from the titular genre paired with a combination of classic and modern cocktails as well as a handful created by the author, a former bartender turned “professional drinker,” which he defines in the introduction as “somebody who imbibes every day but never gets drunk. Well, almost never.” This is a pretty good label for me, too, and I appreciate Muller’s emphasis on accessible ingredients and recipes which can be easily adapted to a variety of circumstances over obscure spirits and elaborate techniques. It lends itself to smart pairings, too, as in the case of The Breaking Point, which he calls “the finest film ever made from a Hemingway book” and matches with the famous novelist’s “personal spin on a Caribbean classic,” the Hemingway Daiquiri. Although it may seem like an obvious choice, Muller justifies it with a suggestion to either substitute mezcal as the base spirit to better connect with the film’s Baja California setting or use Captain Morgan white rum as an homage to the character played by John Garfield.
Other thoughtful combinations include pairing The Big Sleep with a Gimlet because they feature prominently in another work by Raymond Chandler, the author of the novel that the film is based on; Force of Evil with a drink by Los Angeles bartender Paul Sanguinetti called The Blacklisted by way of acknowledging the “political imbroglio” that impacted key noir figures like the movie’s screenwriter Abraham Polonsky; and Side Street with San Francisco bartender Todd Smith’s Black Manhattan for the poetic reason that it’s a worthy companion to the film that Muller lauds as “the best New York noir.” I love the decision to use director Luis Buñuel’s personal Martini recipe in the pairing with Sweet Smell of Success, and I enjoyed both of Muller’s inventions that I tried, the Sailor Beware paired with The Lady from Shanghai and the Hammett Martini paired with The Maltese Falcon, which features a split-base spirit combination of vodka and rum that was new to me.
Noir Bar is organized alphabetically by movie title, which makes sense, and features ephemera from Muller’s personal collection like a prop “Wanted” poster from The Hitch-Hiker that reminds me of Ted Haigh’s Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, which I intend as a high compliment! It also contains some of the most stylish (the black backgrounds were a great choice) and creative drink photography I’ve ever seen. I don’t endorse *every* aspect of Muller’s philosophy: I tend to agree with Toby Maloney’s statement in The Bartender’s Manifesto that “it’s gauche, it’s gross” to rub expressed citrus peels over the rim of a glass, for instance. All of them reflect Muller’s years of experience behind the stick, though, and represent a definite point of view, and I’d love to come over to the “full-scale cocktail lounge” in his garage for happy hour sometime!
André Darlington’s Forbidden Cocktails, which features “libations inspired by the world of pre-Code Hollywood,” unfortunately doesn’t stand up well to a side-by-side comparison. To lead with the positives, many of the film descriptions are quite good, such as the analysis of which “paradise cocktail” exactly we’re watching someone prepare in One Way Passage, and I like how it consists entirely of original creations made from ingredients from that period of film history, which stretched from roughly 1930 when the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America adopted the Hays Code to 1934 when they actually began enforcing it. But I wish it would have gone further in this direction by telling you in detail how to set up and stock an early 1930s bar and then offering a curated library of drinks that could be made with those ingredients which includes both classics and original creations along with the movie pairings. The main problem with going all-in on the latter is that Darlington’s recipes are mostly just slight variations on existing drinks, which would be fine were it not for the fact that they don’t always represent an improvement over the original. The My Pal Rye which accompanies Night Nurse, for instance, is a perfectly credible riff on an Old Pal, only it isn’t at all clear to me why this rather edgy film calls for a variation which “takes things in a softer direction” by switching out dry vermouth for Lillet Blanc. A more successful example is the Rose-Colored Glasses paired with 42nd Street, which replaces the creme de cacao in an Alexander cocktail with raspberry syrup to give it an attractive pink hue that evokes a line from the movie, but even this seems like only half an idea: why not add a floral component as well? The book also isn’t organized in any logical fashion, contains far less appealing pictures, and seems impersonal next to Muller’s guided tour of his sometimes delightfully idiosyncratic noir canon.
I applaud the fact that both books are available in spiral-bound editions and feature indexes organized around ingredients to make it easier to find and flip to a recipe you can make with the bottles you have on hand, and I’m going to enjoy having each of them in my collection–there are still a number of recipes in Forbidden Cocktails that I want to try! But Noir Bar is clearly my top recommendation. It would make a fabulous gift for lovers of that genre who also enjoy an occasional drink, drinkers who also like movies, or anyone who throws parties for people from either of the aforementioned groups who might enjoy picking it up off a coffee table and flipping through it.
The Prodigal Cinephile 