booze

"Would you like a drink?"
-- nearly every American movie of the '40s

"...I've seen genuine, actual tragedy
issuing directly out of pure carelessness, out of the merest trifles:
a casual impulse, an idle flirtation, one drink too many..."
-- expository precaution issued by assistant D.A. Frank Lalor (Raymond Massey)
to his friend, Prof. Richard Wanley (Edward G. Robinson), a lifelong two-drink man
who's just started on his third in Fritz Lang's The Woman In the Window (1944)

"You drink it."
-- blackmailer/extortionist Heidt  (Dan Duryea) to Alice Reed (Joan Bennett), suspecting that she's poisoned his whiskey and soda (she has) in Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window (1944)

	"Your money's no good here, Mr. Torrance."  Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) chats with Lloyd (), the spectral bartender in the Gold Room of the Overlook Hotel, in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980).   Like James Mason's megalomaniacal reactions to cortisone in Nicholas Ray's harrowing Bigger Than Life (1956), Kubrick uses Jack's alcoholism to expose the repressed rage he feels toward his family.  Although The Shining is generically a horror film, its merciless dissection of nuclear family tensions, and Fritz Lang-like feel of claustrophobia and entrapment (enforced by those relentless Steadicam shots through the labyrinthine corridors and over the geometrically patterned rugs of the Overlook) are essentially the stuff  film noir is made of.

back into the dark room