The Prodigal Cinephile

I started this series four years ago as a way to get back into the habit of regular writing. It proved to be so effective that by July I had made up my mind to keep it going through 2025 and supplement it with enough “bonus” posts to give me the equivalent of a year-long weekly film series. Eventually it occurred to me that if I added one more, I could edit everything into a self-published book complete with an introduction, and when I created a two-column landing page a 54th became inevitable. But now after 95,940 words and 1,746 screengrabs, we have finally reached the finish line! We end as we must with the most canonical drink I haven’t yet written about, the Martini. I’m pairing it with The Thin Man and the screen couple who may well be responsible for James Bond’s outdated impression that it’s supposed to be shaken instead of stirred, Nick (William Powell) and Nora (Myrna Loy) Charles. After all, that’s how Nick is preparing one when we first meet him at the end of a 50-second-long tracking shot that makes its way through a crowded dance floor before coming to rest on our hero:

“You should always have rhythm in your shaking,” he tells the bartenders who watch him, rapt. “Now, a Manhattan you shake to foxtrot time.” He begins to strain the concoction into a glass:

“A Bronx to two-step time,” he continues, placing the drink on a tray:

“The dry Martini you always shake to waltz time,” he concludes. Which: this *would* guarantee that the shaking is done gently, limiting aeration and dilution to acceptable levels, and I don’t think a barspoon is capable of anywhere near the same degree of bespoke sophistication, so maybe the technique is overdue for a revival! The Martini proportions in The PDT Cocktail Book are perfect as far as I’m concerned, but in a nod to the Christmas season (which is when The Thin Man takes place) we’ve been making ours with a dash of an extra ingredient and a festive garnish. Here’s how:

3 ozs. Plymouth gin
1 oz. Dolin dry vermouth
2 tsp. Élixir Végétal de la Grande-Chartreuse

Stir all ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled Nick & Nora (of course!) glass. Garnish with three fermented Christmas cranberries on a cocktail pick.

Élixir Végétal de la Grande-Chartreuse is the original product that its more famous descendants green and yellow Chartreuse are based on and a little goes a very long way. Here it contributes distinctive herbal notes to the nose and sip and, just as important for our purposes, a pale but pronounced green color that contrasts beautifully with the brick red garnish. The cranberries, in turn, provide just the slightest bit of effervescence, which accentuate the citrus notes of the Plymouth, but fear not: everyone we’ve served this to agrees that the little surprises we’ve added know their place and that our version has the classic finish of the one Nick proceeds to serve himself:

And savor:

The images in this post all come from my TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection box set which includes the first three Thin Man sequels, too:

The original can also be streamed on Tubi for free if you don’t mind commercial breaks or rented and purchased from a variety of platforms if you do.

Martha Nochimson argues in her book Screen Couple Chemistry: The Power of 2 that The Thin Man “is not structured by Hollywood’s familiar gender formula: woman/body–man/mind.” She submits as evidence the fact that both Nick and Nora first appear from behind, him in the mixing ritual depicted above which “requires an atypical male absorption in his body,” while her entrance behind their dog Asta “uses the cliche of female closeness to animality and body to make a joke of Hollywood’s traditional images of female glamour”:

As Rob Kozlowski describes it in his book Becoming Nick and Nora, their first conversation “takes place over the course of a single, forty-seven-second shot” that has nothing to do with the murder mystery that the film is ostensibly about “but everything to do with showing us this marvelous relationship.” It is preceded by Nick, who is visibly but amiably tipsy throughout this scene and much of the movie, forgetting the word “cocktail” but still managing to make himself understood to a waiter as he invites Nora to sit down and join him in one:

The long take which follows is, per Kozlowski, “very economical,” but also “absolutely the correct approach from a narrative standpoint”:

Because:

By holding both Nick and Nora in the frame, we’re able to see them both speaking, and both listening, at the same time. Nora, adorned in a fur coat with her chin resting in her hand, perpetually amused by the sight of her besotted and blotto husband, has her focus entirely on him. Nick, with his arms resting on the table, his hands inches away from hers, has his focus entirely on her.”

The scene ends with Nora asking Nick how many he has had. “Six martinis,” he replies. Her response is to immediately order five more to catch up, which to Kozlowski captures the essence of what makes theirs “the friendliest, most fun marriage ever captured on screen.”

“They’re almost always playing,” he explains, “and they’re equals on top of it all.” Nochimson agrees with him about this sequence, which she calls paradoxically “both archly witty and genuinely earthy,” but also notes that while “time has veiled Nick and Nora in sentimental nostalgia,” upon closer inspection “their abrasive qualities burst off the screen.” In a not-quite-but-almost-acknowledgement of the darker side of drinking, the latter wakes up the following morning with a hangover (instead of alcohol poisoning, which might be more realistic), but rather than make her more relatable, the ice bag she wears like an elegant hat only serves to reinforce Nochimson’s description of her as “tall, slim, condescending, and always appareled in stunning, regal, intricately designed and infuriating (for those in the audience who will never be able to afford such things) ‘outfits'” who “stands with that ramrod carriage that summons images of young girls schooled relentlessly in balancing books on their heads”:

Meanwhile Nick, whose speech is already beginning to slur from what appears to be a breakfast of Scotch and soda, does indeed have “the loose-jointed bearing of a man just about to fall into a heap” as he first flicks her nose:

Then pantomimes smacking her in retribution for a well-deserved slap on the back of the head:

The man on the phone in the foreground is Herbert MacCaulay (Porter Hall), lawyer to inventor Clyde Wynant (Edward Ellis), who we see here working in his laboratory:

And the mixology lesson we started this post with was interrupted by Wynant’s daughter Dorothy (Maureen O’Sullivan), who remembers Nick, a former private detective, from a case he worked on for her father in her youth:

You see, Clyde has disappeared. Or maybe he hasn’t: the phone call MacCaulay takes informs him that Wynant is back in town and wants to meet. Except that Wynant doesn’t show, and in the meantime his secretary-cum-mistress Julia Wolf (Natalie Moorhead) turns up dead. Coincidentally, she had just agreed to meet Wynant’s ex-wife Mimi Jorgenson (Minna Gombell), Dorothy’s mother, who upon discovering the body first screams:

But then makes a face and leans forward to remove something from the crime scene:

After she later reveals to Dorothy, who suspects her mother of robbing Wolf, that what she took was a metal chain known to belong to Wynant:

They and Dorothy’s brother Gilbert (William Henry) all descend on a Christmas party that Nick and Nora are hosting in their apartment for an eclectic collection of colorful figures from Nick’s former life. During the festivities a shady figure named Nunheim (Harold Huber) calls in with information related to the case:

As described by Fran Mason in his book Hollywood’s Detectives, the result of all of this is to “disorder Nick’s world, most obviously when Mimi slaps Dorothy in front of Nick and Nora because she believes that Dorothy has revealed information that thwarts her plan to blackmail Wynant on his expected reappearance”:

And although it isn’t until after they leave that the party “degenerates into an anarchy of tuneless singing, drunken disagreements and maudlin sentimentality,” Mason argues that “it is implied that they cause the disorder by bringing their world of crime, venal desire and pathologies to the hotel room to disturb the small world of Nick and Nora.” Thus when Nora sighs, “oh Nicky, I love you because you know such lovely people” at the end of the evening:

The line “applies as much to the Jorgensens and people like them as it does to the working class and underworld figures from among Nick’s acquaintances who are still present.” This sequence also again showcases the strong bond between the central couple when Nora walks in on Dorothy embracing Nick, which Kozlowski notes director W.S. Van Dyke “stages as if it would become one of those dramatic incident in which a wife sees her husband with another woman in her arms”:

He follows it with two quick pans, though, one to Nick making a face at his wife:

And then one of her crinkling her nose at him in return:

“By panning between the embrace and Nora’s reaction rather than cutting between them,” Kozlowski observes, “again we have Nick and Nora as one unit rather than being edited apart from each other, and we establish again that this married couple trusts each other completely.” That night Nick saves Nora’s life by knocking her out before the man who has broken into their apartment (Edward Brophy) can shoot her:

Now well and truly implicated in the case, Nick proves his mettle by solving it in relatively short order with an assist from Asta, who locates a body in Wynant’s factory when Nick decides to visit it on a hunch:

The police fall for the false clues buried with it and conclude that they’ve found someone else who was killed by Wynant, who at this point is their number one suspect, but Nick recognizes a piece of shrapnel visible in fluoroscopy:

And in classic murder mystery style organizes an elaborate dinner party to reveal who *did* do it, but not before he asks if Nora has a “nice evening gown” to wear to it, which per Nochimson confirms that he shares her “forthright understanding of glamour as armor and costume that the two of them manipulate.”

She does, and it is indeed “a lulu”:

After sadistically torturing nearly every guest by suggesting that they are the guilty party, Nick provokes the real killer into incriminating themself before the main course is even served:

And the movie’s penultimate scene finds Nick and Nora in the sleeping car of a cross-country train toasting their success with Dorothy and her new husband Tommy (Henry Wadsworth) in an off-center composition by cinematographer James Wong Howe that makes it clear the Charles’s have overstayed their welcome by including the door:

Hopefully the honeymooners have been paying attention, because their elders have been giving them and us a master class on the art of a happy marriage. As summarized by Elizabeth Kraft in her book Restoration Stage Comedies and Hollywood Remarriage Films, the central theme is that “it is a supremely adult activity and requires both maturity and common sense, along with the opposite ability, that is, the childlike ability to play and invent and enjoy.” Which come to think of it reminds me of my description of Drink & a Movie #1 The Tamarind Seed as “a thoroughly grown-up film to enjoy with your adult beverage! I’m not sure whether or not there’s an overarching theme there, but it strikes me as a fine place to leave off regardless. As mentioned above I’m planning to turn these posts into a book, which I think will involve a lot of cutting. A graphic designer friend has offered to help me, and I’m optimistic that the end result will make for an attractive and useful Christmas present for family and friends, so with any luck I’ll be done before next New Year’s Eve. I’ll order a few extra and sell them at cost from this site, so stay tuned if you’re interested! In the meantime, my liver has earned a good, long rest for services rendered, and I’m planning to abstain from alcohol for the duration of 2026–after all, even Nick Charles himself eventually confined himself to cider for the entire runtime of The Thin Man Goes Home! This means no cocktail commentary for awhile, but I do intend to keep up my pace of one illustrated longform post about movies per month on average. It isn’t midnight yet, though, so I have time for one last Martini before then. Here’s to you for reading!

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka my loving wife. Links to all of the entries in this series can be found here.

Fear not: this is not yet another polemic weirdly way too invested in convincing you that Die Hard is a Christmas movie! It *is* part of our household’s regular holiday rotation, though, so I’ve been saving a December slot for it and the Chain Smoker from Sother Teague’s I’m Just Here for the Drinks. The pairing is, of course, inspired by Bruce Willis’s John McClane, who quaintly lights a cigarette immediately after disembarking at Los Angeles International Airport approximately two minutes into the film:

Then proceeds to consume at least a full pack before the end credits roll. Here’s how you make it:

2 ozs. Mezcal (Del Maguey Vida de Muertos)
3/4 oz. Dry vermouth (Dolin)
1/4 oz. Zucca Rabarbaro
2 dashes Cocktail Punk smoked orange bitters

Stir all ingredients with ice and chain into a chilled rocks glass. Garnish with a flamed orange twist.

Teague describes the Chain Smoker as “basically a smoky mezcal Manhattan augmented with Zucca, an Italian aperitif, which has a natural smoky flavor from the dried Chinese rhubarb that serves as its base ingredient.” He notes that “the bitters add a subtle citrus note as well as another layer of smoke,” which is what dominates the nose. Flamed twists have always struck me as being more about theater than flavor or aroma, but both Teague and Frederic Yarm swear the burnt oils are a factor here as well. Regardless, agave and grape on the sip give way to a dry finish with roaring fireplace vibes, suggesting that Hart Bochner’s Harry Ellis could serve it with the “nice aged brie” he mentions while clumsily hitting on McClane’s wife Holly (Bonnie Bedelia):

The image above and those which follow all come from my Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Die Hard Collection DVD set:

It’s also available on Hulu and Prime Video with a subscription.

The late, great David Bordwell suggested in 2019 that Die Hard “changed ideas of just how well-wrought an action picture could be.” One way it did this was through the “ingenious ways” it finds to “let the audience’s eye go with you” in its widescreen format, which begins with the scene that immediately follows the image that begins this blog post: Holly’s boss Joseph Yoshinobu Takagi (James Shigeta), president of Nakatomi Trading, addresses the company holiday party, but with his back to the camera because we’re meant to follow Holly as she wends her way through the crowd from the elevator (in its first of many appearances) at the right side of the frame at the start of the shot:

To the hallway at the left, which is where Ellis ambushes her with his offer of old cheese and flames:

Bordwell also lauds Die Hard as “one of the great rack-focus movies,” and that technique makes an early appearance as well during a telephone call when Holly’s daughter Lucy (Taylor Fry) asks, “is Daddy coming home with you?”

“We’ll see what Santa and Mommy can do,” Holly replies. The maneuver is reversed after she hangs up:

And followed by a cut to a close-up of a family portrait upon which Holly takes out her frustration with her husband, who hasn’t communicated his travel plans to her, by slamming it down:

The photo will reappear nearly exactly one hour later, making it perhaps the most prominent example of what Bordwell calls “felicities” which mark Die Hard as a “hyperclassical film” that “spills out all these links and echoes in a fever of virtuosity.” But I’m getting ahead of myself! First McClane rides in a limo for the first time and is introduced to the holiday classic “Christmas in Hollis” by his driver Argyle (De’voreaux White), who being new to the job also doesn’t realize that it’s customary for passengers to sit in the back:

Upon arrival at Nakatomi Plaza he discovers that Holly has started going by her maiden name again when he looks her up on a computer system that may be so advanced that “if you have to take a leak, it will help you find your zipper,” but isn’t much of a consistent speller:

McClane joins a storied cinematic lineage with this reaction to a sip of “watered-down champagne”:

And is in Holly’s office “making fists with his toes” with his shoes off to dispel his jetlag per the advice of the “Babbit [sic] clone” (per the screenplay) he’s sitting next to in the film’s opening scenes when suddenly gunshots ring out. Grabbing his sidearm and rushing to the door, McClane ascertains that a hostage situation is underway:

Then takes advantage of the distraction afforded by a topless partygoer to escape into what according to James Mottram and David S. Cohen’s Die Hard: The Ultimate Visual History production designer Jackson De Govia saw as the “steel jungle” of the not-yet-complete Nakatomi building’s stairwells, thus setting in motion what he calls “a survival drama in the context of architecture that’s under construction.” As criminal mastermind Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) carefully lays his plans, which include wiring the roof with plastic explosives so that he and the members of his team (all of whom, as Nick Guzan details in a terrific blog post ranking their wardrobes, “have distinctive roles, attitudes, and aesthetics”) can eventually fake their own deaths:

And convincing the FBI that he’s a terrorist by way of manipulating them into cutting the power to the building and automatically releasing the last, otherwise unbreakable, lock guarding the company’s vault:

McClane adapts to his new environment. He uses an elevator as a duck blind to scout his foes without being seen:

Hides in the cave-like vents that inspired this month’s drink photo:

Sets traps:

And successfully navigates a shootout through a conference table that De Govia chose for the way it “moves like a river”:

That altercation ends with McClane taking a bag of explosives off the body of one of his fallen adversaries while he identifies himself to Gruber over a walkie-talkie as “just the fly in the ointment, Hans, the monkey in the wrench.”

From this point forward they oppose each other more directly. First McClane retaliates against Gruber for firing a second anti-tank at an already disabled police vehicle just to make a point by strapping a bomb to a chair and dropping it down an elevator shaft, taking out two of Gruber’s men:

Then Gruber shoots Ellis, who not understanding what he’s up against, foolishly tries to convince McClane to turn himself in:

McClane meets Gruber face to face in a scene replete with unsettling canted angles when the latter goes to check on the explosives on the roof, but initially fails to recognize him when Gruber cleverly clocks a floor directory and pretends to be a hostage named Bill Clay:

Gruber also notices that McClane is shoeless and is able to hobble him by summoning his henchman Karl (Alexander Godunov) and ordering him to “shoot the glass”:

While McClane tends to some of the most painful-looking wounds in cinema history:

Gruber takes advantage of his absence to achieve his goal of gaining access to the $640 million worth of bearer bonds in Nakatomi Trading’s vault in a scene that Robynn J. Stilwell argues in a 1997 Music & Letters article “clearly constructs [him] as a sympathetic, heroic figure as aural and visual cinematic cues and narrative drive come together,” including the “rhythmic speech” of hacker Theo (Clarence Gilyard Jr.) building with the music toward a full-throated statement of Gruber’s Beethoven-based theme, a shot from a “low, powerful angle” of him rising “slowly, awestruck, to his feet, a little breeze ruffling his hair in the halo of the brilliant emergency light”:

Theo whispering “Merry Christmas” in another striking low-angle composition which dramatically sets him and his white sweater off against the pitch black of the rest of the frame:

And a euphoric tour of the vault’s contents that follows a shot of FBI agents Johnson (Robert Davi) and Johnson (Grand L. Bush) foolishly gloating that “those bastards are probably pissing their pants right now”:

Which makes sense when you remember that, as screenwriter Steven E. De Souza told Dan Frazier in an interview, “if you’re doing genre, the protagonist is the villain.” But while we may be “given every possible opportunity to read Hans as the hero of a caper film,” as Stilwell puts it, “classic Hollywood closure […] demands two things: that Hans die, and that Holly and John McClane are reconciled.” And so Die Hard doesn’t end here. Instead, McClane puts all the pieces together and heads back upstairs, where he battles Karl to the death, saves the hostages from being blown to smithereens, and leaps off the roof of Nakatomi Plaza:

Meanwhile, Gruber solves a puzzle himself when he discovers the picture we talked about earlier and finally figures out how a New York City cop came to be in position to interfere with his California heist:

“Mrs. McClane, how nice to make your acquaintance,” he says, setting the stage for a final showdown.

In his introduction to Mottram and Cohen’s book, director John McTiernan reveals that the inspiration for Die Hard came from a surprising source:

In this case, it was easy. It was right in Shakespeare. He wrote a bunch of plays he called comedies. They weren’t funny ha-ha the way we mean it. They were fun. Basically, fun adventures. And I was pretty sure that one of them fit.

It was about a festival night on which something crazy happens–and for everybody involved, the world is turned upside down. The princes become asses, and the asses become princes, and in the morning the world is put back right and the lovers are reunited.

Now the plot of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is way more complicated than that, but don’t look at that. Look at the totality. It was right there: Tell the story not of the cop and the terrorists but of the people who are part of the event. Let the audience sit back and watch the craziness as a whole. Let them enjoy it.

To Matt Zoller Seitz, writing on the occasion of the film’s 25th anniversary, this sense of fun is what makes the Die Hard great. Citing this shot of a S.W.A.T. team member pricking himself on a thorn as a particularly memorable example:

Zoller Seitz notes that “there’s a strain of satire coursing through the picture” and that “more often than not, what’s being made fun of is machismo itself.” He observes that “McClane is mostly spared this sort of scrutiny, but not always,” which to me is crucial to understanding its ending. First, there’s the specific manner of Gruber’s demise: he plumets to his death only after McClane unclasps a Rolex watch that Holly was given by her employer, which Roderick Heath describes as “a symbolic wedding ring to the new age of rootless money-worship” in a turn of phrase that reminds me of last month’s Drink & a Movie selection.

Afterward McClane spots the beat cop Sergeant Al Powell (Reginald VelJohnson) who supported him throughout his ordeal across a crowded courtyard:

He introduces Holly as “my wife Holly . . . Holly Gennaro,” but she corrects him with a line that understandably rubs a lot of people the wrong way: “Holly McClane“:

In this moment they both clearly think they’ve changed, sure, but why should *we* believe it? After all, as Stilwell points out, “despite the ‘happy ending’ in this film, Holly is still not back ‘in her place’ in the sequels,” evidence perhaps that McClane has more John Wayne in him than Roy Rogers after all. Maybe, to paraphrase Puck’s final speech in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we should instead think but this, so all is mended, that we have but slumber’d here while these last few visions did appear. Certainly that would make Karl’s subsequent improbable reappearance easier to stomach!

So light ’em if you got ’em, or pour yourself another Chain Smoker if you don’t, and let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka my loving wife. Links to all of the entries in this series can be found here.