Very beautiful blondes
The Vikingsby Richard Fleischer (1958). In one of the greatest adventure films in the history of cinema, the American director Richard Fleischer intends to take an ethnographic look at the Vikings. After research in a museum in Oslo, he turns in Norway and on the English coast. The filmmaker recounts the splendor and decadence of a Nordic people, who express themselves through savagery and debauchery – two traits that historians must strongly qualify.
A banquet scene plays a central role: it carries both the overall project and advances the story, where the brutal Kirk Douglas and the romantic Tony Curtis oppose each other. It is at the table that the outrageous actions of the characters are played out and revealed, in particular that played by Ernest Borgnine, or the place assigned to women (in the service of men). Fleischer films the bacchanalia as both a degenerate moment and a moment of great happiness. Vikings drink beer from cow horns. This drink, then weakly alcoholic, drawn from barrels and which kept much longer than water, was largely dominant during the maritime explorations of the Vikings in the Middle Ages.
Pass the ball!
A monkey in winterby Henri Verneuil (1962). Adaptation of the eponymous novel by Antoine Blondin, A monkey in winter owes a lot to screenwriter Michel Audiard, who intends to show the moment of change between a declining Gabin and an ascending Belmondo, between the star of French cinema of the 1930s and the star of the New Wave. The literal reading of the novel-screenplay boils down to the unlikely meeting of two alcoholics in a small coastal town in Normandy. With, in the shadows, a Blondin who drank as he breathed. But the face-to-face between the two actors in front of a balloon of red wine or a calva, swallowed with zinc, not at the table, turns into an existential stake in a France frozen by the war.
Gabin not only embodies an ex-marine in Indochina, prematurely aged, who runs a boarding house with a rare client with his benevolent wife. He becomes this man who has renounced the madness without which no life is possible. Alcohol confronts the characters with their flaws and the failure of their existence.
Be careful, “it’s brutal”!
The Tontons gunslingersby Georges Lautner (1963). It was in a 4 by 3 meter kitchen, with Formica cupboards and a wooden table, that Georges Lautner filmed what would become the most significant drinking scene in the history of French cinema. The four uncle gunslingers, Lino Ventura, Bernard Blier, Francis Blanche and Jean Lefebvre, joined by Robert Dalban as a butler, eye a squat carboy, whose label bears the name of a fictitious whisky, The Three Kings. Strong alcohol is defined by allegories: a “contraband booze”, “the weird”, “the vitriol”, “the curious”, “brutal”.
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