20. Bars, taverns, nightclubs, and saloons
Virtually any film depicting society in any era of the past includes within its pictures scenes within a watering hole where people congregate to eat and drink, but especially the latter. Westerns feature saloons, some elaborately decorated, others a plank across two barrels, at which patrons ordered whiskey or beer. In films of the Prohibition Era, bootleggers were depicted as heroes as often as they were seen as villains. Nightclubs, where gowned women and tuxedoed men gathered for drinks and dancing, were featured in many films of the 1930s and early 1940s. America’s longstanding love affair with alcohol is well-presented in film.
Although a few films made to address the dangers of alcoholism came from Hollywood during its Golden Age, such as The Lost Weekend in 1945, for the most part, Hollywood looked at drinking with a kindly eye. W.C. Fields built much of his film career out of schtick based on drunkenness. One reason for the tolerance was Hollywood being a hard-drinking town itself. That doesn’t explain the acceptance by audiences, the films reflected the behavior adopted by American citizens. Just as tobacco left a haze in the movies of the thirties, forties, and fifties, the tinkle of ice in glasses of liquor added to the soundtrack, and slapping the bar while ordering whiskey remains a cliché of the western hero and villain alike.