“Eddie Muller—host of TCM’s Noir Alley, one of the world’s leading authorities on film noir, and cocktail connoisseur—takes film buffs and drinks enthusiasts alike on a spirited tour through the “dark city” of film noir in this stylish book packed with equal parts great cocktail recipes and noir lore.”
Photo courtesy of Tim Millard and “A Sip of Noir” podcast interviewing Eddie Muller.
“Eddie Muller’s Noir Bar pairs carefully curated classic cocktails and modern noir-inspired libations with behind-the-scenes anecdotes and insights on 50 film noir favorites. Some of the cocktails are drawn directly from the films: If you’ve seen In a Lonely Place and wondered what’s in a “Horse’s Neck”—now you’ll know. If you’re watching Pickup on South Street you’ll find out what its director, Sam Fuller, actually drank off-screen. Didn’t know that Nightmare Alley’s Joan Blondell inspired a cocktail? It may become a new favorite. Meanwhile, Rita Hayworth is toasted with a “Sailor Beware,” an original concoction which, like the film that inspired it (The Lady From Shanghai), is unique, complex, and packs a wallop.
Featuring dozens of movie stills, poster art, behind-the-scenes imagery, and stunning cocktail photography, Noir Bar is both a stylish and exciting excursion through classic cinema’s most popular genre.”
To help celebrate the Noir City 22 Film Festival showing at Oakland’s Grand Lake Theatre January 24-February 2, 2025 and touring the U.S. throughout the year, we return to Noir Bar for two more recipes following our 2023 sneak preview and the 2024 sequel. Michael Thanos of Forbidden Island in Alameda will have a cocktail bar each Friday, Saturday and Sunday evening.
THE RECKLESS MOMENT paired with the RECKLESS MOMENT
A significant figure in the classic noir era, Joan Bennett is too often overlooked in retrospectives of the great femmes fatales. She worked her magic four times with legendary director Fritz Lang, two of those roles anchoring noir classics: The Woman in the Window (1944) and Scarlet Street (1945). In both, she is the downfall of middle-aged Edward G. Robinson, another performer whose career was revitalized by noir. In the 1930s, Bennett and her sister Constance were post-flapper ingénues: fresh beauties with marcelled curls and bee-stung lips. But in the ’40s Joan became a wisecracking noir dame; not always the femme fatale, but always aware of the effect she has on men. With the sublime domestic noir The Reckless Moment (1949), Bennett entered yet another phase of her career, playing tenacious mothers—without sacrificing her sex appeal.
In the 1930s, legendary Havana bar Sloppy Joe’s created an eponymous cocktail in honor of Bennett. It blends 2 ounces of rum with an ounce of purple Parfait d’Amour, shaken with pineapple juice and served over ice. The color is an unappetizing taupe, fit more for a handbag than a cocktail. Frankly, I’m only a fan of pineapple cocktails when it’s 102 degrees and I’m in Barbados overlooking the Atlantic Ocean— in other words, about as often as you’ll find a bottle of Parfait d’Amour in your local liquor store. So I revised Sloppy Joe’s formula by making something closer to what Bennett drinks in her saltiest role: as Kitty March in Scarlet Street, she lets wizened geezer Chris Cross (Eddie G.) buy her a Rum Collins after he rescues her from a street corner fracas. So my liquid homage to Joan Bennett is a variation on the two—but named for my favorite Joan Bennett movie.
RECKLESS MOMENT
DOUBLE ROCKS GLASS, ice cubes SHAKER, strained
2 ounces. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .light rum
1 ounce. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .dry Curaçao
2 ounces. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .pineapple juice
2 ounces. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .club soda
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Pineapple chunk
Garnish . . . . .Brandied Maraschino cherry
CONSTRUCTION: Pour rum, Curaçao, and pineapple juice into the shaker. Add ice, cap, and shake. Strain into a glass two-thirds full of ice, and top with club soda. Score a pineapple chunk. Stick a toothpick through a cherry, insert pick into pineapple, and insert pineapple on lip of the glass.
Excerpted from EDDIE MULLER’S NOIR BAR: Cocktails Inspired by the World of Film Noir by Eddie Muller. Copyright © 2023. Available from Running Press, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Discussion of The Reckless Moment by Chris Sturhann
PHANTOM LADY paired with PINCH & WATER
There is a scene in this 1944 noir in which spunky secretary Carol Richman (Ella Raines), nicknamed “Kansas,” starts searching for the woman who is her boss’s only alibi in the murder of his wife. Kansas visits the saloon where Scott Henderson, on the outs with his spouse, asked a “phantom lady” he’d just met to accompany him to a show. Upon entering, she asks for a drink, hoping to glean some dope about the mysterious woman in the extravagant hat—the only clue she has. Kansas will nurse that drink ’til closing time, silently eyeing the creepy barkeep (Andrew Tombes), hoping to spook him into revealing a precious detail that will put her on the phantom lady’s trail. Thus Kansas begins her descent into the noir netherworld of novelist Cornel Woolrich, brilliantly realized on-screen by producer Joan Harrison, director Robert Siodmak, and director of photography Woody Bredell.
In the book, Kansas simply asks for “whisky and water.” But on-screen she calls for “Pinch bottle and water.” Sure enough, the bartender pulls up a bottle of Dimple Pinch Scotch whisky: a distinctive triangular bottle encased in fine netting, with dimples in each of its three sides. It’s so distinctive, in fact, that in 1958 it was the first liquor bottle to be trademarked in the United States. Scotland’s Haig Distillery, which makes Dimple Pinch, dates back to 1655, making it one of the oldest distillers in the world. I like to think the specific reference to it in Phantom Lady was the work of English producer Harrison, on whom Ella Raines modeled her performance.
Dimple Pinch is still available, although its lightness has left it out of favor with peat-happy single-malt elitists who require something heavier and “deeper.” I find Pinch a perfectly acceptable after-dinner drink, no splash required. So did another notable noir character, Breaking Bad’s Walter White. He snuck in a few glasses during the run of that legendary series and left a glass of Dimple Pinch unfinished on the bar at his New Hampshire hideout in the show’s penultimate episode. You were quite a character, Walter . . . but my toast goes to Kansas, one of the most resilient and resourceful dames in noir.
Also, a nod of thanks to Rosemarie Keenan, half of the writing team Renee Patrick (the Lillian Frost mysteries) for deciphering Kansas’s drink order for me!
PINCH & WATER
HIGHBALL GLASS
3 ounces. . . . .Dimple Pinch Scotch whisky
Splash of . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .water
NOTES: This is how Kansas drinks it in the movie. If you want it on the rocks, feel free to add a few ice cubes. In which case, forget the splash; ice will dilute the drink as it sits. Or forget all that and drink it neat. Dimple Pinch is renowned for its smooth and mellow taste.
Excerpted from EDDIE MULLER’S NOIR BAR: Cocktails Inspired by the World of Film Noir by Eddie Muller. Copyright © 2023. Available from Running Press, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
NOIR BAR can also be purchased at your favorite independent books store in person or online.
Phantom Lady’s Pinch and Water Cocktail discussed by Chris Sturhann who then makes the drink.
New Yorker. Copyright © 2014
Related clip from Phantom Lady can be viewed here.
Boss, she’s been sittin’ there all night.
Like last night, and the night before.
Staring at me.
Sure she keeps staring at you,
she wants another drink.
We’re closing up, miss.
[Narrator] I’m Richard Brody,
and this clip is from Phantom Lady
a 1944 film noir directed by Robert Siodmak.
We’re closing up, miss.
[Richard] It’s got a plot line that,
with the release of David Fincher’s Gone Girl,
is suddenly newly familiar.
It’s about a civil engineer,
in New York City,
Scott Henderson, played by Alan Curtis,
who after a fight with his wife,
has a night on the town with
a woman he meets in a bar.
He returns home to find the police waiting for him.
His wife has been murdered,
he’s the prime suspect,
and, in fact, he’s convicted and imprisoned.
His secretary, Carol Richman,
played by Ella Raines,
who is in love with him,
believes in his innocence
and pursues the investigation on her own.
As with any good film noir,
neo-noir, or thriller,
Phantom Lady is about much more than its plot.
It’s about mood, tone, vision, and style.
All of which converge in Siodmak’s direction.
Scott seems to have an airtight alibi.
He was, after all, with a woman
who in principle could vouch for his whereabouts
on the night of the crime.
But at her insistence,
he never learned her name.
And when the police try to confirm the alibi,
neither the bartender who served them,
nor the cab driver who took them to the theater,
nor the drummer and dancer,
who made eye contact with them at the theater,
have any recollection of this woman.
What Siodmak conjures by way of this plot device
is a hallucinatory vision of city life.
[Man] Hey, you!
[Richard] First of all, it’s a city burdened
with the cold, hard grind of survival.
One in which neither nightlife,
nor street life, nor police work
have any gleam of romance.
It’s a desperately lonely vision of New York.
The maddening struggle for survival.
The savage quest merely to make a living
seems to blind the vision,
and deaden the sensibility of the city’s residents.
Siodmak presents a kind of double-edged paranoia
of constant surveillance,
and utter invisibility.
On the one hand, even the most intimate connections
seem to take place in full public view,
and on the other hand,
the mental machinery of city life grinds
along with an absolute indifference
to each individual.
Siodmak has an extraordinarily expressive
visual style to capture both the hectic frenzy
and the inner chill of city life.
As part of her investigation,
Carol picks up the drummer who
spied Scott and the mystery woman at the show.
He’s played by the great character actor,
Elisha Cook, Jr.
Even though his actions are innocuous enough,
his intentions are anything but.
And Siodmak infuses the after hours jazz joint
to which he brings her with a chaotic
anticipatory air of menace.
Moment after moment,
from the very revelation of the musicians,
to the angles at which they’re filmed,
to the looming close up of Carol
as the drummer moves in behind her,
to the way her mirror shakes as the music pounds.
Siodmak captures a panoply of details
that reveal underlying psychological disturbance.
There’s no music score to Phantom Lady,
and Siodmak uses the silence to emphasize
the desperation of urban loneliness.
In this scene, Carol, wanting to challenge
the bartender on the account that
he gave to the police,
pursues him through the streets,
after his night’s work is done.
A key moment occurs in an exemplary New York location,
an elevated subway station.
Though Carol has no weapon,
and no evil intention,
her pursuit results in an urban chase scene
that silently shrieks with a stifled cry of terror.
(train rumbling)
(turnstile clicks)
(train wheels screeching)
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