Today we’re featuring an obscure drink possibly named after an operetta that everyone seems to agree is really, really bad. You’re unlikely the see this masterwork performed, but there is, we’re told, a solidly psychotronic early pre-code, two-strip Technicolor talkie from 1930 of the same name, “Golden Dawn.” The film — not one this movie maven has personally seen, yet — is apparently also quite something, in a super-racist MST3K kind of way. However, the great Ted Haigh appears to be mistaken in “Vintage Drinks and Forgotten Cocktails” when he says that one of the songs is called “Hymn to…
Author: Bob Westal
Bob Westal
Writer guy Bob Westal was literally born in Hollywood and has commented on the worlds of movies, popular culture, politics, and food ever since. His interest in cocktails is more recent, but he made up for lost time with hundreds of “Drink of the Week” blog posts for Bullz-Eye. In addition to writing and editing, Bob also talks a lot.
Today’s drink is a little known beverage I dug up in Gary Regan’s classic “The Joy of Mixology.” It’s terrifying name notwithstanding, the Deadly Sin is basically just a supercharged variation on a Manhattan. It’s not for everyone, but I think it’s a pretty good choice if you’re in need of a serious attitude adjustment and don’t want to mess around too much with a lot of ingredients. Indeed, the most difficult thing about this drink is some sightly odd measurements. However, I wouldn’t try messing with them much. I did and the result was nasty as sin, but not…
Movies and cocktails are two subjects I’ve often combined. Still, the only things the movie, “The Godfather” and the drink, the Godfather, have in common is that they both first appeared sometime in the 1970s and they both got a big awareness boost thanks to Marlon Brando. Now, there is no confirmation on this, but the story goes that the late superstar mega-thespian was fond of combining Scotch and amaretto, a very sweet, somewhat bitter and very popular almond-based liqueur. While there’s no denying the (very) eccentric Mr. Brando’s influence on the acting profession, and there’s even less denying the…
Today’s not particularly patriotic pre-Independence Day beverage is yet another unjustly obscure treat from the pages of Harry Craddock’s post-prohibition classic, “The Savoy Cocktail Book.” According to Erik Ellestad, who didn’t like this drink half as much I did, it actually predates that book by a few years and appeared in a more obscure 1925 tome published in England. Other than that, we know pretty much zip about where this drink comes from. On the other hand, “Moll” can be short for “Molly.” Also, as us old movie buffs know so well, a “moll” is an old-timey gangster’s girlfriend, as…
As part of my ongoing efforts to present the most politically relevant cocktail out there, a few weeks I Googled and brought forth the Prosecutor. It turned out to be perfectly lovely drink and is credited to Bostonian bartender Josey Packard and reportedly named by my one-time cocktailian muse and mentor, Rachel Maddow. But that was then and this now, and I’ve made few alterations to create an amended beverage I’m dedicating to Robert Mueller, a reportedly honorable long-time Republican now widely maligned by his political tribe. As we wait to find out just how deeply our nation has been…
Today’s drink is another tasty relic from probably well before the 1930 publication of Harry Craddock’s “The Savoy Cocktail Book.” As others have pointed out, it’s really just a slightly reshuffled Perfect Manhattan but with Scotch…which I guess would make it a somewhat less potent, Perfect Rob Roy. In any case, I think I might actually like this drink more than the standard Rob Roy. It’s both light and, for a drink that’s comprised of only alcoholic ingredients it’s surprisingly refreshing. At least if you shake it. The funny part here is that, while Craddock (like me) often breaks the…
This might sound odd coming from a cocktailian pinko like me, but I admit to being a monarchist-sympathizer. It’s not that I believe the wrong side won the American Revolutionary War, far from it. It’s just that, now that European monarchs perform ceremonial functions and have little or no official political power, they seem to me quite decent sorts. I mean, who wouldn’t be charmed by the revelation that the king of the Netherlands has been moonlighting as an airline pilot? And what fan of that thing called human freedom didn’t get some goosebumps when Prince Charles of the UK…
In 1988, Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams and David Zucker (aka ZAZ) were big names, but the commercial potential of their post-“Airplane!” spoof films was slightly in doubt. Clearly, the place to turn now was their most glaring commercial failure. Hot off their airborne coup de spoof cinema, the Milwaukee-bred trio had crafted their first and only television show. “Police Squad!” was six episodes of cop show parody gold. Leslie Nielsen, a longtime second-string actor who had gotten a lot of attention for “Airplane!,” returned as the seriously stupid Lt. Frank Drebin in a show highlighted by ingenious and often surreal…
Athoughtful fellow critic – a more forgiving soul than I when it comes to genre films – told me that he thought the directorial debut of hip-hop maestro and hardcore Asian action fan RZA (real name Robert Fitzgerald Diggs) was exactly the movie he wanted to make. If that’s true, the leader of the Wu Tang Clan clearly doesn’t look for the same things I do in a movie and I wonder if he respects his audience at all. His film’s tagline, “You can’t spell kung fu without F and U,” kind of says it all. Now, I understand that…
Full disclosure: I’ve been going to Comic-Con for so long that I spent decades taking it for granted that I could just wander in 15 minutes late to most events. Hah. I’m so old I actually know that Comic-Con was once an event called the San Diego Comic-Con which played second fiddle to the New York Comic-Con and was small enough to be housed in a funky old hotel. It’s true that other media – movies, television and genre literature – have always been an element of the convention, but I’m also so old I remember when Comic-Con was mostly…