Review by C.J. Bunce
If you keep up with Turner Classic Movies and Running Press’s TCM film library, you’re going to be surprised at how essential its next volume is. TCM’s Forbidden Cocktails: Libations Inspired by the World of Pre-Code Hollywood is actually a step ahead of its predecessor book, Eddie Muller’s Noir Bar, reviewed here at borg. Forbidden Cocktails, written by André Darlington, is more of a required companion to the brilliant Forbidden Hollywood (review here), TCM’s full survey of the Pre-Code era–the four-year span in 1930 to 1934 when the film industry had a production code, which the studios for the most part ignored. This book couples films with new cocktails, concocted by the author, but it also delivers background of the era, and introduces 50 film recommendations, complete with gorgeous contemporary film stills and marketing photographs. Forbidden Cocktails is available for pre-order now here at Amazon.
Whether or not you’re into emulating cocktails derived from ingredients and drinks in the 1920s and 1930s, you’re going to be impressed with this book. From Darlington’s “Balanced Account,” an ode to 1930’s The Divorcee starring Norma Shearer to the “Asta,” his tribute to the 1933 film classic The Thin Man, starring the funny and fun William Powell and Myrna Loy, readers will find new intersections between films, and a reflection of alcohol, prohibition, the studios, and censorship on the nation itself.
Because the publisher has not released preview images of the book, it’s difficult to do justice to the reproduction quality of the images readers will find inside. It’s no exaggeration that this book has the best quality photographs of any early era cinema book we’ve reviewed at borg. Clips and set-up shots for contemporary marketing are as crisp and clean as taken with a top-line camera today. The reproductions of the vintage movie posters, lobby cards, and other ephemera is really as good as it gets.
Darlington runs the gamut across Pre-Code movies, with film and drink pairings prompted by features including Dracula, Strangers May Kiss, The Public Enemy, Night Nurse, Shanghai Express, Scarface, One Way Passage, Trouble in Paradise, Call Her Savage, Sign of the Cross, Gold Diggers of 1933, Flying Down to Rio, and one of the biggest films of the era, Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night.
Forbidden Cocktails stays on theme of what was once allowed–and not allowed–in cinema, seen in last month’s review of TCM’s Double Indemnity and the Rise of Film Noir. In an era where the censorship of books and other content is being escalated at a disturbing rate, these surveys of American history via film may give some insight into the devastation such acts can cause.
Forbidden Hollywood‘s Mark A. Vieira provides a foreword for the book.
A must for film buffs and fans of the 1930s and early Hollywood, in an attractive hardcover binding, TCM’s Forbidden Cocktails: Libations Inspired by the World of Pre-Code Hollywood is available for pre-order now here at Amazon, slated for publication May 7, 2024.
Don’t miss the other volumes from TCM’s film library reviewed here at borg: 52 Must-See Movies That Matter, 52 More Must-See Movies That Matter, Must-See Sci-Fi, Dynamic Dames, Forbidden Hollywood, Viva Hollywood, Fright Favorites, Summer Movies: 30 Sun-Drenched Classics, TCM’s Hollywood Victory, TCM’s Danger on the Silver Screen, TCM’s Rock on Film, TCM’s Essential Directors, TCM’s Christmas at the Movies, Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir, TCM’s 50 Oscar Nights, But Have You Read the Book?, Eddie Muller’s Noir Bar, Lena Horne: Goddess Reclaimed, Double Indemnity and the Rise of Film Noir, and TCM’s 20th Century Fox: Darryl F. Zanuck and the Creation of the Modern Film Studio.
