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With Will Smith's 'Hancock' hitting the screen and the bottle as a hard-drinking superhero, we reflect on film's most memorable drunks

By Don Kaye
Special to MSN Movies

In the movies, we've tended to like our vices simple: Illegal stuff, like cocaine and weed, is almost always bad, but alcohol and cigarettes were acceptable, even cool, for a long time. Drinking especially used to be played almost solely for laughs -- isn't hiccupping, falling down and waking with a hangover hilarious? It wasn't really until 1945, when Billy Wilder directed Ray Milland in "The Lost Weekend," that the idea of alcoholism as a disease and the perils of the bottle became legitimate dramatic material on the big screen.

Since then, alcohol has had a mixed career in movies, with famous comic and tragic roles. That continues this summer, but with, ahem, a twist as alcoholism enters uncharted territory: the realm of superheroes.

"Iron Man," starring Robert Downey Jr., brought to the screen the pioneering Marvel Comics character of Tony Stark, who developed an alcohol addiction that nearly destroyed everything in his life, including his defense business and his career as a superhero. Stark's battle with the bottle added a depth and vulnerability to his character that had rarely been explored in comic books before, and Downey's Stark has begun to manifest the roots of his problem (although his descent into full-blown alcoholism is a development tentatively scheduled for the sequel).

Now, on the comic side, "Hancock" features Will Smith as the titular superhero, alcoholic and homeless, whose image is rehabilitated by a public relations consultant (Jason Bateman) and who tries to find his place in the world again.

Depending on the success or failure of these films both commercially and artistically, Tony Stark and John Hancock have a good chance of joining our list of the screen's most famous -- or most memorable -- drunks.

Don Birnam (Ray Milland) -- "The Lost Weekend" (1945)
Billy Wilder's "The Lost Weekend" attacked the problem of alcoholism head-on, long before the entertainment industry and polite society itself acknowledged that dependence on booze was a legitimate issue. The film was built around Ray Milland's Oscar-winning performance as a blocked writer whose three-day bender turns into a nightmare. Milland, who ended his career in B-level horror pictures, was never better than in this crackling, confrontational film, which exposed both Birnam's and society's hypocrisies about the way we medicate ourselves, yet did so without taking a holier-than-thou stance. Wilder and Milland forced us to take a long, hard look in the mirror the next morning -- and wonder if we should have had that last "one for the road."

Dude (Dean Martin) -- "Rio Bravo" (1959)
As a singer and nightclub performer, Dean Martin had perfected his public image as a carefree, laid-back, always tipsy boozer, even if he stayed much more on the straight and narrow in his private life. But on-screen his roles in "Some Came Running" (1958) and especially "Rio Bravo" (1959) explored the darker side of the drinking life while ironically cementing his public reputation even further. In the latter, one of Howard Hawks' finest Westerns, Martin's ex-deputy Dude can barely shoot straight because of the shakes from his two-year stint as town drunk. But sheriff John Wayne gives him a second chance, and Dude takes it -- leading this flawed former lawman to the kind of redemption echoed years later in films like "The Verdict"... and, on the comical side, "Blazing Saddles."

Joe and Kirsten Clay (Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick) -- "Days of Wine and Roses" (1962)
The ease with which two cohabitating people can both be consumed by their own self-destructive habits was vividly presented in "Days of Wine and Roses." The Clays have it all -- he's a successful advertising exec, she's a loving wife, they have a wonderful home and child -- but when Joe's social drinking turns into dependency and the previously nondrinking Kirsten first joins and then outpaces him, the collapse of their seemingly perfect life together is shocking. Director Blake Edwards ("The Pink Panther," "10") reportedly checked himself into rehab after completing this 1962 film -- perhaps realizing he did not want to follow the Clays into the abyss.

John "Bluto" Blutarsky (John Belushi) -- "National Lampoon's Animal House" (1978)
John Belushi's Bluto was the definitive sloshed college frat member. In his seventh year of school, with a GPA of 0.0, the permanently hammered Bluto barely gets out a coherent sentence throughout the entire film (except for his rallying speech near the end), leaves a path of destruction behind him, and is the embodiment of every perpetually wasted student everyone has ever known from their undergrad years. The fact that he goes on to become a U.S. senator should surprise absolutely no one. The late Belushi became a big-screen star -- all too briefly, as it turned out -- in this iconic role.

Arthur Bach (Dudley Moore) -- "Arthur" (1981)
Dudley Moore and writer/director Steve Gordon brought back the funny side of excessive drinking (which went out of style about 30 years previously) in "Arthur." Moore's perfectly played title character is heir to a tremendous fortune and on the surface wants for nothing, living a life of drunken leisure. Arthur could easily have been one of the most annoying characters ever -- after all, he doesn't have to do anything except drink and loaf around -- but instead he's a sweet, sympathetic and ultimately lonely man. When this would-be king of the world finally meets his queen in a working-class shoplifter (Liza Minnelli), rejecting the arranged marriage that his entire inheritance depends upon, you're rooting for this befuddled and sodden souse all the way.

Alan Swann (Peter O'Toole) -- "My Favorite Year" (1982)
Peter O'Toole was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for his performance as washed-up matinee idol Alan Swann, who turns up plastered for a TV variety show appearance and is placed under the care of one of the show's writers (Mark Linn-Baker), who needs to get him sobered up for the live broadcast. Allegedly based on a true incident involving screen star Errol Flynn, director Richard Benjamin's nostalgic, good-natured film places Swann on the thin line between devil-may-care frivolity and a darker fate. O'Toole walks that line magnificently, making Swann a truly bittersweet character.

Frank Galvin (Paul Newman) -- "The Verdict" (1982)
Wow, what was happening in the early '80s? Drunks were all over the silver screen. The theme of the down-on-his-luck alcoholic achieving personal redemption through doing right by others was forcefully presented in Sidney Lumet's 1982 courtroom drama. Paul Newman gives one of his finest performances -- and earned an Oscar nomination -- as Galvin, the downtrodden lawyer who takes on a malpractice case that lines him up against the Catholic Church and its formidable attorney (James Mason). But Galvin's growing personal investment in the case leads to a renewed involvement in his own life as well. Our verdict? Even a lawyer -- and a drunken one at that -- can find his humanity again.

Henry Chinaski (Mickey Rourke) -- "Barfly" (1987)
Henry Chinaski is the thinly disguised alter ego of famously self-destructive writer Charles Bukowski, with the screenplay for "Barfly" (directed by Barbet Schroeder) written by Bukowski himself and culled from several of his own autobiographical short stories. There's little plot in "Barfly" -- it mainly consists of the permanently disheveled and stuporous Chinaski (Rourke at his most dissolute) drinking, talking and fighting, with fellow drunk Wanda Wilcox (Faye Dunaway) gradually becoming his partner in grime and even forging a romance of sorts. Chinaski/Bukowski ultimately rejects the lure of mainstream success -- personified by Alice Krige as a beautiful publisher -- but his choice is, in its own odd way, tragically noble.

Alice Green (Meg Ryan) -- "When a Man Loves a Woman" (1994)
Many of the screen's most famous alcoholics have been male, but Meg Ryan aced a rare and powerful dramatic performance as Alice Green, a school counselor with a secret, in "When a Man Loves a Woman." What makes the film even more unique and provocative is that Alice's recovery is only the first part of her struggle -- her airline pilot husband Michael (Andy Garcia) must come to grips with the idea that his newly strong wife is no longer the helpless mess who always needed his help. The beauty of this overlooked gem is the subtle way in which it tackles more than one kind of dependency.

Ben Sanderson (Nicolas Cage) -- "Leaving Las Vegas" (1995)
"Leaving Las Vegas" was based on a semiautobiographical novel by John O'Brien, who committed suicide two weeks after production began. Similar in some ways to "The Lost Weekend," the book and movie detail the downward spiral of a screenwriter so consumed by alcohol that he severs all connections to his life in Los Angeles and moves to Las Vegas to literally drink himself to death. This tragic tone poem marked a turning point for Cage (he won the Oscar for Best Actor) and serves as an elegiac tribute to a life lost. Like the compassionate hooker (Elisabeth Shue) he shares his last days with, "Leaving Las Vegas" never judges Ben Sanderson -- it merely asks us to observe and remember him.

Willie T. Stokes (Billy Bob Thornton) -- "Bad Santa" (2003)
If Arthur and Bluto made being drunk funny again, Billy Bob Thornton's Willie Stokes in "Bad Santa" carried on the tradition -- but in keeping with the times (the movie came out in 2003), the dissolute and debauched Stokes is a much darker, nastier character. Frightening children who come to visit him at the department store he plans to rob, soiling his already filthy and sagging Santa suit, hurling obscenities in every direction, Stokes is full of hatred for himself and the rest of the human race -- which makes his ultimate bonding with bartender Sue (Lauren Graham) and loser kid Thurman Merman (Brett Kelly) that much more surprising and oddly triumphant. If there's a glimmer of hope for this bottom-feeding stumblebum, there's a chance for us all.

Who is the most memorable movie drunk? Write us at heymsn@microsoft.com.

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Don Kaye is based in Los Angeles and covers movies for MSN and Fangoria.