In Barfly (1987), protagonist Henry Chinaski, a down-and-out, alcoholic poet lives most of his life in L.A. bars, drinking, bonding with regulars, hitting on women, and getting into fights. Chinaski's a poet of the streets, not a fancy poet of the Ivory Tower. His main haunt is the Golden Dome. Director Barbet Schroeder uses the bar setting in his film like director Michael Curtiz uses it in Casablanca (1942)—it's the center of the action. And beyond the action, Schroeder turns his camera, in a stunning montage, to the visual exteriors of Los Angeles bars with names like Firefly, Boulevard Inn, Ski Room, and The Elbow Room. As with diners and motels, the camera loves the look of neon set against the dark of night.
These are low-end bars where drunks and misfits while away the time; where prostitutes ply their trade amidst the stench of spilled beer and stale cigarette smoke. None of that depresses Chinaski, the bohemian, however, which is one of the things that makes this film special.
One of the reasons film directors love bars is that they provide cheap sets. Barfly’s bars are so evocative of the rejection of societal norms and the embrace of the underbelly that they become characters themselves. The total production budget for Barfly, starring Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway, was $5 million, which was considered modest even for the mid-1980s indie landscape. That's plenty of bang for the buck, as it’s a fine, original American film. Its low budget worked in its favor in capturing the dingy essence of the life of Charles Bukowski, the writer Chinaski’s modeled on.
The bar in The Shining (1980), situated in the cavernous, empty Gold Room at the Overlook Hotel, is sleek and pristine with a glass surface lighted from below, but the Gold Room’s psychologically oppressive, mirroring the mental state of Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson). In Lost In Translation (2003), The New York Bar at the Tokyo Park Hyatt, where critical scenes were shot, has a cool, minimalist design that enhances the film’s moody elegance. The Whole Year Inn at the beginning of Leaving Las Vegas (1996) has a posh, glamorous look that makes Ben Sanderson's slovenly, drunken behavior stand out even more.
Directors strive to shoot scenes that are revealing in their honesty and unpredictable in their human behavior. Every bar serves the substance that draws these qualities out—alcohol. Alcohol lowers action-killing inhibitions. Characters blurt out inappropriate confessions. They get into physical and verbal confrontations. Anyone can walk into a bar, a possibility with explosive potential.
In the movie Shane (1953), Shane (Alan Ladd) walks into Grafton’s Saloon, where he knows he's not wanted. He's looking for a fight. The men inside, hired guns for a ruthless cattle baron, taunt him, calling him “sodbuster.” They laugh when he orders a soda pop. What makes the scene so emotionally satisfying is that Shane, who’d heretofore been portrayed as stoic and non-violent, reveals an unknown side of him when he unleashes his fists against these rogues who'd been bullying him and his fellow homesteaders. Director George Stevens capped off one of the best slow burns in cinematic history with this riveting scene. His sound design—cracking wood, grunts, the sound of fists landing on faces—adds weight to a fight that represents the triumph of good over evil. It's the best bar fight in cinematic history.
No discussion of slow burns leading to bar fights would be complete without mentioning the basement tavern scene in Inglorious Basterds (2009). While the slow burn develops over the course of events in Shane, in this film director Quentin Tarantino compresses his slow burn into 20 minutes of white-knuckle tension. This scene is crucial to the plot because it illustrates how difficult it was for the Basterds to pull off their strategy of pretending to be German soldiers in Germany. As a result of the disaster in the tavern, the Basterds’ mission increases in difficulty, upping the dramatic tension. For the scene to work, it had to be shot in a confined space where strangers drink together—a bar. The cramped underground setting with low ceilings suggests the eruption to come. The shootout happens fast. It's chaotic yet controlled. The violence feels like a release, as it occurs after prolonged, suspenseful conversations. Just as in Shane, virtue triumphs over evil, but not without getting nicked up.
Bars are places where people go to feel good. Alcohol can also make them dangerous places to hang out. A customer might drink too much and kill someone with their car on the way home (21 Grams, 2003). A guy might flirt with a woman without knowing about the violent boyfriend who’s lurking nearby (Roadhouse, 1989). Overhearing sensitive information while drinking in the wrong bar could put one's life in danger (The Drop, 2014).
The bar’s one of the most enduring settings in film, with directors continually reinventing it in reflection of societal changes. In early American cinema—particularly Westerns—the bar appears as the saloon, a place of violence, masculinity, and escape from hard physical labor. The saloon was America’s first cinematic microcosm—a reflection of frontier chaos. As there were limited dating possibilities in the Wild West, prostitutes filled that role. But some of these prostitutes were much more than mere “working girls.” In Destry Rides Again (1939), Frenchy (Marlene Dietrich) is a prostitute (called a “dance hall girl” under the 1930s Hays Code censorship regulations) and saloon singer. With her exotic appeal—including a German accent—and sharp-witted knack for manipulating men through charm or insults, Frenchy’s not just a woman who entertains cowboys in the upstairs rooms of the saloon. She's the magnetic center of the film.
The film noir bar, in the hands of directors like Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, and Edward Dmytryk, was no longer a place of action and spectacle. It was a place of regret, secrecy, and moral drift. The bar was a psychological extension of the character’s state of mind. Cinematic bar archetypes emerged, like the cynical bartender, the loner at table, and the femme fatale. In Husbands (1970), John Cassavetes uses bars as places where middle-aged men try to rediscover their true selves in drunken breakdowns. With the rise of stylized and self-aware cinema in the post-2000 era, the bar evolved again. David Lynch turned the bar into a surreal dream zone in Blue Velvet (1986)—a place where dread and beauty intermingled.
Today, bars are often stripped of their masculine energy and violent undertones. Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation features a hotel bar as a place of fragile human contact between a man and a woman, both married to other people, thousands of miles away from home. David Fincher, in Gone Girl (2014) and The Social Network (2010), discards the trope of the bar as a place of chaos or emotional release. There's no warmth or conviviality in his controlled, sleek, and sterile drinking spots, a reflection of his philosophy that modern society’s losing its soul.
Bars serve as natural gathering spots where characters converge, driving plot through dialogue, conflict or chance encounters. Film mirrors the world in all its beauty, injustice, ugliness, humor and pain. The bar is a cinematic tool to put all of these elements on display.