“I have two ambitions in life: one is to drink every pub dry, the other is to sleep with every woman on earth” — thus said the late, great British thespian Oliver Reed. When I visited the Crown Liquor Saloon in Belfast, Northern Ireland, more than a decade ago, I had neither ambition in mind. Rather, my mind was full of Oliver Reed’s uncle, Sir Carol Reed. I was in Belfast as part of a pan-British Isles film culture project I was undertaking for the British Film Institute. After landing in Belfast at the crack of dawn and participating in an enervating day of meetings, I requested my gracious hosts to take me to a pub. Not any pub, but specifically the Crown.
The reason was simple. The Crown features prominently in Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out (1947). Now, Reed is perhaps best known for his magisterial The Third Man (1949), The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965) and Oliver! (1968), but Odd Man Out is often unfairly overlooked. Indeed, I had overlooked it myself until a Tokyo-based friend of mine, who watches only noir films made before 1965, brought it to my attention. In the film, shot in stunning monochrome, James Mason plays an Irish nationalist leader who’s on the run from the police. He eventually ends up at the Crown, wounded, and takes refuge in a booth. “Snug, not booth,” as my Belfast colleagues swiftly corrected me.
Though it was relatively busy, we found a vacant snug and proceeded to quaff pints of Guinness. The obvious rumination then was to recall other films that had memorable scenes set in pubs. The first one that came to mind was Bruce Robinson’s cult British classic Withnail & I (1987) where Richard E Grant (Withnail) and Paul McGann (& I) are at the Mother Black Cap pub in Camden, London, discussing a trip to the countryside to visit fey Uncle Monty. A Guinness-quaffing punter calls McGann a ‘perfumed ponce’ and after a hilarious and pusillanimous confrontation, the titular duo makes good their escape.
For sheer hostility by locals towards strangers in a pub, nothing can quite match The Green Man pub in the fictional island of Summerisle in Robin Hardy’s British horror classic, The Wicker Man (1973). The locals who infest the pub are feral and Britt Ekland, playing the pub landlord’s daughter, thinks nothing of moving around in the altogether.
Coming to more recent fare, Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004) is set almost entirely in The Winchester pub in North London. Simon Pegg and Nick Frost memorably fight off hordes of zombies. Wright takes the theme further in The World’s End (2013), where Pegg and Frost and a bunch of former drinking mates reunite to complete the hitherto incomplete pub-crawl from years ago at Newton Haven. The aim is to have a pint at all 12 pubs in town, ending at The World’s End pub. Trouble is, they run smack dab into the middle of an alien invasion.
And, since you ask, the Guinness does indeed taste better in Ireland than anywhere else in the world.