10 Best Booze-Guzzling Movie Characters

We meet Frank Galvin, a once big-shot lawyer, in a dreary bar, a kind of second home to the man who has fallen on truly hard times. Galvin is nursing a beer, smoking a cigarette, and fighting a pinball machine. He’s always in bars, in fact, womanizing and drinking Irish and ambulance-chasing for new cases. Galvin is such a b*stard that he hands his business card out at funerals.

With each passing hangover, Galvin descends further into obscurity and depression. His career goes nowhere until one day a peculiar case comes along which galvanises his career, not to mention offering him a chance for personal salvation.

At first, it’s an open-shut case: Galvin intends to pocket a little money from it and continue to drink his life away on the proceeds. But Galvin looks deeper into the case, realises that a young girl’s life has been criminally exploited by the powers-that-be and with messianic zeal finds his former goodness and swings the verdict his way.

Frank Galvin is one of cinema’s great redemption stories. Throughout the trial Galvin is haunted by his addictions. In one scene he hides behind a door, raging inwardly, desperate to drink himself into oblivion. And Galvin doesn’t go cold turkey either, but drinks to steady his nerves. He drinks so that he can do the right thing by this poor little girl’s family. This is Newman’s most under-rated performance and Sidney Lumet’s most under-rated film.