10 Best Booze-Guzzling Movie Characters

One of the greatest films of all time also features one of the all-time great boozers in the character of broken-hearted Rick Blaine, a once and future resistance fighter during the Second World War. Blaine has shed his past in Paris and now runs the best little bar in Morocco, Rick’s Café Americain, and rules it like a king. He has the best music, the best drinks, the best clientele, everybody comes to Rick’s, but at the centre of his existence he also has a great big hole that can’t be filled.

That is of course until "of all the gin joints in the all the towns in all the world she walks right into mine." So begins the brilliance that is Casablanca as the expatriate Rick, a man who "sticks his neck out for no one" is forced to reconsider his life and made to choose between love and duty, Isla or war, in the tear-jerking climax.

So how much does he drink? Lots. Rick Blaine is constantly nursing a brandy or bourbon throughout the film and is a brooding, desperate boozer of a man. When Major Strasser asks what nationality he is, Rick answers "drunkard."

Rick remains a classy drinker, refusing to drink with the riff-raff, and whilst he’s never without a drink he never seems truly drunk either. Bogart is fantastic as the woman-hardened man and spirit-hardened drinker whose tough exterior melts by the end of the movie.

Not bad for a film about a bar and a barman.