10 best movie bar scenes

If you ask me, there’s no better place to capture the most basic human interactions than a bar. That could very well be only because I really like beer, but so must a whole lot of filmmakers, because a host of movies use the local watering hole as the venue for some of their most pivotal scenes. Whether it’s a zombie standoff, a meeting of the minds, or the most tense game of “guess the famous person” – the Nazi version! – ever played, it all just works better when there’s booze involved. So without further ado, here are ten of the best bar scenes ever. Like every list, this one is in no way exhaustive, but these are ten of my favorites across movie history. Be warned, this article contains spoilers!

Casablanca

Basically the entirety of Casablanca is one big bar scene, so it’s hard to choose one moment over the rest. Do I go with Sam playing “As Time Goes By”? “Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine”? Both of those are classic moments in their own right – seriously, it’s amazing how many culturally significant quotes there are throughout this movie – but the most powerful (and, arguably, pivotal) scene comes when Paul Henreid’s Victor Laszlo leads the patron’s of Rick’s in a rousing chorus of “La Marseillaise,” drowning out the Nazi soldiers as they sing “Die Wacht am Rhein.” This scene is the first real sign of a turning point for Humphrey Bogart’s Rick, as until now he has been totally resigned to, if not an ambiguous position, a neutral one. The moment he OKs Laszlo’s direction to the band to play “La Marseillaise,” he takes a clear step towards joining the resistance.

Inglourious Basterds

My favorite Quentin Tarantino film, Inglourious Basterds, has its fair share of tension-filled sequences – the opening featuring Christoph Waltz’s Landa slowly wearing down Mr. LaPadite and then the later scene where Shosanna is forced to watch the man who killed her family enjoy strudel are enough to make any viewer cringe – but we’re talking about bar scenes here, and the one that takes place in the basement tavern in France is a doozy. Tarantino has a way of injecting little innocuous references or discussions into stressful scenarios, making that harmless topic feel rife with anxiety because of what’s going on around them.

Watching the small group of Basterds and Bridget von Hammersmark secretly discussing their plan to dismantle the Third Reich would have been tense enough. Adding an unexpected group of celebrating Nazi soldiers (and one commanding officer with a keen ear for accents) brings it to a whole new level. I cringed every time the drunk new father came up to the Basterds’ table, just waiting for something horrible to happen, and then when the Nazi major joins them it’s clear it’s only a matter of time. I’ve never felt such a sense of dread at a party game like I did watching the round of the guessing game they play, and Tarantino certainly cashes in his chips with a quick and ferocious shootout that puts the final scene of Reservoir Dogs to shame.

The Blues Brothers

Every band has a reason for playing their music, a message they want to send, but outside of Christian Rock, very rarely are those bands “on a mission from God.” Even with approval from on high, booking gigs is tough work, and the reformed band cons their way into playing at Bob’s Country Bunker, pretending that they’re the Good Ol’ Boys. Lesson number one to learn from the Blues Brothers’ country-western gig: chicken wire between the stage and the audience is never a good thing.

Thanks to a steady stream of bottles shattering on the chicken wire, it becomes clear to Jake and Elwood that their go-to set list won’t work on Bob’s patrons. It’s only after a crowd-pleasing rendition of the theme from Rawhide that they’re able to escape with their lives, though not before adding the real Good Ol’ Boys and an unpaid Bob to their growing list of enemies.

Good Will Hunting 

I wrote at some length about Good Will Hunting recently, but it deserves mention here too. There are plenty of scenes to choose from – the movie is, after all, about working class young adults from Boston – but my favorite is the one where Matt Damon’s Will schools the pretentious Harvard kid who was mocking his friend. It’s always so satisfying watching an a-hole get put in his place, and when Will, the poor kid from Southie, calls this pretentious jerk on all the textbooks he’s stealing his “original” ideas from, it’s a thing of beauty.

This is also the first time we meet Skylar, who turns out to be the first girl to really break through Will’s shell (even if he doesn’t admit it to himself until the very end).

Shaun of the Dead 

The movie that inspired me to write this article, The World’s End, is the third movie in what Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost have dubbed the Cornetto Trilogy (named after a British ice cream brand). While this final movie is sure to have its fair share of wonderful bar scenes (it is, after all, about a pub crawl in a town that has been taken over by robots), let’s look back at the zom-rom-com that started it all. After a daring rescue of his mother, girlfriend, and others, Simon Pegg’s Shaun leads the group to their new safe house, the Winchester Pub. This makes perfect sense to me, because my first instinct upon the arrival of the end of the world would be to go somewhere I could get totally blitzed.

Because nowhere is truly safe in the zombie apocalypse, Shaun and his friends are eventually discovered by the undead thanks to an ill-advised trip to the jukebox. This gives us the only time in history that a zombie attack has been accompanied by the song stylings of Queen, and the world is a better place for it. As “Don’t Stop Me Now” blasts from the jukebox, Shaun and his ex Liz rhythmically (and unsuccessfully) beat the walking corpse of the Winchester’s proprietor with pool cues while the horde of zombies outside are lured to the bar by the wonderful voice of Freddie Mercury. All of that leads to the kind of chaotic and flesh-devouring conclusion that you’d expect from one of the best zombie movies of the last 20 years.

Road House

I’ve never personally been in or around a bar fight, but I’d like to think that they all involve at least 30% roundhouse kicks. That’s what Road House taught me, and I choose not to question it. Obviously, in a movie about a man who specializes in diffusing rowdy situations – typically, again, by roundhouse kicking them right in the face – there is a host of bar-centric scenes to choose from. All of them naturally result in many a broken beer bottle, window, chair, table, and/or face courtesy of Patrick Swayze, and one is equally as glorious as the next. But anybody who has seen Road House knows that the best scene in the movie does not take place in a bar, which means I’m totally gonna cheat on my own article (I’ll allow it).

Towards the end of the film, Swayze has just narrowly escaped an exploding cabin with an unconscious Sam Elliott over his shoulders when he sees the villain’s Lorenzo Lamas lookalike henchman speeding away on what appears to be a Vespa. Shirtless Swayze tackles Lamas Lite and proceeds to rain blows and, yes, roundhouses, down upon him before, Mortal Kombat-style, ripping the man’s throat out with his bare hands. I’ll repeat that in case you need to hear it again: he rips a man’s throat out with his bare hands. ‘Nuff said.

Django Unchained

If you watch the aforementioned Inglourious Basterds, it becomes pretty apparent that Christoph Waltz was born to speak things written by Quentin Tarantino (the director has said as much himself). One of the highlights of their second collaboration, Django Unchained, is the scene in which Waltz’s King Schultz enlists Jamie Foxx’s Django to join him as a fellow bounty hunter as they sip on beautifully poured pints of beer. It’s listening to Waltz rattle off Tarantino’s dialogue that makes this scene stand out so well in my memory – well, that and the fact that it made me really thirsty for an IPA.

Goodfellas

By the time we meet made man Billy Batts after his release from prison, we’ve already gotten a pretty good idea that Joe Pesci’s Tommy Devito is, let’s say, unpredictable. His fuse is so short it’s practically non-existent, so when Batts starts disrespecting Tommy about his shoe shining days, we know it’s only a matter of time before something bad happens. Still, the brutality of the beating Tommy gives Batts – with ample help from Robert De Niro’s Jimmy Conway – is pretty shocking. Tommy’s fate is pretty much sealed from here on out, since once a guy is “made” it’s forbidden to touch him without strict permission from the mafia bosses. Almost a decade later, Tommy is lured to his death with a false promise that it’s his time to get made.

Star Wars

This list would be a sham if I didn’t include the introduction of the most iconic galactic smuggler the world has ever known. The scene at the Mos Eisley Cantina (thanks Wikipedia!) gave audiences their first look at Han Solo and Chewbacca, a pair that have inspired generations of children (and undoubtedly some adults) to dress in leather vests and pilot their own cardboard-box versions of the Millennium Falcon. We also get our first glimpse at how dangerous Obi-Wan can be as he lightsabers a guy’s arm off, but it’s really Han’s intro that’s most important here. Oh, and despite what the revamped, all-CGI-all-the-time new edition of the original Star Wars may want us to believe, Han shot first. End of story.

Raiders of the Lost Ark

Anybody who can drink a big Neaplese man under the table is not someone with whom to mess. That’s how we first meet Marion Ravenwood, and it solidifies that she easily has the highest alcohol tolerance of any love interest in movie history. Her bar in the middle of nowhere is the scene for not only the most one-sided drinking contest ever, but also the first direct confrontation between Indiana Jones and the ever-so-creepy Major Toht (I had to check IMDB for that guy’s name – I’m pretty sure no one ever actually addresses him by name in the entire film). Thanks to some flaming booze and plenty of automatic weapons, Indy gets his first taste of the Nazi opposition and a partner on his quest for the Ark of the Covenant.