By For many people in Britain, the pub is an institution that they just can’t survive without. From sinking pints until the early hours of the morning to having that long-awaited catch up with a friend you haven’t seen for a while, the pub serves us all through a variety of purposes – and it’s no different in the world of cinema.
Nowhere is that more apparent than with British filmmakers. A collective group of auteurs such as Guy Ritchie, Edgar Wright, Danny Boyle, Matthew Vaughn and Richard Curtis have used the pub as a way of expressing characters’ emotions and bringing out the best of British culture through this avenue. With genres as varied as the horror flick to the romantic comedy, the pub transcends these kind of categorised labels, working in almost every scenario to bring a smile to our face and a glimpse of nostalgia as we think back to our own pub experiences.
So with the pubs now reopening here in the United Kingdom (or the beer gardens at least… for now), we’ve decided to take a look at five of the most iconic depictions of that beautiful staple of the British way of life – within films made and set in the UK – that are bound to make you want to start sipping on a cold, refreshing pint in no time.
5) Love Actually
We’re starting our trip to the pub today with Kris Marshall’s American adventure scene towards the end of Richard Curtis’ Love Actually. Marshall’s character Colin decides to leave his life behind in London to travel across the pond, hoping to use his British charm to woo the ladies in the land of the USA.
While it may have seemed like an incredibly rash and ill-conceived plan, walking through the door and ordering a bottle of Bud with his English accent works wonders for Colin, as not one, not two, but three American beauties go crazy over over the magnetism of his Basildon allure as Smooth by Santana plays in the background.
The scene ends with Colin going back to stay with the three ladies in his very first night in America and finally fulfilling the fantasy he’d be dreaming about all his life. Following on from some of the more emotional and heartbreaking scenes presented throughout Love Actually, this sequence is perfect to relieve some of that tension and provide a bit of comic relief to give Richard Curtis’ script a little bit more balance.
Pub Rating: 6/10 – no pints are sank but a round of shots, a jukebox and a table cluttered with drinks allow this to just about squeeze into the top 5.
4) Legend
One is charming yet volatile, and the other is an unstable paranoid schizophrenic, but if there’s one thing that ties gangster twin brothers Reggie and Ronnie Kray (both played by Tom Hardy) together then it’s their love of a good, old-fashioned pub brawl. Set in the London underworld of the 1960s, Brian Hegeland’s Legend mixes tension with humour as the Krays are outnumbered by a rival gang looking to cause trouble, yet Reggie still finds time to pour himself a pint of Guinness.
Brass knuckles and hammer blows soon come flying out as the Krays show their bloodthirsty, more gruesome side and their affinity for violence becomes clear for all to see. It’s an old-school style of fighting in an old-school setting – with the background of the vintage pub scenery an iconic throwback to the days when pints wouldn’t cost you an arm and a leg.
Although the script is a bit of a mess and lacks a clear focus at times, you can’t deny the brilliance of Hardy’s performance in the dual role of the Kray twins – particularly in this scene which explicitly highlights the differences in the two characters’ personalities. The most memorable moment in a film packed full of different storylines and entertaining dialogue, it proves that you just can’t go wrong with a refreshing pint of Guinness.
Pub rating: 7/10 – heralding back to the golden era of the British pub, the scene gets bonus nostalgia points but loses marks for the unbranded Guinness glass.
3) Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
Guy Ritchie’s London comedy-crime masterpiece Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels is littered with memorable scenes set in the pub, so it was difficult to limit its inclusion to just one of them. Starring Jason Statham, Nick Moran, Jason Flemyng and Dexter Fletcher as four friends desperate to pay back a gambling debt of £500,000 before mobster Hatchet Harry disposes of them, the film features an impressive array of entertaining secondary characters: including Rory Breaker – whose eventful trip to the pub is covered in this entry.
Breaker (played by Vas Blackwood) has his story, about the pub, told to the main characters by the bartender in the pub, meaning double the pub fun for all of you drinking establishment fans out there. The tale of Rory Breaker involves an argument about the volume of a football match, followed by a spray of alcohol, a lit match, and finished off with some action from a fire extinguisher.
Regarded as a classic in British cinema and reigniting the trend of the London gangster flick which saw the likes of Snatch, Layer Cake, RocknRolla and the aforementioned Legend all follow, the film is as hilarious as it is influential in making stars of its actors and director in Guy Ritchie’s first feature-film. A confusing title perhaps, but there’s nothing confusing about the joys of a good drink in the pub hearing tales about legends of the bar’s past.
Pub rating: 7.5/10 – while you can’t go wrong by including a football match on the TV, and the mixture of drinks on show is impressive – who really orders a cocktail at a pub?
2) The World’s End
If there’s one thing that’s better than just a mere trip to the pub, then it’s a pub crawl. Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Eddie Marsan, Paddy Considine and Martin Freeman try and conquer 12 of them, from The First Post to The World’s End, as they return to their home town of Newton Haven – where everything isn’t quite how they remembered it.
The third film in Edgar Wright’s Cornetto Trilogy, The World’s End continues on from the themes of Wright’s previous works Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz – which both feature prominent pub scenes in some capacity. Although there is one major difference between this film and those films, and the rest of the films in this list, and maybe any film that I can ever remember watching, come to think of it: it’s exclusively about pubs.
With plenty of bar fights and the destruction of strange alien-like imposters, there’s a great mix of action and comedy as you’ll always find in Edgar Wright’s films. But when it comes to pure pub proceedings, then you really can’t find many films with a higher pub presence percentage. Now that’s what I call alliteration.
Pub rating: 8.5/10 – is there such a thing as too much pub? The World’s End perhaps crosses that border ever so slightly, but with 12 different pubs on show it’s always going to rank highly on the pub index-ometer.
1) Trainspotting
If there’s one film which combines all of the previous elements discussed in this list into the culmination of the perfect pub scene in British cinema, then it’s the Begbie glassing scene from Danny Boyle’s 1996 classic Trainspotting. The group gather round a table overflowing with discarded pint glasses to hear Begbie (Robert Carlyle) tell the story of how he attacked a rival in a pool hall.
The nostalgia from the 1990s is flowing heavily as cigarettes are smoked freely, loud chatter fills the air, and downstairs, a crowd builds up unbeknownst to what the psychotic Begbie is about to do. He finishes his fabricated story just as he finishes drinking his pint, proceeding to throw the glass over his shoulder and straight onto a woman’s head. Blood gushes down her face as Begbie saunters downstairs trying to find which mysterious stranger glassed the poor woman, looking for a fight from anyone who happens to get in his way.
The booze, the tall tales, the brawling, the second-hand cigarette smoke. If there’s another scene in cinema which perfectly captures the pub atmosphere which we’re so accustomed to here in Britain as much as this one from Trainspotting, then I’m yet to see it. With Renton (Ewan McGregor), Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller) and Spud (Ewen Bremner) all listening on, it’s amazing to think that the drama and panic arisen from this scene is absolutely nowhere near some of the pain that is to come for these characters later on in the film. But, for now at least, they have the ability to casually sip their pints and have a good old chinwag with those closest to them in the pub – something we’ve all been longing for desperately throughout these lockdowns.
Pub rating: 10/10 – the ultimate pub scene in British cinema. Difficult to find any faults to dock it points and the dire 1990s fashion choices make it all the more nostalgic.
Written by Josh Glover.
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