Although today’s drink comes to us from David Embury’s 1940s cocktail classic, “The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks,” it doesn’t really have any particular story to go with its classy provenance or courtly name. Embury just presents it as one of a series of drinks “based on an Applejack Sour.” It’s potentially a very sweet drink, at least on paper, since it includes both simple syrup (or sugar) and a very sweet orange liqueur. Still, the notoriously booze-severe Emory cautiously approves.
“With a base liquor as pungent as applejack,” Embury notes, “and with a liqueur as sharp as curacao… such addition may be possible within certain limits without rendering the cocktail too sickish sweet. With a bland liquor, such as gin or white label rum, and with a heavy fruit liqueur such as peach or apricot, this would be wholly impossible.”
On the whole, I don’t disagree. It’s a reasonably well balanced drink. Still, especially as I tend to be a bit of a baby about very tart flavors, I had a hard time finding a mix that was entirely satisfactory to me personally. Nevertheless, if you don’t mind strong citrus notes playing alongside the still under-utilized family of apple brandy boozes, this one might well be for you.
As I’ve mentioned here about 20,000 times, my approach to Drink of the Week is that these are reasonably quick and easy to make cocktails for the home, not major DIY projects. While I love the companies that send me free drinks and (for the most part) really good cocktails, if a recipe calls for, say, a ginger-asparagus-truffle reduction syrup, I’ll skip it. If it demands that I use freshly ground nutmeg, I’ll very likely just stick with the store-bought pre-ground stuff, thank you very much. In other words, I’m kind of lazy and I think you might be, too!
A truly smart and well-written sex comedy is a thing of beauty and not an everyday occurrence — rare in the past and rarer still in the present. Indeed, my film-besotted compatriots and I had relatively modest hopes for Melvin Frank’s 1968 near-farce, “Buono Sera, Mrs Campbell,” at this year’s TCM Fest. For the most part, we were expecting an entertaining but possibly rather routine 1960s romp and were there largely to check out its legendary star. That would be Italian bombshell-turned photographer and sculptor Gina Lollobrigida, a rather amazing woman on numerous counts who, at 88, still has a few thoughts on her mind and an innately humorous sensibility. The movie, much to our delight, turned out to be nearly as extraordinary as its star.
For fans of classic era film musicals, 1953’s “The Bandwagon” usually ranks somewhere just below “Singin’ in the Rain” in terms of sheer greatness. Devotees of director Vincente Minelli might even argue it’s somewhat better. At the same time, like it’s competition, the final film I saw at this year’s TCM Fest is not a movie that takes itself seriously. Indeed, the whole point of the film is that even just a little too much gravitas can have some pretty disastrous show business outcomes. It’s also a given by the conclusion that, when something isn’t working, it’s best to throw out your original idea and start something new.
When superstar film distributor Michael Schlesinger introduced 1934’s “Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back” at TCM Fest 2016 as the greatest movie we in the audience had never seen, I was inclined to be skeptical. After all, as a lifelong film geek, I’ve heard that one a lot. I was there because I’d long been curious about Drummond, an early pulpy prototype for James Bond created by one H. C. McNeile, aka “Sapper.” I was expecting a historically interesting movie but not one that was likely to become a huge personal favorite.
