BARFLY -1987-

BARFLY Henry Chinaski is an alcoholic and great writer who spends his life in bars. His favorite is the "Golden Horn", frequented by a ragtag group of vagabonds, prostitutes and other waste society. Henry gets along very well with Jim, the bartender by day, but he frequently discusses with Eddie, the night bartender, an angry and boastful man. Their fights are the object of bets by the clients. When Henry wins, he spends his money touring the other bars in the neighborhood. That's how he meets Wanda, a woman still beautiful and as alcoholic as he is.

When the human being did not walk upright and was governed by the Law of the Strongest, we quickly come to mind the image of a dirty, hairy Cro-Magnon man, without law or order to protect him or stop him. Mickey Rourke (The Law of the Street, The Wrestler) gets into the skin of Henry Chinaski (alter ego of writer Charles Bukowski who also served as screenwriter in this film), living image and likeness of a caveman of the twentieth century. He wanders from bar to bar, has no territory of his own, fights for refusing to pay for the round and allows himself the luxury of meeting depressed women (Wanda and Tully, played by Faye Dunaway and Alice Krige respectively), although love does not care about a whistle . Wanda, an alcoholic like him, represents the passive side of which Chinaski is so proud and Tilly, the naive and repressed editor who sees in the drunk something more than a genius, reflects just the opposite; the ambition and the success, circles of which he resists to be part, in an excess of lyric of the pride and anticonformism united. In spite of everything Henry will continue to stink of fart, whiskey, wine and cigarette smoke behind a face chewed by the sweat and blood of the dozens of beatings he receives from Eddie (Frank Stallone, brother of Sylvester) the unfriendly bartender who does not trust to nobody. But Henry has the unconditional but passive support of another good bartender, Eddie (JC Quinn) and a retinue of old drunks like walking stunted livers and stubborn fulanas who make their living making fellatio in rotten bar latrines before spending their last years in a geriatric.

Barbet Schroeder (Before and After, The Lawyer of Terror) directs this film produced by Francis Ford Coppola and paid by executives and off-roaders at the time, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, more frequent in financing action films than dramas with an autobiographical character. Shortly after completing the shoot, Bukowski had the willpower to write his experience on the set (he actually appears in a fleeting cameo as a bar client) in the autobiographical novel "Hollywood."