Stack says that and I went, "huh?" What era are we in?
shareI think in the book, the era was 1920's/30's; although I have not read it
myself. Found this in the IMDB TRIVIA section.
"OOO...I'M GON' TELL MAMA!"
Prohibition was in effect in the U.S. for nearly 14 years, from 1920 to 1933.
shareEven after Prohibition was repealed in 1933, there were probably still bootleggers, or I guess moonshiners is the work, making illegal whiskey. Probably still are!
shareI figured its set in the 50s in the time the film was made, but Stack's character likes it because thats what he started out on at 14 which would have been in the 1920s,some hard core moonshine,that the Bars would have still kept around for low rent types..
shareIt couldn't be the 20-30s because of the style of the movie. The costumes and vehicles point more to the 50s as does the airplane used in opening scene. There are still "bootleggers" today who do make alcohol except it may be a lot more stronger then the name brand stuff that is approved by the governemnt so when Stack mentioned the bootleg stuff, it is more likely he meant the illegal alcohol.
share>>> and I went, "huh?" What era are we in?
A few years back I was at a party where the host had secured and served a jug of honest to goodness white lightning. I had some just so I could say I had tried it out. It turned out this was a smoother drink then any of the mass-market whiskys I had ever sampled. That's counter-intuitive but it's true.
A moonshiner who knows what he is doing can make a good product. Presumably Kyle has a connoisseur's expertise in finding such craftsmen. There aren't many left now but back in 1950s Texas they shouldn't have been too difficult to find.
There are still lots of folks making moonshine, bootleg whiskey, you name it. The "revenuers" from the Treasury Department (ATF) are kept busy year round pursuing bootleggers (a term which refers to any form of illegal distilling of alcohol).
In the 50s (and this movie is set in its contemporary times) such stuff was easily had, particularly in places like Texas where bootlegging has a long history. Clearly Kyle had grown up drinking it (it was probably the first liquor he'd ever had as a kid) and had a taste for the kick it gave him.
I love his repeated demands for "A bottle of corn!" The fact that the bartender had to go to the back room to get it, and bring it out wrapped in old newspaper (not very surreptitiously) demonstrates its illegal provenance. That may have been part of the "kick" too.
Note that Prohibition didn't end for everybody in America in 1933. Many counties in a variety of states kept various liquor prohibiton laws in place, and many still do even to this day.*
I'm wondering if Kyle Hadley (Stack's character) could have legally bought ANY whiskey (bootleg or otherwise) at that seedy bar that's depicted in the film. That's because Texas had (and still has) so-called "dry" and "moist" counties, where liquor sales are either banned outright ["dry"], or some combination of lesser alcoholic drinks (beer and wine, but not hard stuff) are legal to sell ["moist"]. And in some of those "dry" counties, private clubs are exempted. The Japsers in this film did in fact belong to a private members only club, so I'm assuming that's how they were able to skirt the dry laws of that county and obtain the quality stuff and the "bonded whiskey" as that one guy called it. But a private club would obviously not have been keen on stocking bootleg corn liquor, so that's what drove Kyle to obtain it through his illegal source: the bartender at that seedy bar.
I noticed that that seedy bar sold beer (and maybe wine) but I did not see any hard liquor bottles on the shelf back of the counter. So I'm thinking this must have been a "moist" county.
*Further reading - quite an interesting article:
http://www2.potsdam.edu/hansondj/Controversies/1140551076.html
After Prohibition ended, the Federal Government still required a license to produce more than a small, fixed amount annually (a few gallons, I believe.) This is a personal use allowance. In many parts of the country (most famously, Appalachia) people resented the "revnuers" control of liquor production, leading to the production of mostly corn whiskey, in remote areas, mostly at night. Cooking shine has remained a custom in many places (my grand mother, a widow, cooked it through the 1940s to help support her children (being Polish, she used mostly potatoes.) Stock car racing started as shine runners racing the vehicles used to transport illicit booze.
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