Coffee and Noir: HEAT

every instance of coffee in noir: 015

You learn a lot about a noir character by their coffee: sugar? cream? more whiskey than caffeine?

I’m cataloging every noir scene where coffee plays a role — rote and ritual, soul-dark or cream and sugar, served from dingy diners to shiny penthouses.

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When cop Vincent Hannah (Pacino) pulls robber Neil McCauley (De Niro) over, both have pulled their weapons in expectation of a big showdown. Instead they exchange two sentences, both concerned with the same thing this project is . . .

coffee.

But once they’re at the cafe, though waiters serve it and other patrons drink it all around them, Hanna and McCauley don’t actually sip it, not once. The beverage is entirely a pretext, something to give them an excuse for a small ceasefire in a public place, and they both buy in.

It’s a pretext for the characters, but Pacino and De Niro as actors could still drink it, so why don’t they?

Maybe the soundie or continuity supervisor said ‘please for the love of god you’re killing us,” on a set like this — good enough to know the timing of a coffee cup being lifted doesn’t matter when the content of the scene is straight fire, and where actors of this status do whatever the fuck they want — that seems unlikely.

Maybe the set coffee was terrible, or the actors were already overstimulated caffeinated.

But it feels to me more likely Pacino and De Niro made the choice they would follow their characters’ leads, and acknowledge both coffee and the ‘business’ of playing with the mugs serve to cover up what they’re really after. This is the one scene where Hannah and McCauley are dropping all pretence, so too do the men playing them, simply giving their raw performances across the table from another actor at the absolute top of his game, with the coffee growing cold between them.