Cinema's best bars

From Carrie Rickey's "Flickgrrl"

www.philly.com/philly/blogs/

flickgrrl

Watching Burlesque, the preposterous and intermittently entertaining backstage musical that takes place in a nightclub and, like Flashdance, Showgirls and most Elvis movies, likewise takes place in its own special universe, my mind drifted to the movie bars, boites, cabarets, clubs, and dives where I'd like to hoist a glass.

Many movie buffs would think first of Rick's in Casablanca (1942), where Dooley Wilson played the piano while Humphrey Bogart pined for Ingrid Bergman and affected an apolitical stance. Other great movie nightclubs are in Hollywood musicals, like the art deco Silver Sandal in Swing Time (1936), where Fred Astaire partnered Ginger Rogers across a gleaming Bakelite floor. Or the eponymous Cabaret in the 1972 film where Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey performed and watched Germany transform from the Weimar Republic to Third Reich.

Or the Cotton Club in the movie of the same name (1984), the self-styled "plantation," where black acts (Gregory and Maurice Hines in the movie) performed for white revelers.

Surely the oddest of these clubs is either the one in Flashdance (1983) where Pittsburgh welder Jennifer Beals moonlights as an exotic dancer or the one in Coyote Ugly (2000), where Piper Perabo dances with other cowboy-booted bartendresses and drives the boys wild.

The ultimate movie-musical bar would have to be Hernando's Hideaway, that dark, secluded place where no one knows your face, in The Pajama Game (1957).

The place I'd most like to have a drink is the piano bar in Nick Ray's In a Lonely Place (1950) where Humphrey Bogart takes Gloria Grahame on a romantic date, although the Magic Club in Susan Seidelman's Desperately Seeking Susan (1983), with Ann Magnuson as a retro hatcheck girl and Rosanna Arquette as a magician's assistant, runs a close second, tied with any of the watering holes frequented by Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn in Doug Liman's Swingers (1996).

Which movie bar do you wish were in your neighborhood? Why? What would you order? Bottoms up!!