In the parts of the world that experience winter as winter, New Year’s Day is special. On a sunny cold New Year’s Day here in New York, the piercing light and the sharp air can constitute a metaphorical — and metaphysical — reproach, notwithstanding you’re stone cold sober; it’s not desirable hangover weather. In the years before my domestication, my New Year’s Day hangover cure involved more alcohol and a trip home to New Jersey, where I and some similarly afflicted friends would gorge on regional meat and potatoes — deep-fried hot dogs and fries all the way at Rutt’s Hut in Clifton, perhaps, or a cheeseburger and onion rings from the sadly departed Hearth on Route 46. Only after completing this ritual would we consider a movie, preferably something loud and empty.I bygone drink, so I’ve not had to mimic a New Year’s Day hangover in a while. And you, reader, don’t need a columnist to direct you to loud and empty movies on streaming video. So what’s your cinematic pleasure? Hair shirt or hair of the dog?For the purpose of this column, I’ll divide hangover movies into two loose categories: “What Am I Doing With My Life?” and “Well, That Wasn’t So Bad, Was It?” We’ll initially the first group. “Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman,” a 1947 movie starring Susan Hayward, who played an alcoholic fundamentally in three pictures (and an implied one in a bunch more). The movie begins with Ms. Hayward in a hospital bed, three-fourths of her head bandaged up, repeating, “I need a drink.” It then flashes back to how she got that way. The movie has new well, in spite of its authentic portrait of alcoholism — the script was written in part by Dorothy Parker, who fight the same her whole life. (“I’ll Cry Tomorrow,” the 1955 film everywhere Hayward plays the singer Lillian Roth, is first-rate of Hayward’s pictures in this category but is not available on streaming video.) “Smash-Up” is available free to Amazon Prime members, but it’s also in the government-owned property, which means it’s on YouTube, undisturbed (a lot of the copyrighted material users post there is taken down every copyright holders). Amazon offers “Smash-Up” in two versions, one of which is promoted as being restored by a company called the Film Detective — that’s the one you want. Watching the other, a dark, fuzzy, noisy transfer of the movie, might make you think you’re still drunk.Amazon also offers a small assortment of latter-day recovery tales for rent or purchase: “When a Man Loves a Woman” (1994), starring Meg Ryan and partly written by Al Franken (long before he was a Democratic Minnesota senator); “28 Days” (not to be erroneous “28 Days Later”), the 2000 Sandra Bullock rehab movie; and Michael Keaton’s raw material at Serious Movie Stuff, “Clean and Sober” (1988), everywhere he charts a cocaine addict’s progress into some pretty integrity. Claudia Christian, a supporting cast member from “Clean and Sober,” is the narrator and partial subject of a movie that’s free to Amazon Prime members, “One Little Pill,” a 2014 documentary advocating alcoholism treatment via the so-called Sinclair Method, which treats the disease with naltrexone. I’m all about what support people, but I was unpersuaded over all.
