Movie Star Moment: Nick Nolte

Nick Nolte as Doc
in "Cannery Row" (1982)

   There's a scene in "Cannery Row" where Nick Nolte drinks a beer milkshake. It happens like this:
    Nolte plays a marine biologist named Doc, who's living on a famously rundown stretch of the Monterey waterfront and grudgingly, awkwardly falling for a hooker named Suzy, played by Debra Winger. Doc's drinking a beer out in front of his storefront lab one night, when he looks up and sees Suzy with a customer through a window of the local cathouse. It's more than he can take at that point, so he gets in his car and drives off. He ends up at a roadside diner, where he takes a seat at the counter, and when the waitress asks him what he wants, he remembers Suzy telling him about a guy who once drank a beer milkshake. Doc couldn't feel much lower anyway right then, so he orders one. The waitress (Judy Kerr) eyes him with a mixture of suspicion and seen-it-all resignation and proceeds to fill the order. She sets it down on the counter and Doc studies it for a moment and then slowly brings it to his lips. When he puts it down again, there's foam on his mustache and a look on his face that tells you a lot about what it's like to drink a beer milkshake. Nolte's been known to go to extremes in the interest of realism in his performances, so it's not too outlandish to think that what he's drinking there is the real thing. From his reacti0n, it sure looks like it could be. He looks like he could hurl at any moment, which he doesn't, but one thing at least seems obvious: The cure for romantic agony, or anything else for that matter, is probably not a beer milkshake.