Soon after the first reel of celluloid unspooled in Hollywood, the cocktail shakers began chattering. When Garbo first spoke, in the 1930 film “Anna Christie,” she ordered a drink: “Gimme me a whiskey, ginger ale on the side. And don’t be stingy, baby.”

Mixed drinks loom large in the movies because they can do all sorts of things, and send all kinds of messages. They can establish character, set up a romantic scene, introduce a plot twist, ignite a gag.

Without too much effort it is possible to map out a cocktail trail that wends its way from the earliest silent films to the 21st century with nary a break, not even for Prohibition. Especially not for Prohibition, when America was dry but the movies were soaking wet.

This is precisely what the British writers Will Francis and Stacey Marsh have done in “Cocktails of the Movies: An Illustrated Guide to Cinematic Mixology,” a fond survey of more than 150 bibulous scenes, from “Caught in a Cabaret,” a 1914 Mack Sennett film, to last year’s “Grand Budapest Hotel.”

It’s a big topic. A thoroughgoing treatment of the subject would run to a thousand pages, and an equal number of cocktails. (If you don’t find what you’re looking for in “Cocktails of the Movies,” published last month, you might find it in another new book, “Cocktail Noir: From Gangsters and Gin Joints to Gumshoes and Gimlets,” by Scott M. Deitche, who doesn’t limit himself to movies but covers some of the same liquid ground.)

Think of movie cocktails as drinkable Oscars, a timeline of supporting performances that chime neatly both with the coming awards season (beginning with the Gotham Independent Film Awards a little over a week from now) and one of the most highly anticipated cocktail moments in recent movie history. In “Spectre,” a runaway hit after two weeks in theaters, Daniel Craig, as James Bond, forgoes his traditional vodka martini with lemon twist. Instead, in a meaningful shared moment with Léa Seydoux, as the brainy and beautiful psychologist Madeleine Swann, he orders a dirty martini, ingredients unstated, although three little skewered olives can be seen in the glass.

It goes down easy. The same can be said for quite a few of the filmic cocktails celebrated in the Francis and Marsh book. I found, when mixing a selection and checking out a film or two on the list, that a good rye Manhattan does wonders to make even the slowest scene glide by.

The cocktail is just a gag in “Caught in a Cabaret,” a silent Charlie Chaplin film with funny intertitles by his brother Sydney. In one scene, Mabel Normand, playing a pampered young thing, stands outside her palatial home and, asked by a factotum if there are any orders for the groom, says, “Yes, tell him to mix me a ‘Horse’s Neck.’”

The drink is nothing great, only whiskey and ginger ale with a twist of lemon, served in a highball glass, but it doesn’t have to do much here — just raise a laugh. The cocktail itself does not even make an appearance.

It’s quite otherwise with the lovingly prepared Old Fashioned in “Crazy, Stupid, Love.” The cocktail as instrument of seduction has a long cinematic pedigree. So does the romantic lead who’s a dab hand with a cocktail shaker. But Ryan Gosling, a wolf on the prowl, adds a 21st-century, artisanal ingredient to the formula. With practiced hands, before the camera’s leering lens, he drips Angostura bitters on a sugar cube at the bottom of a heavy glass, gently pours two fingers of exquisitely priced bourbon, adds ice with a silver spoon. Then, with surgical precision, he detaches a broad swath of peel from an orange and squeezes it, ever so gently, causing its volatile oils to spray a mist over the surface of the drink. This he presents, like a chalice, to Emma Stone.

Equally revealing is Jake Gyllenhaal’s signature drink in “Zodiac,” the Aqua Velva. It is a ridiculous concoction, tinted with blue to look like Aqua Velva after-shave, and served, in one of the film’s bar scenes, with a little pink umbrella anchored in a big straw.

Robert Downey Jr., as a tough crime reporter investigating the 1970s Zodiac murders in San Francisco, eyes the drink suspiciously. “This can no longer be ignored,” he says. “What is that you’re drinking?” Mr. Gyllenhaal answers: “It’s an Aqua Velva. You wouldn’t make fun of it if you tried it.”

It’s the perfect cocktail for a goofy and guileless former Boy Scout, who drinks it through the straw. It also contains a secondary meaning. It says that Mr. Gyllenhaal’s character, a political cartoonist determined to crack the coded messages sent by the Zodiac Killer, thinks outside the box. His innocent curiosity leads him to connections and clues that jaded investigators ignore. The fact that Mr. Downey takes the Aqua Velva plunge — together, he and Mr. Gyllenhaal polish off a tableful of the drinks — says something about him too.

The book includes, as it must, the Dude’s White Russian (in Dude-speak, a Caucasian) from “The Big Lebowski” and Carrie Bradshaw’s Cosmopolitan in “Sex and the City.” (No room for the Flirtini, alas.) Good taste is not the criterion. If it were, the book would shut the door on the Godzilla of modern mixed-drink movies.

“Cocktail” is its name. Released in 1988, with Tom Cruise as Brian Flanagan, a flashy mixologist on the make, the film is to bartending what “Showgirls” was to pole dancing, a rank embarrassment that survived to become a perverse classic.

Along with the cavalcade of bad 1980s hair and worse 1980s music, “Cocktail” encapsulates an egregious mini-era in drink culture, an overheated time when “flair” bartending first emerged, a flamboyant style of mixing that required bartenders to toss shakers in the air and catch them behind their backs.

There are actually only three drinks that the audience sees being mixed: a Red Eye, a daiquiri and a Turquoise Blue, but the film is an encyclopedia of period drinks, most of them shouted out by customers crowding the bar, and too many of them involving peach schnapps: the Cuba Libre, the Alabama Slammer, the Orgasm, the White Fly, the Friar Tuck, the Ding-a-Ling, the Dirty Mother, the Jus d’Amour, and the Death Spasm, which Heywood Gould, the former bartender who wrote the novel “Cocktail,” later said he invented when writing the screenplay for the film. He described it as a mixture of gin, absinthe and Fleischmann’s rye “shaken very cold and thrown down in one shot.” Think of it as the godchild of the Depth Bomb that W. C. Fields drinks at the Black Pussy Cat Cafe in “The Bank Dick.”

We are a long way from the world of “The Thin Man,” and the cocktails that William Powell attacks early in the day. The Bronx, the Martini, the Manhattan — these are the enduring classics that, inevitably, lead to the morning-after scene involving an ice bag on the head. Mr. Francis and Ms. Marsh enshrine the Bronx — gin, vermouth, orange juice — but they could just as well have chosen Powell’s vodka martinis from the original “My Man Godfrey,” from 1936, nearly three decades before Sean Connery, in “Goldfinger,” electrified filmgoers with the immortal words “shaken, not stirred.”

Hollywood presented the authors with a surplus of material. They might have included Cary Grant’s Gibson in “North by Northwest” (they opt for Bette Davis in “All About Eve”), the Buck’s Fizz in “Top Hat,” the Brandy Flip in “Grand Hotel,” the Black Russian in “Ninotchka.” The list is long, although, oddly enough, there is no evidence of a Manhattan cocktail in the lost 1928 film “Manhattan Cocktail.”

There are a few fantasy cocktails, too, like the sinisterly childish Moloko Plus from “A Clockwork Orange.” Ingredients have been translated into the world of the possible. The Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” calls for, among other things, “Fallian marsh gas” and “the tooth of an Algolian Suntiger.” In that 2005 film, Sam Rockwell, using all three of his arms, serves it on what looks like a shallow martini glass and lets out a short scream after tossing one down. Hardly surprising, since the effect, the narrator intones, “is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick.”

One fictional drink is sorely missed, even if it is undrinkable. In “The Nutty Professor,” the title character’s alter ego, Buddy Love, played by Jerry Lewis, steps up to the bar and orders an Alaskan Polar Bear Heater. Here’s how it’s made, Buddy explains to the puzzled bartender: “Two shots of vodka, a little rum, some bitters and a smidgen of vinegar … a shot of vermouth, a shot of gin, a little brandy, lemon peel, orange peel, cherry, some more Scotch. Now mix it nice, then pour it into a tall glass.”

After listening impassively, the bartender asks, “You going to drink this here, or are you going to take it home and rub it on your chest?”