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A cigarette was to Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Marlene Dietrich, Kay Francis and dozens of equal or lesser radiance what a gun was to Cagney, a horse to John Wayne: an icon of self-expression, a license to doing something cool and mildly dangerous. Something only men were supposed to do. Like enjoy sex. Often, the lighting of a cigarette provided the first intimate contact between a movie man and a movie women, the opening gambit to the game of romance.
It also bespoke freedom. In the 1933 "Hold Your Man," Jean Harlow, sentenced to a reformatory, gets the chance to take an ecstatic drag on a cigarette. Oh, that's good, she coos. The cigarette is a token of all the pleasures awaiting her outside, denied her inside. To be deprived of cigarettes is to be imprisoned in propriety. (For GIs, the cigarette was a similar symbol of freedom, the America they were fighting for. Klein quotes Gen. Pershing as saying cigarettes were as important to his troops as food. Tobacco companies bragged about the free cartons they shipped to our fighting men in Europe and Korea, and further draped their patriotism in the mantle of the new medium of TV journalism. The first prime-time news show on NBC was "The Camel News Caravan," a title that conjured up a vision of the brand's iconic beasts of burden carrying the news from around the world to your living room.)
Not to torture this subject into its own doctoral thesis, I'll just say that the noir 40s offered a flourishing nightscape for cigarettes. To take an example from the last 40s film I watched, the B melodrama "Black Angel" features Peter Lorre as a nasty nightclub owner who smokes constantly; the only function of his muscle-bound assistant (Freddie Steele) is to rush to light Lorre's cigarette. Fast-forwarding to the 50s, you will recall that, in the 1952 classic musical comedy "Singin' in the Rain," silent-movie star Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen) places a cigarette in its holder and six men lean in from nowhere, competing to light it for her. And is it James Dean or Corey Allen who tucks his cigarette pack inside his T shirt arm in "Rebel Without a Cause" (a mannerism quoted in George Lucas' 1973 retro-rocker "American Graffiti")?
A recent TIME article on the fight to ban smoking from movies (not in the theaters: on the screen) included the remarkable assertion that "on average the 20 top-grossing films featured 50% more instances of smoking an hour in 2000 than in 1960." I suppose the statistic could be accurate; it simply flies in the face of my experience of movies: growing up with the films of 1960, seeing the films of 2000 as a professional reviewer. Back then, smoking was pervasive, and was included without editorial comment. It's less so now, and when it occurs it's usually to indicate a character who is villainous or, at the very least, selfish and thoughtless.
Two examples. One is a fake 1962 movie, released this year: "Down With Love," which means to evoke the Rock Hudson—Doris Day sex comedies of 40 years ago. Author Renee Zellweger has just meet her book editor, who lights a cigarette; Zellweger's response is to frown, cough and wave furiously to clear the air — an unmistakable imposition of 2003 attitudes on 1962 mores. Now, a real 1962 movie: "The Manchurian Candidate." Korean War vet Frank Sinatra, traveling to New York on a train, is near a nervous breakdown, and so frazzled he can't light a cigarette. A sympathetic stranger, Janet Leigh, sees his distress, takes the cigarette, puts it between her lips, lights it and passes it back to him — an act of sympathy (and romantic interest) that echoes the meeting-sweet cigaretiquette of the grandest old movies.
BRIGHT LIES
Cigarettes are still a rich subject for drama, and once in a while the movies are up to the task. Two entries at this year's Toronto Film Festival showed different routes to the same enlightenment. The wild Mexican comedy-melodrama "Nicotina," written by Martin Salinas and directed by Hugo Rodrguez, is set in a rough section of Mexico City, where a gang of cyber-crooks collides with pharmacists, hairdressers and their bickering spouses. The twist: everyone's nerves are on edge because they either smoke or are trying to give up the habit or can't stand smoking. Fear, greed and sexual obsession tangle in a plot that has more twists than a curl of smoke traveling through a double helix. "Nicotina" deserves to be the next big hit out of Latin America.
"Bright Leaves" is a fascinating diary-documentary by McElwee, the director of "Sherman's March," whose family came to North Carolina in the early 1700s. His cousin John McElwee started saving films, and found the film "Bright Leaf," a Gary Copper vehicle that told of the development of tobacco manufacturing in North Carolina. According to family legend, Ross' great-grandfather John Harvey McElwee had worked on such a process, created the Bull Durham brand and made a bundle, then lost it when his rival John Buchanan (Buck) Duke stole the Bull Durham recipe. Duke's fortune eventually rose into the billions; his daughter Doris was for a time the world's richest woman. The McElwees became convinced that the story of their ancestor's rise, and betrayal by Duke, was encapsulated in "Bright Leaf" — that the film was, as Ross put it, "a home movie reenacted by Hollywood stars."
Part of the film explores this mystery, as the envious Ross, carrying a fourth-generation grudge, visits the Duke mansion and mutters, "This would have ben all mine.... Duke University would have been McElwee University." (Which means "Cigarettes Are Sublime" would have been published by McElwee University Press.) It's small consolation that his great-grandfather "did leave behind a sort of agricultural-pathological trust fund."
To other family members, John Harvey's only legacy is a nicotine craving. Recalling the days of his cigarette habit, Ross echoes Klein's observation about the "parenthesis of time" tobacco engenders: "Smoking put me into kind of a trance state, as if time had stopped and time would go on forever." Cousin Kerry has tried to quit, he says, but then "life steps in and I find a reason to go back." His friend David Williamson confesses that "There are many times I would rather have had a cigarette than a woman. Not that that opportunity comes very often." Two lovebirds had sworn to quit when they got married; a few months later, Ross finds them back at the habit. "I'm having my first post-matrimonial cigarette," Brian says. His bride Emily will admit to no deep-seated reason for her refusal to quit: "I kept smoking because I love to smoke."
They're in denial, or refusal, to think that smoking is not a habit but a hobby, not an addiction but the fiercest form of brand loyalty. They exist in a smokers' Brigadoon, where time stopped in the 50s, when people could enjoy cigarettes that were "outstanding ... and they are mild," and when the culture convinced them that a cigarette were so sublime it would help them live, not longer, but more beautiful lives.
SMOKE, DRINK AND BE BURIED
All that was long ago. Then the 60s — from which all ominous changes can be dated — rewrote the rules of American gesture. Such previously banal signifiers as handshakes and haircuts, comic books and pop music, became freighted with contentiousness. Soon Steve Martin was introducing politically (not politely) correct comedy to the smoking debate. "Mind if I smoke?" he imagined someone asking him, then replied, "No. Mind if I fart?"
In the 80s, even James Bond felt bad about smoking. Today the habit is excoriated — antitobacconists depict Joe Camel as a schoolyard drug pusher — and publicly survives only as a vestige of James Dean rebelliousness. As smokers are hounded off the streets, like pedophiles at a playground, so tobacco companies are chased away from sports sponsorship; the Virginia Slims Tournament and the Winston Cup are no more. Only the twentysomethings can exercise their privilege to smoke. For them it is a declaration of outlawry, an insurrection of style, and one more thing to piss off their parents and all others who would presume to understand or help them. The rest of us cannot erase the stigma: the bell of societal opprobrium around our necks, the scarlet letter on our lungs.
We have a forlorn dream: if only we were hooked on booze. Then we could see our drug advertised on TV, in commercials brazenly aimed at kids and teens. (Joe Camel will seduce kids into smoking? Well, how many people under 21 have died of smoking? A good estimate would be zero. And how many have died because of drinking? Thousands: they're roadkill every night.) If we were alcoholics, we could receive official succor for crimes somewhat more poignant than fouling the lungs of ourselves and our loved ones. I don't know of one husband who battered his wife because he'd smoked too much that night. I haven't heard of any fatal car crashes caused by a driver whose "one for the road" was a Carlton Light. Smoking shortens lives; alcohol ruins them too.
But no one will share smokers' illegal-alien status. Cigarette users must huddle in the ragtag solidarity of their serene, intense habit. Defiantly, they say, "We look so cool, don't we, waving our wicked wands in the air. Our voices have the knowing, late-night duskiness of alto-sax jazz. We pack more fun into life because we know — know better than all those who stare darts our way — how short life is. We are nature's bravados, medicine's death-row aesthetes." As the health magazines remind us, absolutely everything can kill you. So smokers figure they may as well go out with a smile on their lips, a stain on their teeth and a wheeze in their outcast hearts.
Can we reach a compromise, O America of the New Prohibition? I'll light up a little less; you lighten up a little more.