Why giving films with smoking an adult rating would threaten an essential prop

There may be sound reasons behind the WHO's argument – but smoking is often integral to characters and storylines

Geoffrey Macnab
Friday 05 February 2016 21:56 GMT
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Lauren Bacall in ‘To Have and Have Not’ ‘
Lauren Bacall in ‘To Have and Have Not’ ‘

They’re essential props that have been used in movies since the very beginning. Cigarettes feature in every genre imaginable and serve many different purposes.

There may be sound reasons behind the World Health Organisation’s argument this week that films with smoking scenes should be given an adult rating, to not encourage the idea it’s cool among younger viewers – especially when 36 per cent of films judged to be appropriate for young people by the authorities in 2014 contained smoking. But smoking is often integral to characters and their storylines.

In early comedies, cigarettes had a comic function. You can watch old silent footage of Charlie Chaplin lighting a fag with a gun. Stan Laurel used his thumb for the same purpose. Fatty Arbuckle rolled his own. Harold Lloyd shared a cigarette with a monkey. In the hands of the right kind of comedians, there were infinite possibilities as to what could be done with a little smouldering tobacco.

Cigarettes were in demand out West, too. “Come to where the flavour is,” read the old Marlboro ad featuring the cowboy. Clint Eastwood’s “man with no name” had a thin cigar in his mouth during the Mexican standoff with Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. The cigar signified calmness and imperturbability. In the face of violence and death, Clint kept puffing away.

If cigarettes in movies do come with public health warnings and revised censorship guidelines, it may save kids from the terror of Cruella de Vil, the fag hag villainess from 101 Dalmatians who was rarely seen on screen without that immensely lengthy cigarette holder. Cigarette holders are ambiguous props. In the hands of Cruella or of George Sanders’ sneering critic in All About Eve, they signal malevolence. They are like a talon.

There are plenty of other movies, though, in which they suggest sophistication. Bryan Cranston uses one in his new film Trumbo, in which he plays blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. He likes to smoke through it in the bath as he works on a new screenplay. When he is thrown in prison, it’s a sign of how far he has fallen that he is reduced to using ordinary cigarettes with no holder in sight.

In prison dramas, cigarettes often play an enhanced role. They’re used as currency and sharing them is one of the few ways for those behind bars of expressing camaraderie.

The same kind of cigarette holder that looked so threatening in the hands of Cruella de Vil and Addison DeWitt had a very different connotation as used by Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It suggested a supreme elegance and was as much a part of her appeal as the Givenchy gowns. The absurdly long cigarette holder also had comic possibilities, not least for setting fire to people’s hats in the party scene.

In Todd Haynes’s Carol, Cate Blanchett’s cigarette holder is a sign of social status as well as of sophistication. Along with her furs and expensive shoes, it makes it very clear she comes from an extremely affluent background.

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Censorship may have stopped Hollywood showing couples having sex but it didn’t stop the studios from showing them sharing cigarettes together.

Many of Humphrey Bogart’s most memorable scenes involved cigarettes. As fishing boat captain Harry Morgan in To Have and Have Not, he is utterly bewitched when a siren-like Lauren Bacall appears in the corner of his office with a cigarette in the corner of her mouth and purrs, “anybody got a match”. In The Big Sleep, Bogart and Bacall smoke a fair few cigarettes too, often at the most climactic moments.

Irving Rapper’s melodrama Now, Voyager is full of scenes in which the cigarettes are an essential part of the courtship between Paul Henreid’s character and Bette Davis’s repressed young heiress. Henreid has a famous gesture of lighting two cigarettes in his mouth at once and then handing one to her. They then both blow smoke in each other’s faces.

In film noir, cigarettes served a dual purpose. They add to the mood. The cinematographers tend to be using chiaroscuro lighting anyway and a bit of smokiness heightens the atmosphere yet further. It also goes without saying that the private eyes and soulful villains liked to have a cigarette hanging from their bottom lip. Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past is a case in point. Jean Gabin, French cinema’s equivalent to Mitchum who often played the down at heel bruiser with the tender, poetic soul, smoked as a matter of course, on screen and off.

To make a movie, Jean-Luc Godard famously declared, “all you need for a movie is a girl and a gun”. He could have added cigarettes to that list too. Jean-Paul Belmondo’s charming thug is seldom without his Gauloise or Gitane.

For teenagers in movies, cigarettes are both a symbol of defiance against the big, bad adult world and an expression of style. That is why James Dean paid as much attention to how he smoked as to the arrangement of his tousled hair in Rebel Without a Cause.

For much of film history, cigarettes were ubiquitous on screen. Viewers knew long before Al Pacino and Russell Crowe told them so in The Insider that they weren’t good for you. Nonetheless, in the make-believe world of the movies, they were part of the mise-en-scène. Take them away and you’d be removing what used to be a vital spark.

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