• 6/10/2006
  • London, England
  • Hugo RIfkind
  • TimesOnLine (entertainment.timesonline.co.uk)

Cigarettes were cool in the 1950s; a killer in the 1980s. Now Hollywood is hooked again, says Hugo Rifkind

Here’s a funny thing. Throughout Casablanca, not one woman smokes. The men do, like anything. A viewer from another species might assume that Humphrey Bogart has a thin white fifth finger, and that he contains an inexhaustible supply of thin, wispy, white candyfloss, which seeks any orifice from which to escape. But the women; never. They may hold cigarettes, but they never smoke them. Seriously. Not once.

There is even a scene, right at the beginning, where a women beside Sam at the piano starts to bring a cigarette towards her mouth, and then pauses, as though thinking better of it. Richard Klein, the author of the excellent Cigarettes are Sublime (Picador, 1995), suggests that she may have been checked by a signal from the director. This was 1942, and a mainstream Hollywood movie. Such things just weren’t done.

Jump forward 63 years, to 2005’s Romance and Cigarettes, and you can sort of see where that director was coming from. Whenever Kate Winslet’s grotesquely strapping lingerie salesgirl Tula drains a cigarette and leaves it crushed and lipstick-smeared, it is evident to even the most naive viewer that this cigarette probably represents something else.

Thank You for Smoking, which opens on Friday, is a satire based around a tobacco PR, played by Aaron Eckhart, who is desperate to get smoking back into the movies. “Let’s make it like it was in the old days,” he says, at one point. Yet it already is. According to a recent study by a pair of scientists at the University of California, there are as many people smoking on screen today as there were in 1950 — and this despite the fact that the number of smokers in America halved during that time. In a paper titled Tobacco and the Movie Industry, Annemarie Charlesworth and Stanton A. Glantz found that there were 10.7 “tobacco incidents” (smoking, tobacco adverts, ashtrays) an hour in “top-grossing” 1950 films, and that this had dropped to 4.9 by 1982. By 2002, they were back up to 10.9. Pushing Casablanca levels, in other words.

I saw Casablanca the other week, and those figures are a terrifying thought. Forget the women; the men in that film are a cancer ward waiting to happen. They smoke enough to make this perennially lapsing ex-smoker feel wheezy. They smoke like beagles, strapped down in a lab. And they weren’t unusual. They were the norm, in films, right up until the 1980s, at least. What on earth has happened? How can we be back to that? Didn’t the patches work? Even before 1942, not every film had the scruples of Casablanca. Women had smoked, just indecently. It was that same year, in 1942, that Paul Henreid lit a cigarette for Bette Davis in Now, Voyager, a pioneeringly sexy bit of stage direction that has been cribbed so often since as to have become a cliché. Even before then, nobody sucked on a cigarette like Marlene Dietrich, and in a manner not so dissimilar (see Der Blaue Engel, 1930) from Kate Winslet today. Still, such brazen sexiness was a slightly niche thing, born, like Dietrich’s career, in Weimar Germany and diverting itself thereafter towards the wheezing tales of detectives and showgirls in Hollywood film noir.

An advertiser’s dream.

When Margot Kidder’s Lois Lane first lit up a Marlboro in Superman II (1980), you’d have been forgiven for assuming something similar was going on — that this hard-bitten reporter was smoking because the movies had taught her that this is how a hard-bitten reporter behaved. Perhaps not. There is rather a lot of Marlboro in Superman II. Kidder smokes them constantly. She even, in one scene, wears red and white. At one point, Superman finds himself throwing around a huge Marlboro truck — a truck that seems to have been created especially for the movie.

Product placement was nothing new in movies, even then, but Superman II appeared particularly brazen. “How many thousands of girls, primed for smoking, will the movie have given that last nudge into a cigarette habit?” pondered the New York State Journal of Medicine at the time. There was no sign of the reproof shown in the first Superman, when the Man of Steel used his X-ray vision to check Lois’s lungs for cancer.

Forgetting ethics for a moment, the marriage between screen and cigarettes has always worked well. For tobacco companies the benefits are obvious — in America, the 390,000 teenagers who start smoking every year are worth an estimated $4.1 billion in lifetime sales. For the film-makers, aside from the money, cigarettes are artistically useful. They make for good punctuation. They are a method of character exposition.

Bluntly, smokers look good on screen. As one critic wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1996, “Everything people deny about smoking is cool in movies. It is sexy. It is glamorous. Smoking on stage may be problematic. Smoking in restaurants unwelcome. But on camera, there is no more compelling way of doing nothing.”

For all that, by the mid-to-late 1980s, like many of those iconic smokers themselves, smoking on screen was dying. Even as early as 1981, the American Cancer Society was declaring that Hollywood had “all but kicked the nicotine habit”. Smoking wasn’t friendly. It wasn’t LA. Where characters did smoke, their smoking was used to depict a flaw, or a weakness. Think of Lorraine McFly (Lea Thompson) in Back to the Future (1985) or Michael Douglas in Basic Instinct. Dirty. Unsatisfied. Addicted.

By The Insider (1999), with Al Pacino starring in what was essentially an anti-tobacco lobby polemic, Hollywood was officially anti-smoking. And where the worthies led, the idiots soon followed. In 2002, Joe Eszterhas, the writer of Basic Instinct, apologised (although not for the plot. Shame). While recovering from surgery for throat cancer, he announced that he had been “an accomplice to the murders of untold numbers of human beings” through his films.

Though cigarettes in Basic Instinct had been a “sexual subtext” (no, really?), this was no excuse. “A cigarette in the hands of a Hollywood star is a gun aimed at a 12 or 14-year-old.” And not so much as a mention of ice picks.

It is this new, anti-smoking, sanitised Hollywood that Thank You for Smoking seeks to satirise. Nobody in the film actually smokes. “If somebody smokes, they’re a psychopath or a European,” complains Eckhart’s PR man. “The message Hollywood needs to send out is that smoking is cool.” It’s a funny film, and based on a good idea, but out of its time. Unofficially, Hollywood is already smoking again.

Probably, there are two reasons for this, and the lesser of these is history. With cigarettes all but banished from contemporary storytelling, they have become a useful filmic device for stepping back in time. David Strathairn’s Edward R. Murrow had to smoke in George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), because Murrow was, famously, never seen without a billowing Kent. Likewise Joachin Phoenix’s Johnny Cash in Walk the Line , or the many smokers in Capote. You sense, nonetheless, that there is a laziness to it. Directors have begun to depict a time by mimicking the movies of that time. Every bar is Rick’s Bar; a shorthand to the past.

Or perhaps that’s too grandiose. Let us just say that Hollywood is back on the weed and, like any other failed ex-smoker, now finds itself smoking in a fury, with a vigour fuelled by self-loathing and regret. And, let us say that this self-loathing will grow, and grow, and Hollywood will smoke more and more, until it takes the plunge and goes cold turkey once more. And maybe next time, it will mean it. But then, we all say that, don’t we?

The lung goodbye

In the 1970s and 1980s, films featured or made reference to smoking an average of eight times. By the late 1990s, this had risen to 25 times, according to the American magazine Health.

85 per cent of the 250 top- grossing films in the previous decade featured smoking, said a survey published in the medical journal The Lancet in 2001.

Young white leading males smoke more than other characters in films. They also tend to be the heroes.

Films rated PG or PG-13 in America are less likely than R-rated movies to contain negative messages about smoking, according to a report published in 2000.

A study of films made between 1990 and 2006 found that 57 per cent of leading characters smoked, when only 14 per cent of those of a similar social class in America did so.

According to a 2003 Australian study, tobacco use was portrayed as acceptable on screen 95 per cent of the time, a reverse of the trend in society.