No two industries have waltzed together as merrily through the years as tobacco and moving pictures. Films make cigarettes glamourous, and cigarettes lend that glamour back to generation after generation of chain-smoking stars. There have been stories of underhand deals to make sure actors smoked as much as possible through films, and actors who openly advertised cigarettes. According to the anti-smoking lobby, it was Hollywood that taught women to smoke. Husky-voiced foreign temptresses such as Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo made cigarettes sexy and they were followed by Americans like Katharine Hepburn.
Many of this century's films have leant heavily on cigarettes to suggest sexual intentions, andForties audiences didn't need a dowsing in Freud to tell them what was going on. But foreplay was only one use for cigarettes. If you didn't have a handy fag or cheroot, how could you light a stick of dynamite or a trail of gunpowder? In 1957, when Bogart (the best advert the tobacco companies ever had) died of cancer of the oesophagus, aged 57, the links between smoking and the disease that killed him were just starting to be discussed. But tradition was as strong as it had ever been: James Dean, dead two years before Bogart, had already entered the smoker's hall of fame.
In the Sixties and Seventies, Hollywood's rebellious phase, movies wouldn't have been complete without a smoker: pick any name but start with Clint Eastwood and Steve McQueen, who was also victim of lung cancer. But as medical opinion hardened, America fell out of love with the tobacco industry, and nowhere more so than California.Anti-smoking organisations insist that, statistically, smoking in American films remained steady from 1960to 1990, and then boomed again.
BTW, "Duck Soup" is the oldest movie with a tobacco paper trail, but tobacco became the largest theater "sponsor" in 1888, & has never left the top ten advertisers list since....