smokes

"You've already got one going, Mrs. Mulwray."
-- Private detective J.J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson) to a suddenly
flustered client (Faye Dunaway) who has nervously lit up two cigarettes
in Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974)

"I love you, too."
-- insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), lighting the pipe of his boss and surrogate father Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), the man to whom Neff dictates his confession, which serves as the narration for Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944)

A lot of Americans smoked back in the '40s and '50s, but in the movies it was more than just a bad habit, it was 

	"Anybody got a match?"  That was the famous line Bacall used on Bogart in Hawks' To Have and Have Not (1944).  Re-united with Hawks for The Big Sleep (1946), they lit up the screen again.  After all, smoking is another thing that requires only that you put your lips together and blow....
Once he lights that cigarette for her, it's all over.  Professor Richard Wanley (Edward G. Robinson) ....
	Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), the extravagant silent movie queen turned Spider Woman in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950), loves to surround herself with smoke -- probably because, like a gauze filter on a camera lens, it softens the wrinkles on that magnificent Face. In a wonderful detail, she wears a bizarre cigarette holder on one of her sharp-clawed tentacles that just reeks of exquisite Old Hollywood decadence...
In movies of the '20s and '30s, smoking was often portrayed as glamorous and sophisticated; in the '40s and '50s it became associated with something darker and more dangerous, thanks in no small part to Robert Mitchum -- star of one of the greatest (and best-titled) of all films noir, Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past (1947), as well as one of the most fascinatingly outlandish and Expressionistic, Charles Laughton's brilliant The Night of the Hunter (1955).  In 1948, Mitchum was arrested for smoking something besides tobacco and did 50 days in jail, but it only enhanced his image as Big Bad Bob. No wonder he looked kinda sleepy all the time...
	The phallic cigar adds to the menace personified by ex-con Max Cady (Mitchum) who stalks and terrifies the family of Sam Bowden (Gregory Peck), the prosecutor who convicted him, in J. Lee Thompson's Cape Fear (1962).   Here he surprises Bowden's daughter Nancy (Lori Martin). The Freudian overtones were made even more explicit in Martin Scorsese's unecessary and overheated 1991 remake, where the daughter (Juliette Lewis) flirts with Max (Robert DeNiro) by sucking on his finger.
Sure, in Dark Victory (1939), Paul Heinried was cool when he lit two cigarettes in his mouth at once and then handed one to Bette Davis.  But in the Dark Room, Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck are both smoking the very same cigarette!  It belongs to  belonging to that goddess of tobacco, Marlene Dietrich, the luminous star of a series of influential, Expressionistic pre-noir masterpieces with director Joseph von Sternberg. She also delivered the epitaph for Orson Welles' terminal noir figure Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil (1959), bringing the classic film noir cycle to a close with the words: "He was some kind of a man.  What does it matter what you say about people?"  I suspect this sultry glamour portrait is either from Fritz Lang's western noir Rancho Notorious (1952) or George Stevens' Destry Rides Again (1939). What does it matter? The  cigarette was good.

back into the dark room