I saw a film the other day that had a remarkable smoke-filled moment.
It is NOW VOYAGER.  Bette Davis has encountered Paul Henried again after
a long absence and much previous emotion.  They are at a public party,
have been introduced by someone else, and cannot reveal that they know
one another.  They stand aside.  He reaches up casually and while she is
shyly talking to him lights a pair of cigarettes, one of which he deftly
flips and slides into her waiting fingers.

It was chilling to watch his technique as the two cigarettes--near
enough to seem almost one--were operated simultaneously, as though he
might have said, "I am by no means being so presumptuous as to think you
would care to have me light a cigarette for you," and also at the same
moment, "But of course I would never dream of lighting a cigarette for
myself without lighting one in the same fire for you."  He never looks
at the cigarettes, though WE cannot take our eyes off them; and she
doesn't look either until she has to navigate her fingers around it.

I have no idea what would motivate me to think of this just after having
written that, but another great cigarette moment (of a different kind)
is in Caspar Wrede's ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH.  Tom
Courtenay breaks a hand-rolled cigarette in two and hides half of it
away with such tense focus we actually begin to feel about the tobacco
what he feels, that it is not only food but glorious food--a banquet.
He's a prisoner in a gulag with many hundreds of days left in his
sentence and this is a banquet of banquets, indeed.

I seem to remember something about the moistness of Edward G. Robinson's
cigar in THE CINCINATTI KID.

LA SIRENE DU MISSISSIPPI (MISSISSIPPI MERMAID) is, of course, about a
cigarette manufacturer and there's a charming and perfectly oiled moment
in which he walks past an assembly line and helps himself to one.

Murray
Toronto

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