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 ---- To sign off Screen-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF Screen-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]