Cliché? Perhaps. But thanks to Eastwood, Pacino and the rest, your lit cigar is now officially equated with having a pair of epic cojones — a message burned even further into the collective memory by the following films.

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Smoke Screen (cont.)

Lost In Translation (2003): After a long day of selling out, nothing quite helps nurse that growing sense of existential ennui like a glass of scotch and a cigar at the hotel bar. That’s the hope of Bob (Bill Murray), fading film star washed up in Tokyo to shoot a commercial for Suntory whiskey, when he spies Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) across the room. And to think that the film’s great (unconsummated) romance — the center of Sofia Coppola’s ode to loneliness and the traveler’s need to really, really learn a few phrases in the local language — would never have taken place without one character’s need for a puff.

Hellboy (2004): He’s big, red, horned and wielding the Right Hand of Doom. Such attributes might have led to a lucrative career as a bouncer on the NYC club scene, but anti-hero Hellboy (Ron Perlman) chooses to use his demonic strength to protect humanity from otherworldly evil, usually with a smoking stogie firmly clamped in his ludicrously square jaw. Just because he’s battling the apocalypse, though, doesn’t mean the big lug can’t pick up some valuable cigar advice. “Use a wooden match. It preserves the flavor,” his boss (Jeffrey Tambor) tells him during a post-baddie-squishing smoke break.

Spider-Man 2 (2004): “What, you mean there’s a ban on smoking in New York? Not in my [extremely colorful expletive deleted] office!” Newspaper editor J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons) never actually utters those words in Sam Raimi’s groundbreaking comic-book flick. But he probably would have, if not distracted by a certain friendly neighborhood wall-crawler (Tobey Maguire) raising his blood pressure to near-catastrophic levels. In any case, Jameson’s cigar-chomping and rapid-fire speech brings a welcome bit of Howard Hawks into a movie occasionally overloaded with oh-so-pretty special effects.

The X-Men Trilogy (2000, 2003, 2006): Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) figures an epic battle between good (that’d be him, along with his team of super-powered mutants) and evil (that’d be a bunch of world-conquering villains) is as good as any time as any to whip out the stogie. Then again, if you had 12-inch retractable claws, a metal skeleton, a genetic healing ability that made you virtually invulnerable, then you’d feel perfectly comfortable lighting up amidst a storm of flying projectiles… but maybe not so much in the presence of a boss capable of mind control. “Continue smoking that in here and you’ll spend the rest of your days under the belief that you’re a six-year-old girl,” says X-Men leader Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) when Wolverine attempts to light up inside. Spoilsport.

American Gangster (2007): From the opening scene where real-life Harlem kingpin Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) lights up while simultaneously stubbing out the competition, to his sit-down with mafia don Dominic Cattano (Armand Assante), where they promptly whip out the big cigars (although Cattano’s Davidoff humidor was first produced more than two decades after the movie takes place — oops), Ridley Scott’s mobster epic upholds the stogie as a symbol of power. The film might not approach Godfather levels of magnificence, but Washington’s Lucas would prove a worthy adversary to Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone.

Blowing Smoke (2004): Cigar-lovers of the world, the cult classic devoted to our lifestyle — think of it as The Endless Summer for stogie-puffers — has finally arrived. Despite its tiny budget and a plot straight out of a canceled Showtime pilot, “Blowing Smoke” does have its charms, including cameos by dozens of premium sticks. It also features Estella Warren, whose picturesque smoking of a Churchill isn’t lost on the politically incorrect cretins who gather after-hours at an L.A. cigar shop to play poker — especially after she’s already crashed the party in a wet dress.

Predictably, the bosom buddies cast years-long friendships out the window in pursuit of her, even as she compares their possibly-fake Cubans to horse manure. For smoke enthusiasts, all the cigar-related banter rocketing back and forth is good for around 88 minutes, at which point Warren pulls a fast one on all assembled (mild spoiler alert: she can handle a shotgun just as adeptly as a Siglo VI) and the movie jumps the proverbial rails. While you won’t find the film on Netflix, it can be downloaded directly or ordered as a DVD with a rather risqué cover from their Web site, Blowingsmokethemovie.com. Best if watched while smoking a (real) Cohiba.

Got a favorite smokin'-hot movie of your own? Tell us about it in the Comments section below.

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