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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Shove a lit Double Corona in the mouth of a man in a suit, and they instantly become a big shot, maybe even a Godfather; have your leather-wearing badass chomp on a Toscano while doing something appropriately insane, and they’ll come off as even more badass.

The Man With No Name Trilogy (1964, 1965, 1966): Clint Eastwood squinting from beneath his wide hat brim, smoking a Toscano, waiting for some swarthy villain to make the biggest mistake of their wayward life by actually reaching for that pistol — it’s hard to think of a tough-guy image more classic than that ... unless it’s Steve McQueen on a motorcycle.

Starting with A Fistful of Dollars, followed by For a Few Dollars More, and finally climaxing with the epic The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Eastwood’s Man With No Name shoots his way across the Spaghetti Western landscape with an astoundingly accurate pair of six-shooters and a thin cigar clamped in his steely grimace, surviving by a few simple principles: Say as few words as possible, keep a watch on that shifty-eyed Neanderthal at the end of the bar, and always have a paw on your gun — even if that means learning how to light those Toscanos one-handed (we almost set ourselves on fire trying the same trick).

The Wild Bunch (1969): Talk about your Mexican standoffs; director “Bloody Sam” Peckinpah’s infamous masterpiece focuses on an aging group of outlaws, led by Pike Bishop (William Holden, more gravelly than four miles of Texas back road) grappling with the demise of the Old West. Halfway through the movie, while transporting a cache of guns to a short-tempered client in Mexico, the gang is ambushed by a rebel army. Without missing a beat, Bishop plucks the lit cigar out of a fellow outlaw’s mouth, touches it to a fuse connected to several pounds of nearby dynamite (it always pays to be prepared), and thereby threatens to atomize everyone in the vicinity. Obviously, they’re allowed to pass unscathed. If only such daredevil tactics could be applied to regular life, no?

Apocalypse Now (1979): Like John Wayne’s Id brought to vicious life, AirCav Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall) tears through the Vietnam War with a fleet of helicopters blaring Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries, chomping a smoke with the same devil-may-care insouciance he uses when ordering troops to seize a nearby beach for surfing. Thanks to that iconic performance alone, the phrase “madness of war” takes on a whole new meaning in Francis Ford Coppola’s epic.

Scarface (1983): “In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, you get the women,” says Tony Montana (Al Pacino), foulmouthed Cuban refugee turned recreational-pharmaceuticals entrepreneur, as he begins his enthusiastic climb to the top of Miami’s underworld. And with the power comes, evidently, a huge stogie, given the sizable ones that Montana smokes while wandering around his newly purchased mansion. But given how his little capitalist adventure ends — “with a bang” is a bit of an understatement — maybe he should have gone into the cigar business instead.

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

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