Smoke Screen

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.

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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).

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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?

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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.

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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.

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

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Smoke Screen (cont.)

Wall Street (1987): “Greed is good.” Twenty-odd years after every trader’s favorite movie hit the street, a lot of hardcore raider Gordon Gekko’s trappings of wealth seem downright ludicrous: the “portable phone” hefty enough to kill a Bronx cockroach, the big-shouldered suits and blindingly colorful suspenders, the bulletproof hair. One thing, however, hasn’t gone out of style — toasting up a hefty stick to celebrate ‘liberating’ yet another company from all those pesky assets weighing it down. Burn, baby, burn.

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Predator (1987): The future governator of California enjoys a pre-carnage cigar before mowing down acres of prime South American jungle and one severely irate alien.

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Cape Fear (1991): As Max Cady, a tattooed, cigar-chomping sociopath with a marked inability to let things go, Robert De Niro does an Oscar-winner’s take on a B-movie slasher — in marked contrast to the original film’s Robert Mitchum, who was a cool hepcat with the occasional bad habit of strangling people. But all of his dog-killing, family-terrorizing, and lawyer-beating aside, you know De Niro’s Cady is really evil because he keeps lighting his Casa Blanca Half Jeroboam Maduro with what looks like a butane lighter.

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Reservoir Dogs (1992): Before the shootin’ and the screamin’ (but not before the cursin’), before Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen) does a little bit more than talk a cop’s ear off, before Mr. White (Harvey Keitel) learns what an after school special might call A Valuable Lesson in Trust, Quentin Tarantino’s directorial debut starts with a bunch of suited men in a coffee shop, talking about Madonna and tipping etiquette ... while Mr. Blue (Eddie Bunker) puffs on a cigar. In fact, all the fun-lovin’ criminals in this California noir smoke like fiends — definitely a tempting course of action once a jewelry-store robbery goes wrong and your life expectancy starts being measured in minutes.

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The Hudsucker Proxy (1994): When the head of your corporation carefully sets their cigar in the nearest ashtray and takes a flying leap out the nearest window, there’s only one thing to do — at least if you’re fellow fat-cat Sidney J. Mussburger (Paul Newman): pick up that mostly-unsmoked stogie and growl, “It’s a pity to waste a whole Monte Cristo.” Sure, sure, Mussburger continues to chew roughly a cigar a minute as he concocts a plan to have “imbecile” mailroom boy Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins) become the new CEO, in order to depress the stock — but it’s Norville who really uses the opportunity to enact some plans of his own.

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Crimson Tide (1995): The film that redefines “smoke ‘em if you got ‘em,” award-winning scene-chewers Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman star as Lieutenant Commander Ron Hunter and Captain Frank Ramsey, respectively, on a nuclear submarine whose crew is having a very bad day. Attacked by a hostile Russian submarine, suffering major damage, and ordered to possibly launch a shipload of nukes at a friendly nation, the two officers battle over whether they should hit that Big Red Button — and take the time to smoke a few sticks. “Don’t like it too much,” the Captain advises his subordinate as they torch up. “They’re more expensive than drugs.” Not exactly something to worry about when the world stands on the verge of a major holocaust.

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Smoke (1995): The title says it all — this Wayne Wang-directed, Paul Auster-written film centers around a Brooklyn smoke shop run by the profane but charming Auggie (Harvey Keitel), whose outbursts nonetheless seem to endear him to a neighborhood of colorful characters, including a traumatized writer (William Hurt) and a teenager (Harold Perrineau Jr.) searching for his father. While the film manages to compress several tragedies into its brisk running time, true smoke-hounds may find the one where thousands of dollars’ worth of fine Cubans end up destroyed to be the most poignant — of course, we wept.

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Die Another Day (2002): James Bond’s twentieth outing features a pit stop in Cuba, where everybody’s favorite hedonistic secret agent swings by a cigar factory and puffs away at some of the local product. Here’s to hoping he secreted a few sticks away before leaving the country — given the subsequent explosions (and honestly, how did anyone not see those coming?), it’s unlikely that 007 will be welcomed back to Havana anytime soon.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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