LET'S HAVE A...SSHH - CIGARETTE

NO (MOVIE) FIRE WITHOUT (TOBACCO) SMOKE.

        

Lauren Bacall in TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT.

    Inauthenticity in historical films never bothers me much. I barely flinch when Olivia de Havilland’s dress in The Adventures of Robin Hood has a zipper and Richard the Lionheart in The Crusades wears a wrist watch. Such lése majesté was nothing new to the latter’s creator. As a wit commented, “Cecil B. DeMille/Much against his will/Was persuaded to keep Moses/Out of the War of the Roses.”

              Forgiveness comes less readily when the era in question is one’s own. I experienced at first hand the Los Angeles of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and could conceivably have been  there during the period in which the recent Netflix series Hollywood was set.

            The latter tries to apply a modern sensibility to the problems of the forties’ film industry, beginning with the prejudice against homosexuality. Its key text is Scotty Bowers’ memoir Full Service, about the male prostitution service run out of a Wilshire Boulevard gas station. A number of husky young actors do their best to embody Hollywood hunks vintage 1948 but mostly fail to suggest men who have just lived through a war and, in some cases, fought in it.

David Cronenswet, Darren Cris, Jack Picking and Jeremy Pope in HOLLYWOOD. Four gas jockeys and one lone, unconvincing cigarette.

Where is the underarm hair, the warts, moles and scars, the bad haircuts and, for that matter, the hats that were ubiquitous in those days? Where, above all, are the cigarettes?

Hard as it may be to visualise in this more enlightened age, tobacco was the great leveler, the instrument of bonding and seduction. Working men twisted a pack of Lucky Strike in the sleeves of their t-shirts. Gentlemen carried silver cases filled with Chesterfields and Camels, judges stuffed pipes with shag and moguls smoked Romeo y Juliettas. Butts, ashtrays, packs, lighters, matches and smoke were ubiquitous in cars, cafes, private homes, offices, aircraft, even cinemas, where a stratum of vapour hovered just above the audience’s head, making visible the projector beam, softening the blacks and muting the whites of nitrate film,  giving it a quality of charcoal and pastel.

The choreography of smoking transcended the desire for that nicotine hit. Placing the cigarette between the lips, lighting it with the snap of a Zippo or a match cupped in the hand, expelling smoke, ashing… Luis Bunuel, when he gave up tobacco, said he missed most these automatic movements, the gestures which, like commas and semi-colons, punctuated social interaction.

Such actresses as Bette Davis compensated for their short stature by developing a language of the hands and eyes, often incorporating a cigarette.  Paul Henreid lighting two cigarettes and handing one to her in Now, Voyager boosted a pedestrian scene into legend. Joan Crawford had her back teeth extracted so that, as she sucked in smoke and her cheeks hollowed, those blade-like cheekbones drew attention to her electric gaze. In The Bad and the Beautiful, Kirk Douglas instructs Lana Turner to look not at the flame when a light is proferred,  but rather into the eyes of he who offers.  And the decisiveness of crushing out a butt, grinding it underfoot, or flicking it away into the dark…

Paul Henreid lights up Bette Davis in NOW, VOYAGER.

I never smoked, but my parents did,  and all their friends. My father was convinced that I did so in secret and became quite belligerent when I denied it. “I’d rather you didn’t lie about it,” he said, with such vehemence that I thought I might have to take it up to keep the peace.

History, however, was on my side. As the anti-tobacco movement gathered momentum, it became fashionable to decry smoking as a social device, and particularly its use by women. An anti-cigarette commercial of the time showed two men discussing a girl on the other side of a bar. As she lights up, one murmurs to his friend “Forget it. I dated her. It's like kissing an ashtray.” Well, perhaps. But I never found that taste distracting, any more than I did the greasiness of lipstick. And smoking was an earnest of sophistication, that promise of experience which today is offered, far less attractively, by a tattoo.

It’s clear from recent period films such as Hollywood that smoking, along with how to eat with chopsticks, is not a skill taught to today’s young actors. The gingerly manner in which these performers place a fag between their lips suggests that, given the choice between a Lucky and the male member, they would not hesitate. Clients of that gas station looking for a sexual assignation would tell the gas jockey “I want to go to Dreamland.” Sorry, but you can’t get there from here. But never mind; light up a Marlboro instead.