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Demands that films with smoking should be given an adult rating threaten an essential prop, says GEOFFREY MACNAB
They're essential props that have been used in movies since the very beginning. Cigarettes feature in every genre imaginable and serve many different purposes.
There may be sound reasons behind the World Health Organisation's argument this week that films with smoking scenes should be given an adult rating, to not encourage the idea it's cool among younger viewers - especially when 36 per cent of films judged to be appropriate for young people by the authorities in 2014 contained smoking. But smoking is often integral to characters and their storylines.
In early comedies, cigarettes had a comic function. You can watch old silent footage of Charlie Chaplin lighting a fag with a gun. Stan Laurel used his thumb for the same purpose. Fatty Arbuckle rolled his own. Harold Lloyd shared a cigarette with a monkey. In the hands of the right kind of comedians, there were infinite possibilities as to what could be done with a little smouldering tobacco.
Cigarettes were in demand out West, too. "Come to where the flavour is," read the old Marlboro ad featuring the cowboy. Clint Eastwood's "man with no name" had a thin cigar in his mouth during the Mexican standoff with Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. The...