Branding cigs with 'R': Bogart, Dietrich, and other cinematic smokers would simply die.(CULTURE WATCH)(Humphrey Bogart)(Critical essay)

THERE's an old Hollywood story, which may or may not be true, about Humphrey Bogart. He was about to film an "explainer" scene--one of those dialogue-heavy set-pieces, where one character drones on for a page or two of crucial, but eyeglazing, exposition. Explainer scenes are pace-killers, but unavoidable: There's often no other way to let the audience know that the main character is an orphan, say, or how a cluster-bomb works, or that the hero and the mysterious woman had a love affair once, years ago.

But Bogart, like most actors, worried about boring the audience. The story goes that he looks down at the script, with its long column of dialogue, and then tells the director that the only way he'll do the scene, the only way the scene won't bore the audience, is if they place two camels in the background, and get them to copulate.

In the story, of course, he doesn't use the word "copulate."

Though his solution was extreme, Bogart's instincts were correct. In the end, he didn't get his two camels. What he got was a Camel Unfiltered.

They shot the scene as written, but the director gave Bogart a simple piece of onscreen business. All he had to do to inject the scene with some interesting drama was to say some lines while taking out a cigarette, tap it lightly to compact the tobacco, say some more lines, light the cigarette with a match, wave the match out and toss it contemptuously aside, say some more lines, take a big drag, and finish the speech. Cut. Print. Instant drama.

Smoking in movies has a long, glorious history of effectively solving the Explainer Scene problem. So it's alarming, if you're in the film business, to hear that the Motion Picture Association of America, the lobbying arm of the movie industry, is planning to crack down on on-screen smoking by adjusting its rating system to account for the (supposedly encouraging) effect that watching movie stars smoke has on young people. According to the MPAA's initial proposal, if characters in a picture smoke in a non-contextual, nonperiod-specific way--if, say, two contemporary cowboys who are not homosexual lovers light up, as opposed to the early-1960s gay-cowboy lovers in Brokeback Mountain--then the movie may find itself with an "R" rating, which severely restricts its box-office take. The idea here is that if kids stop seeing cool role-model movie stars light up, then they'll stop thinking that smoking is cool.

But smoking isn't cool because people do it in movies. People do it in movies because it's cool. Smoking is a lot more than just puffing away, as Bogart knew. Smoking is a collection of hand movements, lip actions, match striking, and heavy breathing, all to a measured, controlled tempo. Smoking slows things down--it's almost impossible to light a cigarette quickly--and it's irresistible to actors for the same reason it's irresistible to teenagers: It draws attention inexorably to the smoker and away from whatever mediocre dialogue he or she is forced to say, either because of a lazy screenwriter (in the case of the actor) or because of a lack of imagination caused by listening to simplistic dance music and ...