Aliens, Apes, Insider Trades, and Big Screen Cigars

There's an amusing irony in the fact that Los Angeles, California is both the unquestioned capital of the movie industry and yet is also possibly the most restrictive city in the U.S. for cigar smokers. It's ironic because so many people who make movies love cigars. At one time, before the anti-smoking brigade put a stranglehold on the Golden State, cigars were right up there with fancy drinks, fashionable attire, and fabulously scandalous affairs as part of the Hollywood mystique - both in real life and in what was portrayed on the silver screen.

I was reminded of this recently, on a chartered bus, returning from a ski trip in upstate New York. The movie playing on the bus was Independence Day, the alien-invasion/disaster epic from the summer of 1996. When I first saw it back then, I didn't realize how prevalent cigars were in the film's theme. Will Smith's character - a cocky, trash-talking pilot - was well-established as a cigar lover, while Jeff Goldblum's role of a bookish, intellectual, environmentalist scientist avoided smoking like the plague. In the film's climax, the two teamed up to fly a spacecraft into the alien mother ship to cripple it with a computer virus. When the heroes thought they weren't getting out alive, Smith (who had brought two cigars with him on the mission) decides to have a last smoke... and offers the other to Goldblum, who then decides, hey, he likes it! A few scenes later, they're striding boldly out of the crashed, burning spacecraft - both puffing on cigars, after having saved the world from the alien menace. And even the mild scolding given to Goldblum by Judd Hirsch, playing his meddlesome father, doesn't take away from the symbolism of the scene: Smith, a wannabe astronaut who's finally seen outer space, is celebrating; and the repressed Goldblum, who has just had his baptism of fire, is finally expressing his manhood and inner grit.

A cigar says a lot about a character in a movie, and what cigar he smokes can say even more. One of my favorite films of all time, Wall Street, Oliver Stone's 1987 morality play about insider trading in the go-go '80s, has a classic example. Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen), an ambitious young stockbroker eager to get coveted access to the office of his idol, Gordon Gekko (played masterfully by Michael Douglas in a role that won him a much-deserved Oscar), finally gets past the secretary with a gift: a hard-to-find box of Havana cigars. In a movie with so many memorable scenes, one that I remember most clearly is Gekko, sitting in his dimly lit office, placing a call to an underling to buy stock, based on the privileged info given him by Fox, while savoring one of the prized cigars. The scene doesn't just represent the beginning of Fox's fall from grace; it clearly establishes the dichotomy of Gekko's character: he's ruthless, cold-blooded, and willing to go to criminal lengths to acquire wealth, but he's a man of rare refinement and taste.

Obviously - as anyone who's experienced vintage Groucho Marx can attest - cigars can be used to comic effect, as well. A movie that falls squarely into my "guilty pleasure" category, 1985's Weird Science, is a film that I will watch any time I run across it on cable. It features a young Bill Paxton in what I still stubbornly hold to be his greatest role ever - the brutish, abusive, militaristic Chet, older brother to one of the nerdish main characters. Paxton played the outrageous role totally straight-faced, walking around in fatigues, carrying a rifle, and chomping on a big cigar. As a college student, it was impossible not to get a kick out of Chet's deliciously nasty taunting. In one early scene, our socially inept heroes, Gary and Wyatt, wake up hung over after a night of partying with the girl they created on their computer (hey, it was John Hughes and the '80s, and I did say it was a guilty pleasure, didn't I?). Chet finds them and proceeds to torture their weak stomachs with talk of "a greasy pork sandwich, served in a dirty ashtray," while arrogantly blowing cigar smoke in their faces. When they say they were with a girl, the disbelieving Chet snorts that the two "couldn't get laid in a morgue." Throughout college, whenever my friends and I wanted to needle each other, there was always a Chet-ism that was made to order. In helping define a memorable character in a fairly forgettable movie, the cigar - as symbol of overstated macho and dominance - was the perfect prop.

Sometimes a cigar can be a key hint about a character's personality, even when you don't have much time to get to know him. In the 1968 sci-fi classic Planet of the Apes, it seemed as though the writer and director wanted to establish Charlton Heston's toughness and perseverance right up front, so they could drop him into the madness of a world ruled by intelligent simians that much more quickly. Hence, the opening scene aboard the spacecraft, where he puffs on a cigar while preparing to embark on his interstellar trip. Through his contemplative monologue, you get the sense of a man taking a moment for one last pleasure before embarking on an adventure into the unknown. (Good thing, too: unlike Smith and Goldblum in ID4, he never makes it back to light one up afterward.)

When Tim Burton remade Planet last year, I just knew it wasn't going to hold up to the original. It wasn't all bad: there was lots of action, great sets, makeup and effects. Tim Roth was deliciously nasty as the evil ape general, and Estella Warren in a tattered bikini could probably even make me sit through a three-hour Ishtar sequel. But leading man Marky-Mark Wahlberg, in the Heston role, never quite convinces me of his toughness. Maybe he's too young or too pretty, or maybe the film could've used an opening scene more similar to the original to better establish a character that seemed fairly cookie-cutter throughout the movie. And don't get me started on that ending...

I could go on, but those are a few of my favorite cigar scenes. I'm sure there are a ton I'm not remembering, and probably even a few of which I'm unaware. So I'll throw the floor open. Do you have a favorite silver screen cigar moment that deserves recognition? Send it to me at the e-mail address below, and I'll print the best ones in a future column. Till then - with apologies to Mr. Ebert - this balcony is closed.