20 Minutes Shorter

Chief Inspector and his deputy Inspector Fox are interviewing a suspect in her home.  The phone rings in the adjoining room, and she asks with a sarcastic tone in her voice if she may be permitted to answer it.  The call is for the Chief Inspector, and he leaves the room, she closes the door behind him, pulls out a cigarette case, lights up a fag (the scene takes place in merry old England), and on second thought offers one to Inspector Fox, who up to this moment stood gazing at a painting on the wall.  He declines.

The cigarette fills the dead time in the narrative while we wait for the Chief Inspector to return.  A common dramatic device in this television mystery production, and the only cigarette to appear during its 100 minutes.

How different from the film noirs of the 1940s!  There, cigarettes and cigarette smoke ruled, and not just in the productions featuring notorious chain smoker on an off screen  Humphrey Bogart.  There wouldn't be film noirs without night scenes, rain, nightclubs, shadows, doom and gloom and cigarettes.  Many cigarettes, always cigarettes.  As dead time fillers, scene stealers, social ice breakers, character descriptors and betrayers, as interludes, symbols, metaphors,  so many things in all those melodramas one can't possibly count them all without seeing again all  those films.  One gets the impression that an average film noir would be up to 20 minutes shorter without cigarettes. Sure, in some scenes the directors apparently cheated, not quite knowing how to resolve a scene they'd order a character to light up a fag.  So what?

And today?  Film noir is dead, cigarettes are mostly out, since if nothing else  their presence affects the official rating status of the movie - no chain smoker can be a hero in a drama rated for the whole family - what can replace cigarettes then as a prop and a dramatic device?

What has at least partly replaced cigarettes as a dramatic device in today's mystery movies is a cellphone.  Partly, because it cannot play all those roles that a cigarette played.  But it can fill a dead space, as we already noted, close or interrupt a scene, and move the action forward.  I have watched some recent films where the cellphone appears as often as a cigarette appeared in film noirs.

And the added benefit or perhaps drawback of having cellphones in a movie is that with the cellphone technology and fashion changing as fast as they have been,  the viewer can quickly place the action of the movie in time, even faster than judging the period by the look of the automobiles present which don't change as fast as these portable telephones.