Iconic Smoking Scenes in Movies

by Lewis Robinson

At an elemental level, movies are simply a series of images woven together. Skilled filmmakers carefully select striking pictures to anchor their narratives and navigate through from one to the next with an orienting sense of reality. While that may sound very heady and organic, it’s simply another way of saying great movies are made of iconic images. 

Throughout the last hundred years, patterns and tropes have emerged in movies, and this very much applies to imagery as well as storytelling themes and devices. While it may seem controversial to say this in the 2020s, smoking is one of the most iconic and recurring images in cinema history. Here are some examples that support this.

“Casablanca”

Michael Curtiz's 1942 international romance/espionage/war thriller “Casablanca” is universally accepted as one of the greatest movies of all time. While its characters aren’t exactly using airopro battery-powered devices to smoke, they frequently light up to great dramatic effect. This is because in the black-and-white era of filmmaking, smoke “popped” off the screen if shot properly.\

Master cinematographers of the era would light the dark negative-space areas where smoke would go after exhaled (think dark walls or ceilings). This showed the curls and motion of the smoke as it dissipated. “Casablanca” has several examples of this, and it is a staple of most film noir movies of the era as well

“Ghostbusters”

Ivan Reitman’s 1984 comedy/action epic “Ghostbusters” is a near-perfect film centered around three of the funniest comedic actors to ever grace the silver screen. While Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Harold Ramis would arguably still be hilarious buried up to their necks in quicksand, it turns out that if you give them cigarettes as props, they can make them absurdly hilarious. 

In the film’s “Slimer” scene, Murray somehow manages to affix his cigarette to his bottom lip and let it drop almost all the way to a right-angle perpendicular to his mouth. Not an easy feat, as any smoker can tell you.

“Basic Instinct”

From the side-splittingly funny to the heart-poundingly sexy, cigarettes can help evoke a huge range of emotions in films. Paul Verhoeven’s steamy 1992 erotic thriller “Basic Instinct” needed just one scene (that happened to make incredibly sexy use of smoking) to make Sharon Stone a Hollywood sex symbol for the ages overnight.

For those not familiar, Stone is being interrogated at a police station about the death of her lover. She casually lights a cigarette only to be told there’s no smoking in the room. She coolly replies: “What are you gonna do? Arrest me?” and sexily takes a drag. As the scene unfolds, the combination of her casually seductive smoking, the stark blue walls of the interrogation room, and a white dress that leaves little to the imagination earn this scene a spot on this list.

“Return of the Jedi”

Completely switching gears, let’s talk about a giant space-slug smoking a hookah. In all honesty, every image of Jabba the Hutt in the third Star Wars movie is striking because of the uniqueness of his design. It’s a fairly quick shot, but at one point, he clearly takes a pull off whatever the intergalactic equivalent of a water pipe is.

It has been speculated that this is an homage to a character in the aforementioned “Casablanca,” or even the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland. When taken together, the image of a large, lounging character with a hookah deserves to be in this conversation.

“Friday”

Finally, we must acknowledge that smoking in films goes beyond cigarettes. F. Gary Gray’s legendary “Friday,” is one of the great stoner films of all time, a culmination of the lineage of Cheech and Chong’s “Up in Smoke,” “National Lampoon’s Animal House,” and “Dazed and Confused.”

Ice Cube and Chris Tucker enjoy their share of blunts and misadventures, paving the way for casual smoking in later films, and the mainstreaming of modern stoner comedies like “Half-Baked.”

While smoking in cinema has understandably evolved and fallen out of fashion, film is forever. We’ll always have these iconic scenes as snapshots of different eras of Hollywood.