A guide to the cigarettes of Out of the Past

Elaine and I watched Out of the Past (dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1947) a few nights ago and were astonished by the number of cigarettes smoked in the course of the film. Here Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas) offers a cigarette to Jeff Markham (Robert Mitchum):

“Cigarette?”

“Smoking.”

The story goes that Mitchum, who was already absent-mindedly smoking, saved the take with quick thinking. (See this moment at YouTube). A later moment in the film seems to be a premeditated joke, when Jeff pauses after knocking out a nightclub manager to fire up the manager’s lighter and light a cigarette from the manager’s desk before fleeing.

Here, after careful review, is a guide to the cigarettes of Out of the Past:

Joe smokes a cigarette. Jeff smokes a cigarette. Jeff smokes a cigarette. Fisher smokes a cigarette. Joe smokes a cigarette. (“Smoke a cigarette, Joe,” Whit says.) Whit smokes a cigarette. Jeff smokes a cigarette. A man in a nightclub smokes a cigarette. A guide to Acapulco smokes a cigarette. Kathie smokes a cigarette. Kathie smokes a cigarette. Someone at a roulette table smokes a cigarette. Whit smokes a cigarette. Jeff smokes a cigarette. Kathie smokes a cigarette. Jeff smokes a cigarette. Jeff smokes a cigarette. Jeff smokes a cigarette. Whit smokes a cigarette. Jeff smokes a cigarette. Meta smokes a cigarette. Jeff smokes a cigarette. Jeff smokes a cigarette. A cabbie smokes a cigarette. Jeff smokes the cabbie’s cigarette. (“Here, you finish it,” the cabbie says.) Kathie smokes a cigarette. Joe smokes a cigarette. Club manager attempts to light cigar. Jeff smokes a cigarette. Jeff smokes a cigarette. Whit’s gambling crony smokes a cigarette. A man outside the municipal building smokes a cigarette. Another man outside the municipal building smokes a cigarette. A man talking with Jim smokes a cigarette. Jim smokes a cigarette. Jeff smokes a cigarette. Jeff smokes a cigarette. Jim smokes a cigarette. Jeff smokes a cigarette. Jeff smokes a cigarette.

Thus we have thirty-eight cigarettes and thirty-nine acts of cigarette smoking (via the shared cigarette) in the film’s ninety-seven minutes, or roughly one cigarette every two-and-a-half minutes. The thirty-nine smokes! And there’s one attempted cigar. Jeff smokes seventeen of the cigarettes. Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer) is a distant second with four. Whit and Joe Stefanos (Paul Valentine) smoke three apiece. The film has a small non-smoking section, with The Kid (Dickie Moore), Ann Miller (Virginia Huston), Ann’s parents, and Leonard Eels (Ken Niles).

I don’t mean to make light of smoking, which killed Robert Mitchum. But I think that cigarette consumption in this film serves to quietly spoof the conventions of film noir. The Whit-and-Jeff exchange, the lighter-and-cigarette bit, and the smoking talk (“Smoke a cigarette, Joe”; “Here, you finish it”) all point in that direction. There’s also a contrarian touch: Jeff never smokes when he’s sitting alone and drinking. One more detail: on a return trip to the nightclub manager’s office, Jeff tosses a still-lit cigarette on the rug, and a thug rushes to grind it out. Damn those cigarettes.

Related posts
An Out of the Past exchange name : Dueling chin dimples (Douglas and Mitchum)