Cigarette-holder

Pipes, cigars and cigarette-holders, amber goods in great variety, and all kinds of smokers’ articles cheaper than elsewhere, at Sig. Roescher’s, 296 Main street, next to City Ice-house.

One moment he [Peter O’Toole] had the audience in the palm of his hand, hanging on to every move he made, from the flutter of an eyelid to the flicking of ash from a long cigarette-holder as he represented, with his serpent’s tongue, the thoughtful desolation of an alcoholic London journalist in Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell.

And he [Dalton Trumbo] remains dapper even in the most dire of circumstances — the hair, the moustache and the sleek cigarette-holder.

But there are crucial advantages to smoking in films, which such campaigns can never concede: it gives actors a useful, subtle, nonverbal way to tell us something about their characters, from Michael Corleone’s dead-calm manipulation of a Zippo in The Godfather, to Norma Desmond’s talon-like cigarette-holder in Sunset Boulevard.