America's investigative reporter Mike Wallace is reportedly furious at the way he is portrayed.

More interesting is the way The Insider can be read as the symbolic end to one of the century's greatest love affairs -- with the cigarette. The movie seeks to expose the sick world of the big tobacco corporations, through the story of Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe), a senior scientist with Brown & Williamson (the makers of Lucky Strike).

Wigand testified against his employer during one of the first big government lawsuits against the tobacco corporations. The film shows Wigand being aided by Lowell Bergman (Pacino) from 60Minutes, America's oldest and most popular news magazine show. After Wigand's reputation is destroyed by a ruthless smear campaign and his marriage collapses, the rug is truly pulled from under him when CBS's owners bury the interview in which he revealed the tobacco industry's darkest secrets.

However, no two industries have waltzed together as merrily through the years as tobacco and moving pictures. Films make cigarettes glamourous, and cigarettes lend that glamour back to generation after generation of chain-smoking stars. There have been stories of underhand deals to make sure actors smoked as much as possible through films, and actors who openly advertised cigarettes. According to the anti-smoking lobby, it was Hollywood that taught women to smoke. Husky-voiced foreign temptresses such as Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo made cigarettes sexy and they were followed by Americans like Katharine Hepburn.

Many of this century's films have leant heavily on cigarettes to suggest sexual intentions, andForties audiences didn't need a dowsing in Freud to tell them what was going on. But foreplay was only one use for cigarettes. If you didn't have a handy fag or cheroot, how could you light a stick of dynamite or a trail of gunpowder? In 1957, when Bogart (the best advert the tobacco companies ever had) died of cancer of the oesophagus, aged 57, the links between smoking and the disease that killed him were just starting to be discussed. But tradition was as strong as it had ever been: James Dean, dead two years before Bogart, had already entered the smoker's hall of fame.

In the Sixties and Seventies, Hollywood's rebellious phase, movies wouldn't have been complete without a smoker: pick any name but start with Clint Eastwood and Steve McQueen, who was also victim of lung cancer. But as medical opinion hardened, America fell out of love with the tobacco industry, and nowhere more so than California.Anti-smoking organisations insist that, statistically, smoking in American films remained steady from 1960to 1990, and then boomed again.

The cigarette's Nineties comeback was a surprise, caused partly by the very success of the anti-smoking movement. Cigarettes were suddenly as rebellious for adults as they were for 14-year-olds. In the mid-Nineties, Los Angeles, having driven cigarette smokers underground, found itself overrun by born-again cigar evangelists. People who scurried away from the sight of a cigarette seemed happy to fill their house with the long-lasting aroma of stogie. Demi Moore and Sharon Stone were rarely pictured without a fat cigar.

-- The Observer News Service