Freud once said that occasionally a cigar is merely a cigar. In the movies, at least, a cigarette has never been merely a cigarette, although the meanings and uses of cigarettes have changed over the decades.

Compare two movies 50 years apart. In "The Maltese Falcon" in 1941, Humphrey Bogart rolls his own. The tobacco pouch that proclaims his toughness and masculinity dangles from his jacket pocket. In "Regarding Henry" in 1991, the wages of chain smoking are having your brains splattered on the floor of a convenience store. Harrison Ford wouldn't have been shot in the head if he hadn't gone out to buy a pack of cigarettes -- almost literally his coffin nails.

The movies, of course, have always played the dual role of reflecting and shaping what society considers proper. With this year's Great American Smokeout scheduled for Nov. 19, many Americans are deciding that it is time to shred that cigarette into the garbage disposal, to rub out the embers in the ashtray, to toss the pack into the trash. On screen, villains still have the habit, but real heroes no longer smoke.

"I would not have any protagonist smoke in a movie unless it was a period film," says the producer Daniel Melnick, who was off nicotine for eight years until he bummed a cigarette from a crew member when he was making "Air America" in Thailand in 1989. "Audiences want the ability to idealize themselves in the stars."