Television Reviews : A Balanced Look at the Dilemmas of Smoking

You don’t have to be old enough to remember sultry Julie London singing TV commercials about Marlboros to know how culturally cool and ultra-sophisticated it once was to smoke cigarettes. Today, smokers are among society’s most picked upon pariahs.

The warnings to smokers about the connection between cigarette smoking and heart disease and lung cancer started in 1964. Now smokers are incessantly lectured about their dirty habit and are increasingly segregated and even outlawed in certain public places.

Yet, as the documentary “Showdown on Tobacco Road” points out tonight (at 8 on Channels 28 and 15, and at 10 on Channels 50 and 24), 51 million Americans (30% of all adults) still choose to smoke. That annoying fact of life in a free society means that wherever smokers and nonsmokers collide they create a full pack of moral and legal and health dilemmas.

These questions are addressed with blessed objectivity and evenhandedness in “Tobacco Road,” an informative and entertaining hour that is concerned with providing historical and cultural perspectives and facts about smoking, not with moralizing or finding fault.

Every conceivable side of the smoking issue is represented. Viewers hear from everyone from tobacco industry lobbyists and the People United for Friendly Smoking to Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and Tony Schwartz, the renowned advertising genius who uses his talent to make potent anti-smoking radio and TV spots.

Medical experts reiterate smoking’s terrible toll of death and disease on society and complain that we don’t ridicule smoking enough. Doctors complain that they haven’t the time or expertise to offer anti-smoking counseling to their patients.

One comedian makes fun of smokers, another takes jabs at the anti forces. Viewers are even given a rare and candid behind-the-scenes look at Phillip Morris marketing people at work. They defend their rights to advertise under the First Amendment and ask ominously what will be next if we outlaw tobacco.

There also are explanations of how World War I doughboys became addicted to nicotine and how the tobacco interests orchestrated a PR campaign that removed the once-strong cultural taboo against women smoking. Along with all the serious stuff, however, are some great old movie scenes with smoky Bette Davis and primitive TV commercials for cigarettes, including such dated cultural embarrassments as the leggy dancing packs of Old Golds and rugged submachine gun-shooting Lucky Strike men.

Independent film makers David Hoffman and Kirk Wolfinger have done a good and honest job with a complicated issue that so often is dealt with too simplistically.