Minor hijack. Altria (formerly Phillip Morris) no longer owns Kraft
But your cites don’t show a suspicious prevalence. If one in four people smoke, and all top-grossing movies feature more than four characters, shouldn’t they all portray smoking at some point? Probably not, since smokers aren’t spread evenly through the population. By the same token, counting movies with cigarettes in them doesn’t really yield any useful information, either.
I can’t see a producer going along with an arrangement like that, since getting caught would be disastrous, and would require the complicity of at least the director and the actor.
Asleep at the Wheel music video, appropriate to this discussion.
When you take this statistic apart and provide some needed context, however, it becomes more enlightening.
Cigarette smoking was never evenly distributed across U.S. society. It varied among lines from urban/rural to regional to economic. Most importantly, it varied greatly among sex.
There are many reasons for this. One is that there was a prejudice against female smokers that extended to the letter of the law. Females in the first part of the 20th century were arrested simply for smoking in public. It was not until after World War I, a time as radical as the 1960s for overturning societal prohibitions and inhibitions, that women started to smoke in public. You didn’t see this everywhere. It was disproportionally in the large urban centers, when the flappers also raised their hems, bobbed their hair, and started going to speakeasies. It took most of the decade for the flapper image to diffuse throughout the country.
The other great reason was World War I itself. Large numbers of doughboys picked up the habit from the cigarettes given freely out to troops. The result of this was that the increased number of female smokers was to a great extent paralleled by the number of male smokers, so the proportion of female smokers did not rise as much as it otherwise would have. Smoking itself certainly rises. Per capita consumption of cigarettes doubles from 1920 to 1930.
So what needs to be true if the total number of smokers at any time were to be 50%? The percentage of men who smoked had to be much higher than 50%. I don’t see precise statistics in a quick search, but we can assume that at least 75% of men and perhaps up to 90% of men smoked at any given time. (And remember that the number of current adult smokers is always much lower than the number of adults who have ever smoked. Even today that number is about 50% of the population.)
Given that the vast majority of men at the time smoked, and that actresses in presumably sophisticated subcultures like that of Hollywood smoked to a degree wildly disproportionate to the general population, it’s fair to suggest that the population represented by the world of acting almost universally smoked. That less than 50% of the adult population smoked is a statistical artifact generated by the position of the 1930s in the slope of the century-long rise to equality in female smoking.
The percentage of American smokers peaked in 1970. There was a tremendous rise in the percentage of smokers in the thirty-seven years before then, and in the thirty-seven years since then. Indeed, it appears, from the statistics I’ve looked at (which aren’t particularly good, unfortunately, being just charts, not numbers), that the percentage of adult smokers in 1933 was about the same that it is today, which is somewhat less than 25%. So if one were to suppose that the percentage of smokers in films correlated closely with the percentage of smokers in real life, one would expect that the year that American films had the most smoking in them would be 1970. I don’t think this is true (although I don’t know how to find the statistics on this). I believe that the increase in smoking in films preceded the rise in smoking in real life by about fifteen years and the decrease in smoking in films preceded the fall in smoking in real life by about fifteen years.