My Favorite Cigar
Eddie Muller • Television Host
Macanudo Café Duke of York
“Tobacco is the greatest movie prop of all. Actors love it. It can convey impatience, languor, anything.” Eddie Muller, host of “Noir Alley” on Turner Classic Movies, is waxing eloquent on his area of expertise: film noir, those gritty flicks peopled with desperate characters, hard guys and femme fatales. The ultimate noir, Double Indemnity, has a smoking theme throughout, he says. Edward G. Robinson is forever asking Fred MacMurray for his cigarette lighter to light a cigar. The point? “The mentor smokes the cigar, the student smokes the cigarette.”
Muller says that on-screen smokers weren’t always ominous. “Today, nine times out of 10, it’s the villain that’s smoking one.” His choice of cigar—the mild Macanudo Café Duke of York—comes from his father, a renowned San Francisco boxing writer also named Eddie. Muller says he’s a solitary smoker, enjoying cigars at home in his garage, which has been converted into a bar. He uses the room as a set for TCM promos, and after a day of shooting a cigar is his reward for a job well done.
