Cocktail Hour

As long as we're talking about things that should have gone into my cigarette lighter book, what about the movie COCKTAIL HOUR? I didn't finish watching it. But the heroine asks for a cigarette and a dozen men come springing from every direction to oblige her. It's a stampede! In the examples I used in my book (Anne Bancroft and Gillian Anderson, if I recall correctly), the cigarettes had already met the lips, and it was a light for which each heroine pined, resulting in a similar crush of attention. Still, it is part of the same mythological gesture. I wondered, as COCKTAIL HOUR came out in 1933, whether this was a particularly early example, but I doubt it. Some dramatic actions float beyond cliche, seemingly inevitable, without origin.