Cold Turkey

1971
PG-13
1h 39m

IMDb RATING

6.6/10

2.5K

YOUR RATING

Hoping for positive publicity, a tobacco company offers $25 million to any American town that quits smoking for 30 days. Amidst a media frenzy, Eagle Rock, Iowa accepts the challenge while the company's PR man tries to sabotage the effort.

Play trailer3:04

1 Video

41 Photos

Dark Comedy Satire Slapstick Comedy

Hoping for positive publicity, a tobacco company offers $25 million to any American town that quits smoking for 30 days. Amidst a media frenzy, Eagle Rock, Iowa accepts the challenge while t... Read allHoping for positive publicity, a tobacco company offers $25 million to any American town that quits smoking for 30 days. Amidst a media frenzy, Eagle Rock, Iowa accepts the challenge while the company's PR man tries to sabotage the effort.Hoping for positive publicity, a tobacco company offers $25 million to any American town that quits smoking for 30 days. Amidst a media frenzy, Eagle Rock, Iowa accepts the challenge while the company's PR man tries to sabotage the effort.

See production info at IMDbPro

IMDb RATING

6.6/10

2.5K

YOUR RATING

See production info at IMDbPro

Videos1

Trailer 3:04

Watch Trailer

Photos41

+ 34

More like this

6.6

Fitzwilly

6.4

On a Clear Day You Can See Forever

6.9

The Late Show

4.3

Some Kind of a Nut

6.8

A Man Called Horse

7.0

Who's Minding the Mint?

6.5

It Happened to Jane

7.0

Never Give a Sucker an Even Break

6.0

The Day of the Dolphin

6.4

The Comic

6.1

The Art of Love

6.2

The Gumball Rally

Storyline

Edit

Did you know

Edit

Trivia
Dropping the cigarettes onto the crowd, in the last midnight town square gathering, was actually done by putting 8" diameter, 25'-long pipes against the trees in the town square. The pipes were then filled with cigarettes. Then, on cue, air was blasted into the pipe bottom, shooting them into the air and onto the crowd. After each take everyone was asked to gather up the cigarettes from the ground and turn them in so they could be reloaded into the cigarette canons and rained down again. The filming of this final scene took several weeks in the late fall in Iowa where it is pretty cold. In the movie it is supposed to be summer time so the actresses are dressed in summer dresses. Between takes, everyone (actors and extras) were huddled in winter coats sucking on ice cubes. The ice cubes kept their mouths and breath cold so there would be no visible vapor when they exhaled.

Goofs
Bishop Manley calls Dearborn, Michigan "General Motors country." Actually, Dearborn is the home of Ford Motor Company, its world headquarters and its flagship River Rouge plant. No GM facilities have been located in Dearborn.

Quotes
Wren: Big clocks are never wrong!

Connections
Featured in Casting By (2012)

Soundtracks
He Gives Us All His Love
Written and Performed by Randy Newman

User reviews58

Review

Featured review

Savage satire on the tobacco industry

Knowing full well that it could never happen, a major tobacco company offers a multi-million dollar prize to any town in the USA that will quit smoking for an entire month.

What the company doesn't expect is the little town of Eagle Rock, Iowa, and the Reverand Clayton Brooks leading the distressed town to prosperity with the much needed money as incentive.

The film, the work of TV sit-com legend Norman Lear, is a savage satire of the American tobacco industry, as well as the TV news community (Comic Ray Goulding appears in one scene as "Walter Chronic" in a parody of TV news anchor Walter Cronkite, with a florescent lamp behind his head, forming an angelic halo).

Many people in the film later went on to become notable television actors, and it's a delight to see how people become so easily unhinged when they're deprived of their nicotine fix (this from a happy non-smoker)!

Bob Newhart plays an odd villain in this film. A strange role for a man so associated with playing meek roles is cast as a rather icy consultant for the tobacco giants.

An underrated film that is worth another viewing, if only to have a snicker at the tobacco industry or see the town of Greenfield, Iowa used as a backdrop.