Mr. Wigand, a former research director at Brown and Williamson who accused his onetime employer of deliberately withholding information about the dangers of smoking, inspired the 1999 movie The Insider , starring Russell Crowe in the role of the courageous defector. Mr. Wigand has been recruited as a champion of City Hall's crackdown on smoking in bars and restaurants.

In 1996, Mr. Kelly headed the New York office of Investigative Group International, a blue-chip research firm retained by lawyers for Brown and Williamson to dig into Mr. Wigand's past. The tobacco company, reeling from Mr. Wigand's allegations of wrongdoing, mounted a full-blown effort to discredit him, and I.G.I. was brought in as part of the effort.

According to a former I.G.I. official who worked for the company at the time, two investigators in the New York office spent more than a month researching Mr. Wigand's life, looking for fabrications in his past résumés and driver's license applications. They even sought to verify a report of a past arrest, the official said.

Told of Mr. Kelly's role as head of I.G.I.'s New York office, Mr. Wigand assailed the commissioner in an interview with The Observer . "What was done was wrong," Mr. Wigand said. "I'm sorry he was involved in it." Mr. Kelly, through a spokesman, declined to comment for this story.

Although the full extent of Mr. Kelly's involvement is unclear-one former I.G.I. official described his role as "peripheral"-the revelations could complicate Mr. Bloomberg's smoking crackdown. His initiative has evolved into a full-blown moral crusade against Big Tobacco, which he has accused of waging a "decades-long disinformation campaign" designed to push a "dangerous product." But Brown and Williamson's effort to discredit Mr. Wigand surely was part of that "disinformation campaign."

No one denies that Mr. Kelly ran the New York office of I.G.I. when it worked on the Brown and Williamson contract, or that investigators under Mr. Kelly worked on the case. What's uncertain is whether Mr. Kelly had a direct supervisory role in the dirt-digging operation. The former I.G.I. official who spoke to The Observer sought to distance Mr. Kelly from the investigation, asserting that the commissioner had not directly orchestrated the operation. He said that the investigation's heavy lifting had been done mostly by Brown and Williamson lawyers, and that I.G.I. had been enlisted once the bulk of the research was finished to perform a "routine" check of Mr. Wigand's résumé and other aspects of his record. He added that Mr. Kelly had no idea that Brown and Williamson intended to leak the information as part of a public campaign to smear Mr. Wigand.

Still, Mr. Kelly oversaw a small office; the former I.G.I. employee said that barely more than a dozen investigators worked there. And the former employee conceded that the investigators toiling on the Brown and Williamson case worked under Mr. Kelly.

"It's a reach to say he supervised the investigation," the ex-employee said, adding: "He oversaw everything that was happening in the New York office. Did the people who were working on it ultimately report to him? Yes."

Mr. Wigand said that while he's fully supportive of the Mayor's efforts, he is nonetheless upset with Mr. Kelly. "It's bothersome to me," he said. "Ignorance is not an excuse here. He's still the boss. The buck stops there. I still feel that I.G.I. and its management were responsible for preparing a document or dossier geared to discrediting me and discrediting the truth in the court of public opinion. That type of activity, in any format, is clearly unethical."

Mr. Kelly's involvement creates a political quandary for the Mayor. At City Council hearings and in other venues, Mr. Bloomberg has sought to cast opponents of his smoking ban as tools of Big Tobacco. That may be a tougher case to make in light of the fact that Mr. Kelly's investigators helped gather information on the one whistleblower the industry's opponents have ever had.

"It's rather hypocritical of the Mayor, isn't it?" said Ciaran Staunton, the owner of O'Neill's, a pub on Third Avenue and the chairman of Irish Bar and Restaurant Owners, a group fighting the ban.

"He says those of us who are standing up for our livelihoods are stooges of the cigarette companies," Mr. Staunton continued. "Yet one of his right-hand people worked directly or indirectly for the cigarette companies, investigating one of the people that Mayor Bloomberg said is a great American."

Edward Skyler, the Mayor's press secretary, declined to comment on any aspect of this story.

Mr. Bloomberg has recruited Mr. Wigand, a Bronx resident, as a key ally in his smoking crackdown. At a smoke-free photo-op lunch with Mr. Wigand at the Union Square Café on Oct. 9, the Mayor said: "He's the first person to stand up and take on the tobacco industry. He did it because he believed it was the right thing to do."

The campaign against Mr. Wigand was one of the most ignominious chapters of the long-running public-relations battle between the tobacco industry and the anti-smoking forces. Mr. Wigand was fired from Brown and Williamson in 1993 under disputed circumstances. Two years later, he went public, alleging that the tobacco industry had known since the early 1980's about the dangers of secondhand smoke, when a Japanese researcher published the first evidence that cigarette smoke could cause lung cancer in the spouses of smokers.

When Mr. Wigand began airing his allegations in 1995, Brown and Williamson launched its campaign to discredit him, and I.G.I. was only one part of that effort. In an extensive article in February 1996 detailing Brown and Williamson's assault on Mr. Wigand's credibility, The Wall Street Journal reported that the tobacco company had assembled a team that included lawyers from the New York firm of Chadbourne & Parke, and top New York public-relations adviser John Scanlon, who died of a heart attack last year.

Also enlisted in the effort, The Journal reported, was I.G.I., which is based in Washington, D.C., and is headed by Terry Lenzner, the former Watergate investigator who worked for Bill Clinton's lawyers during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Brown and Williamson compiled the results of its investigation in a 500-page file bearing the title "The Misconduct of Jeffrey S. Wigand Available in the Public Record." Subheadings included "Wigand's Lies About His Residence," "Wigand's Lies Under Oath" and "Other Lies By Wigand."

Wet Luggage

The dossier went to extraordinary lengths to discredit Mr. Wigand. It detailed everything from a complaint Mr. Wigand had made to an airline about wet luggage to complaints about consumer goods he had purchased, to his possible role in flooding the offices of a former employer.

The file was leaked to The Journal by the Brown and Williamson camp, but the ploy quickly became a public-relations disaster when the newspaper poked holes in many of the dossier's key claims.

Mr. Kelly has never publicly discussed his role in the affair. There was a one-line mention of it in The Journal piece. Without clarifying Mr. Kelly's role, the article said: "[The Brown and Williamson camp is] working with the Investigative Group Inc., a leading Washington-based detective firm whose New York office is run by a former New York City police commissioner, Raymond Kelly. This is the firm Ivana Trump hired to investigate her rival Marla Maples and that Sen. Edward Kennedy used to check into an opponent in his 1994 campaign."

Mr. Kelly's role was also discussed in March 2000, in an extensive article by Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter Sydney Schanberg on APBNews.com, a now-defunct Web site. Mr. Schanberg reported that Mr. Kelly's biggest commission as head of I.G.I.'s New York office was "supervising the dirt-gathering investigation on Jeffrey Wigand."

"Kelly kept out of sight while his IGI operatives dug into Wigand's past for nuggets that Brown and Williamson hoped would stain and discredit its former head of research," Mr. Schanberg wrote.

Mr. Kelly was not quoted in the piece. But in an interview with The Observer , Mr. Schanberg said that during an extensive off-the-record conversation, Mr. Kelly admitted to playing a supervisory role in the inquiry.

But that account was disputed by the I.G.I. official who spoke to The Observer . The official said that Brown and Williamson lawyers had already done the dirt-digging on Mr. Wigand, and had brought in I.G.I. to check the accuracy of some of the facts they had unearthed. The official said that the bulk of the research in the dossier had already been done by the time I.G.I. received the file, adding that while two of Mr. Kelly's investigators worked on the case, Mr. Kelly himself didn't have an investigative role. He said that Mr. Kelly had been angered when the Wigand dossier was leaked to The Journal , in part because the work was shoddy and because Mr. Kelly hadn't yet signed off on it before it was given to the paper.

"He was the head of the office that had a piece of the case, but he never read the report," the official said. "Before it was a finished product, it had been leaked to the press."

Mr. Schanberg agreed that Mr. Kelly had been surprised when the dossier was leaked: "Kelly apparently never expected that he would be tied to this event."

If there's one thing more dangerous to your health than smoking, it's ratting on the cigarette industry in the media. Profound, responsible and sobering, The Insider is a complex and cinematically riveting film about one man's courage to go public with information that blew the lid off the tobacco industry and a major television network's cowardice in refusing to air the hottest story of the decade. Amazingly, it retains the truthful essence of a documentary while jolting you off balance with the brute force of a major suspense story full of mystery and intrigue.

Directed by Michael Mann, whose forte is underworld action adventures (TV shows such as Miami Vice and Crime Story , and the Pacino-De Niro gangster film Heat ), and co-written with Eric Roth, who won an Academy Award for Forrest Gump , this is a challenging and unsettling movie for the kind of thinking audience that demands more for its money than the usual brainless oatmeal served by Hollywood. It says a lot about integrity in journalism. It doesn't say much for Mike Wallace or 60 Minutes . It leaves you both charged and furious.

Based on a controversial Vanity Fair article by Marie Brenner called "The Man Who Knew Too Much," the film has a number of three-piece, size-40 corporate villains and only two brave heroes. Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe) is a research scientist who has inside information on how the tobacco industry enhances nicotine addiction by secretly adding chemicals to cigarettes, consciously ignoring health precautions, lying to consumers about the hazards of smoking, and tripling their sales. Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) is the investigative reporter and segment producer for 60 Minutes who persuades him to breach his confidentiality agreement and blow the whistle on network television.

Mr. Wigand is a conflicted man of integrity who feels guilty about the sinister power cigarette manufacturers hold over smokers and the lies they spread to the American people about cancer, spending $600 million a year in legal advice and then using it to their own advantage. Through Mr. Bergman's charismatic influence, he consents to a Mike Wallace interview, spills the beans with his insider's knowledge, and in one brave act of public service wrecks his life, destroys his marriage and lands himself in a morass of lawsuits. Then, in one supreme act of spineless fear, CBS cancels his segment because it endangers the network's merger with Westinghouse.

Even Mike Wallace sides with the network lawyers and defends the show's decision to drop a potentially litigious "hot potato," a decision he later reversed and has since come to regret. (In one of the film's most persuasive, no-frills performances, Christopher Plummer plays the veteran newscaster with chilling warts-and-all honesty, never once stooping to mimicry or impersonation.) At the time, Mr. Wallace was anything but admirable, and there is a line in the film where he arrogantly bristles and defends his gutless decision to knuckle under to network pressure with: "I don't plan to spend the rest of my days wandering in the wilderness of National Public Radio." If Mr. Wallace really did say that, it's a poor defense for compromising the integrity of the network that produced Edward R. Murrow, Eric Severeid and Walter Cronkite.

At this point, the adrenaline is already pumping like an Oklahoma wildcat gusher, but this two-and-a-half-hour movie is just shifting gears. Now it is the appalled Mr. Pacino's turn to turn his own personal sense of betrayal into constructive outrage. According to the film, the Bergman character became an insider himself, turning the tables on CBS by giving Mr. Wigand's exclusive to The New York Times to protect his source. The resulting scandal and the taped testimony CBS was finally shamed into airing

fueled 49 state lawsuits against the tobacco industry; the suits were eventually settled for $246 billion, and there is still no end to the fallout.

It's a great story, and the filmmakers enhance it further by juxtaposing the parallel experiences of Mr. Wigand, who found himself sued, targeted in a national smear campaign, divorced and facing imprisonment, and Mr. Bergman, fighting to uphold his tough integrity and force CBS to honor its commitment to an innocent good Samaritan who had risked (and lost) so much already. It is next door to impossible for me to praise highly enough the vast complexity and brilliant realism with which scriptwriter Eric Roth and director Mr. Mann have distilled and illuminated so many divisive issues in a style that keeps the audience breathless and informed at the same time.

Filmed with the cloak-and-dagger tension of a noirish thriller, The Insider commands attention and keeps you thirsting for more revelations to come. Scene by scene, the excellent cast performs grippingly. Mr. Pacino may be the marquee lure, but it is Mr. Crowe who steals the picture, unrecognizable from his sexy, two-fisted cop role in L.A. Confidential , with no trace of his Australian accent. As impressive as Mr. Plummer is in the role of Mike Wallace, the great British actor Michael Gambon is even more astonishing as a serpentine American mouthpiece for the tobacco barons, Diane Venora and Lindsay Crouse are perfect as long-suffering wives, and Gina Gershon, in a far cry from her slut portfolio, is chilling as an icy CBS lawyer obsessed with feminist control in a man's domain.

The Insider is that rare attempt by dedicated filmmakers to uplift, educate, entertain and fire the curiosity about a historic social issue regardless of what the profit potential might be. It is a mature, polished, skillfully researched and carefully examined footnote to millennium-cusp history that tells us something valid and thoughtful about the way we live now while making a little cinematic history of its own.

Tortured Lovers à la Hardy

In the clutch of new releases, don't miss a haunting British import called Dreaming of Joseph Lees . Its turbulent psychological torments and mordant longings on the windswept Isle of Man are set in 1958, but the rugged landscape and tortured, star-crossed lovers remind me more of Thomas Hardy. The fascinating newcomer Samantha Morton plays Eva, a spinster who lives a dull life working as a secretary in a sawmill and daydreaming of her one great unrequited love for a handsome cousin named Joseph Lees (Rupert Graves) whom she has not seen since she was 14.

Out of loneliness, boredom and sexual need, she moves in with Harry (Lee Ross), a pig farmer whose adoration is never reciprocated. When Joseph returns from Italy after losing his leg in a quarry, Eva's dreams are finally realized and her passion consummated, but Harry is too weak and dependent to live without her. Harry's tragic suicide attempt is botched, and Eva is left with two invalids to take care of instead of one, and a bleak future that is left up to the viewer to decide.

This may sound like melodrama, but the rich cinematography and the deeply wounding sincerity of the performances keep it on the boil. Rupert Graves, most recently seen opposite Natasha Richardson in the Broadway production of Closer , is one of the most appealing and versatile of Britain's new stars, not to be confused with the swishy, overrated Rupert Everett. Samantha Morton, soon to be seen stealing Woody Allen's new film Sweet and Lowdown , is an Emily Watson look-alike with a face right out of 1930's ads for Lydia Pinkham's beauty creams.

Who Wants to Be Malkovich?

Last, and definitely least, there is Being John Malkovich , an exasperatingly precocious one-joke idea that collapses after the first 20 minutes and drags on numbingly, substituting conceit for substance. John Cusack plays an unemployed puppeteer who goes to work as a file clerk on one-half of an office building floor where everyone has to bend over to reach the water cooler. Behind his filing cabinet, he discovers a rabbit hole through which you can slide into the brain of John Malkovich, the bald, cross-eyed actor with a voice like an unbroken dial tone. The entire cast, which includes Cameron Diaz in an ugly dung-brown wig, Orson Bean and Catherine Keener, takes turns and ends up on the other side of a New Jersey freeway.

Even for freaks who are willing to pay for Terry Gilliam movies, there's one insurmountably fatal flaw in this wreckage: Who in his own right mind would want to spend one day, one hour, or one minute in the brain of Mr. Malkovich? Directed by somebody with the audacity to call himself Spike Jonze, this hyperthyroidal exercise in loopiness only reminds me how much more I prefer the zaniness of the real Spike Jones, with or without his City Slickers, but the people raving about Being John Malkovich don't even know what I'm talking about.

In the two and a half hours to come, Mr. Mann would unfurl an engrossing story about the price of telling the truth in America in the 1990's, but at that moment the crowd was enjoying Mr. Plummer's plummy interpretation of Mr. Wallace. Mr. Plummer may have been missing some of Mr. Wallace's baritone, and at times his British accent poked through, but he had gotten most everything else: the chin in the chest, eyeglasses, the hand gestures near his left ear, the vocal inflections and even the curmudgeonly bravado. In his introductory scene, Mr. Plummer as Mike Wallace gets into a verbal fight with a gun-toting Hezbollah bodyguard because he refuses to move his chair away from the Hezbollah chief. When Mr. Wallace spat out, "What the hell do you think I am? You think I'm going to karate him to death with this notepad?" the media crowd snorted with delight.

How could they not? In his galvanizing, occasionally hyperbolic epic of journalism in full stumble mode, Mr. Mann was giving these gathered media insiders a dramatic cinematic tour of their own backyard. In addition to Mr. Wallace, there on the screen were 60 Minutes executive producer Don Hewitt, played by Philip Baker Hall, public relations executive John Scanlon, portrayed by Rip Torn and, centrally, 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman, interpreted by Al Pacino. There is even a version of former CBS News president Eric Ober, renamed Eric Kluster in this movie.

Behind the snickers of recognition, though, there was genuine excitement among this crew of media insiders. Excitement at having been given an opportunity that has yet to be extended to Mr. Wallace, Mr. Hewitt or Mr. Scanlon. An opportunity to see a movie that weeks before its Nov. 5 release has been causing a shitstorm of controversy over its portrayal of a dark moment of CBS News.

Based on actual events, The Insider is about how Jeffrey Wigand, a former vice president of the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation, decides to go before the 60 Minutes cameras and, among other things, accuse Brown & Williamson's chief executive of lying to Congress when he claimed ignorance about the addictive properties of nicotine. But after Mr. Wigand put his personal and professional life at risk, CBS News executives initially caved on airing his interview when the network's corporate general counsel warned that CBS could be sued for billions in tobacco-friendly Kentucky state court for if the piece ran.

But the 81-year-old Mr. Wallace-though given a comparatively sympathetic portrait in the movie as a kind of slick-haired, menschy Hamlet who agonizes through Mr. Mann's screenplay to side first with the good guys, then with the bad guys, then finally makes a principled stand with the good guys-is furious. He has not seen the finished film, but he asked Mr. Mann for a copy of the script, and the director sent it to him. Apparently what really infuriated Mr. Wallace is the film's suggestion that he did not really protest the CBS News executives' decision until Mr. Bergman helps him see the light of day.

In one of several letters Mr. Wallace sent to Mr. Mann, the 60 Minutes correspondent wrote: "For you to make a film that suggests I would compromise years of building a reputation for accurate and fair reportage in order to what? TO PANDER TO MANAGEMENT? TO SELL OUT MY CONVICTIONS? TO FIND MY MORAL COMPASS AGAIN ONLY UNDER LOWELL BERGMAN'S TUTELAGE IS MINDLESS AND INSULTING."

After 50 years in broadcasting, including some of TV's most Olympian heights and a couple of brutal lows, Mr. Wallace was, apparently, in no mood to be condescended to or depicted as a waffling frontman being sermonized to by the dark ball of fire represented by Mr. Pacino's Serpico-like version of Lowell Bergman. Nor, apparently, did 60 Minutes executive producer Don Hewitt like being sketched as a spineless, sputtering Lou Grant ready to sell out both his producer and Dr. Wigand for a softer version of the story.

Weirdly, however, P.R. executive John Scanlon-who worked for Brown & Williamson whacking away at Dr. Wigand's believability-and, as portrayed by a big-bellied Rip Torn as bearded Beelzebub himself, didn't seem upset. Mr. Scanlon hasn't seen the film, but said he has read every draft of the script, and, he said, "I prefer my fiction in print."

Since then, Mr. Wallace and his boss, Mr. Hewitt, have been vocal in their criticism of The Insider , most recently, in an Oct. 15 piece by Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales, but they have since decided to stop talking. Calls to their offices were referred to spokesman Kevin Tedesco, who said: "We're reserving our right not to publicize their movie."

Speaking from Los Angeles, Mr. Mann called the 60 Minutes vow of silence "a little late."

"I think they have handled themselves poorly," said Mr. Mann. "I mean, come on, these guys are on television every Sunday for the last 30 years. They go into people's lives all the time. This is a motion picture. It's something that's happened to them. The film doesn't represent that they authored these events. They're victims along with everybody else at 60 Minutes of an intrusion of corporate interest into the news. And they were all on the same train wreck together. And everybody acted and reacted in different ways."

Mr. Mann then added that when Mr. Wallace went on Charlie Rose in November 1995 and essentially admitted that 60 Minutes had made a mistake "that was brave and courageous."

"This isn't about public image," said Mr. Mann. We're not publicists. And we're not yellow press journalists. We're not out slamming people. In fact, if the film errs, it errs on the side of being cautious. And when we couldn't nail down things, we didn't go there. We knew we didn't want to pull any punches, and when you don't want to pull punches, you better not go speculating."

Vanity Fair writer Marie Brenner, whose story about Dr. Wigand inspired Mr. Mann's movie, said she believed the controversy "has to do with the complexities of the process of the news business in the 1990's. It's what we all live with. The fear of corporate bigfooting.

"They are angry," she said of the 60 Minutes crew, "because The Insider portrays a moment in their lives as newsmen in which they momentarily stumbled and acted with the corporations. No one ever imagines that that moment is going to be illuminated by movie cameras."

Mr. Wallace's ire aside, he doesn't come off looking that bad. Mr. Wigand and Mr. Bergman are clearly the heroes of The Insider , but Mr. Wallace gets to redeem himself and show a quality of conscience and turmoil which, in the lesson-play construction of the movie, finally brings him out on Mr. Bergman's side.

As depicted in the movie, when CBS corporate leadership and Mr. Hewitt begin to waffle about airing the Wigand interview, Mr. Wallace tells Mr. Bergman. "I'm with Don on this."

But after Mr. Wallace's attempt to explain the situation on his own network's newscast is shredded to a one-word answer, and as Mr. Bergman's character gets busy, essentially becoming a behind-the-scenes whistle-blower for his own company, and the story breaks in the New York Times (with former New York Post editor Pete Hamill playing the 3 A.M. reporter who somehow crashes the story by the morning edition), Mr. Wallace visits Mr. Bergman in his hotel room and makes a speech about how a guy toward the end of his career trajectory wonders about his legacy. "How will I be regarded in the end?" he asks Mr. Bergman, noting, "History only remembers most what you did last. And should that be fronting a segment that allowed a tobacco giant to crash this network, does it give someone at my time of life pause? Yeah."

Then, in one of the movie's climactic scenes, after agonizing in Mr. Bergman's hotel room on journalism, his legacy and mortality in an aria worthy of William Holden in Network , Mr. Wallace gets to tell Mr. Hewitt off. "You fucked up, Don," he says.

When Mr. Hewitt protests that the Wigand story is "old news … these things have a half-life of 15 minutes." Mr. Wallace disputes his boss and tells him, "No, that's fame. Fame has a 15-minute half-life. Infamy lasts a little longer."

Mr. Bergman acknowledges that the legacy speech never occurred as it happens in The Insider , but he said: "I've had conversations with Mike where he's talked about his legacy."

"The movie is not a documentary," said Mr. Bergman, "but from emotional and philosophical points of view and from the point of view of the issues, it's an accurate movie."

That seems, as almost always, to be the crux of the issue with a big studio picture made about an event that happened-even one that took place on television. "For a moviemaker to lose accuracy in the name of drama," said Andrew Heyward, the president of CBS News, "that's not a problem in society. It's only a problem if you're one of the people the movie's about. It's only a problem if the viewer confuses what he or she is seeing on the screen with what actually happened. In this case, the film, by the admission of the filmmakers, is a fictionalized, dramatized version of events. It is done from the completely one-sided perspective of one of the participants, Lowell Bergman."

A few people in the 60 Minutes camp have managed to see The Insider . Correspondent Lesley Stahl is one, and while Ms. Stahl said she thought the portrait of Mr. Wigand was "superb," she said that Mr. Wallace "redeemed himself much more than the movie suggests. For much longer and much harder. He was out there publicly criticizing the place." And, said Ms. Stahl, "the quality of what he did is not in the movie."

Movies and journalism have collided often in the last 25 years, nowhere more paradigmatically than in Alan Pakula's film All the President's Men , which crystallized the national memory of Watergate reporting. Most memorable of all, perhaps, in that movie, superseding the public consciousness of the real man, was Jason Robards' portrayal of Ben Bradlee, the executive editor of The Washington Post . Asked what effect The Insider would have on his friend Mr. Wallace's reputation, Mr. Bradlee replied, "I would think it would take a real hatchet job to ruin Mike Wallace's image. He's had how many years in everybody's living rooms as a crusader and a force for good." Then Mr. Bradlee said, "If some movie comes along and scars that [image], so be it, but it isn't going to change the obit."