Cold Turkey is a 1971 satirical black comedy film starring Dick Van Dyke and a long list of comedic actors.

In the film, the fictional Valiant Tobacco Company stages a publicity stunt, offering $25 million tax-free dollars to any American town whose entire population can stop smoking cigarettes for a month.

As part of a public relations and marketing strategy to compare the empathy of Big Tobacco to the nobility of the Nobel Peace Prize, advertising executive Merwin Wren convinces the Valiant Tobacco Company to propose a challenge: a tax-free check for $25,000,000 ($214.4 million today) to any city or town in America that can stop smoking, going cold turkey, for thirty days.

According to Wren, the offer will generate Valiant worldwide free publicity and praise as a humanitarian gesture, but no town in America would ever be able to claim the prize, with cigarette smoking being too addictive to stop.

The Reverend Clayton Brooks, a kindly but fearsome minister of the Eagle Rock Community Church, takes up the challenge as a spiritual call.

The town council has been trying to woo back the military ever since it closed a base a few years earlier, hoping its return would help the local cash flow.

Among the weakest: the elderly Doctor Proctor, who must always have a cigarette before surgery, and the anxiety-ridden wife of the mayor, Mrs. Wappler, who counts the small gherkin pickles she eats as the hours pass.

The attention of the nation's leading newscasters at the time turns the small community's efforts into a matter of highly publicized failure or success.

Merwin is told by Valiant's board members to undermine the town's efforts at all costs, doing whatever he must to get someone to smoke before the thirty days are up.

To cash in on the publicity, The president of the United States arrives in a motorcade and makes an announcement that Eagle Rock will be the home of the new missile plant.

As the film ends, it shows the huge smokestacks of the new plant spewing columns of black smoke into the air around Eagle Rock.

The Grayson Mansion scenes were filmed at Terrace Hill, official residence of the governor of Iowa, located in Des Moines.

[citation needed] Cold Turkey features original music by Randy Newman, including "He Gives Us All His Love", a ballad with a gospel influence that serves as the film's theme song.

"[11] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times awarded the film four stars and praised several aspects of the production before concluding: "Even if you don't smoke, you'll find Cold Turkey funny.

"[14] Gary Arnold of The Washington Post wrote: "A shallow, self-deluding sort of comedy, it fails to make sense out of its own premise and characters and then tries to cover up by getting cynical about everything-in-general.