Banned in Memphis

"Sorry, boys," said the old man, squinting through his wire-rimmed glasses as the reels on the movie projector spun to a halt and somebody switched on the lights. "But I can't let you show a film like that in Memphis."

The movie he previewed was a 1947 Hal Roach comedy called Curley, and it showed black children and white children attending school together. That was all it took for the old man to declare it "inimical to the morals and welfare of our city," as he would explain later. He also disliked any films starring Charlie Chaplin ("a London guttersnipe"), Ingrid Bergman ("because she was living in open and notorious adultery"), and the 1955 classic Rebel Without a Cause ("it promoted juvenile delinquency").

And it certainly mattered what the old man liked and disliked, because from 1928 to 1955, he absolutely ruled the Memphis Censor Board. Memphians never saw many films shown in other cities, or they saw shortened versions of them because "offensive" scenes were snipped out. His harsh judgments of seemingly harmless films made him a household name across the nation, and Memphians still talk about the days when everything they could see, hear, or read was decided by Lloyd T. Binford.

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Binford had come a long way from the log cabin in Duck Hill. His insurance business made him a millionaire, and he was named a colonel on the staffs of the governors of Mississippi and Tennessee. He became director of the Mid-South Fair, then chairman of the committee that was erecting the Shrine Building downtown. He was a Shriner, a Knight Templar, an Elk, a Rotarian, and a Kiwanian.

But nobody was quite sure why Binford, of all people, was named to head the newly formed Memphis Censor Board. His education (or lack of it) and his insurance background hardly qualified him to be the arbiter of public taste. That didn't matter, though, because Memphis political boss E.H. Crump decided Binford was the man for the job. Binford himself always claimed he didn't know he had even been chosen until he read the announcement in the newspapers. If that's true, it was probably the last time something ran in the newspapers that he didn't know about. The job paid him $200 a month, and Binford proudly wore a tiny badge that opened doors for him at movie theaters across the city and at screening rooms on Film Row downtown.

The Memphis Censor Board had been formed in 1921 to "censor, supervise, regulate, or prohibit any entertainment of immoral, lewd, or lascivious character, as well as performances inimical to the public safety, health, morals, or welfare." Such broad powers would have shut down most of the theaters in the city, but the censor board rarely flexed its muscles.

Then Binford took over. And although the board had a half dozen other members, it was Binford's verdict that counted.

Because of his own traumatic experiences with the railroad, Binford ruled against any films that included a train robbery. In 1940 alone, Memphians never saw Tyrone Power in Jesse James, Henry Fonda in The Return of Frank James, or Jane Russell in The Outlaw. As Binford repeatedly preached, such films were "inimical to the public welfare."

That was just the start. Perhaps because the comedian Charlie Chaplin had a penchant for underage girls, Binford called him a "London guttersnipe" and "a traitor to the Christian-American way of life." Why, he was even "an enemy of decency and virtue." Binford banned all of Chaplin's films in Memphis.

He also banned any films starring Ingrid Bergman because she left her husband and moved in with Italian director Roberto Rossellini. When announcing the ban on Bergman's 1949 Stromboli, he refused to permit "the public exhibition of a motion picture starring a woman who is universally known to be living in open and notorious adultery."

Movies banned by Binford were said to be "Binfordized," and there were many of them. He killed the 1928 showing of Cecil B. DeMille's King of Kings because the film story of Jesus differed slightly from the Bible, and he thought the crucifixion scenes were too violent. He banned The Woman They Almost Lynched (1953) simply because "I'm against pictures featuring Jesse James." And Memphians couldn't see Marlon Brando in the 1954 classic The Wild One because Binford considered it "rowdy, unlawful, and raw."

Others getting a thumbs-down, sometimes for inexplicable reasons, included Dead End (1937) with Humphrey Bogart, Lost Boundaries (1949) with Mel Ferrer, Duel in the Sun (1946) starring Gregory Peck, The French Line (1953) with Jane Russell ... the list goes on.

Even stage plays were halted. Binford dropped the curtain on an Ellis Auditorium production of Erskine Caldwell's drama Tragic Ground because he found it "vulgar."

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But it was Binford's attitude toward blacks that caused him — and Memphis — the most condemnation. Binford was absolutely opposed to movies showing blacks and whites together on the same social level. In 1945, he blocked the hit musical Annie Get Your Gun from Ellis Auditorium because there were blacks in the cast "who had too familiar an air about them." For the same reason, he banned the film Imitation of Life (1934) with Claudette Colbert and Brewster's Millions (1945) with Eddie "Rochester" Anderson because certain scenes "gave too much prominence to Negroes."

To show the films in Memphis, local distributors had to delete these scenes. As a result, some movies shown here were minutes shorter than the same films shown in other cities, because Binford ordered the complete removal of scenes featuring prominent black performers like Duke Ellington or Cab Calloway. Memphians probably never realized that Lena Horne's segment, for example, was snipped completely out of the 1946 picture Ziegfield Follies, as was Pearl Bailey's role in the 1947 Variety Girl.

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