A Memphis theater has ended its 34-year tradition of screening the 1939 Oscar-winning-film “Gone With the Wind” at least once a year. The Orpheum Theatre dropped the movie from its programming after several patrons complained about an Aug. 11 screening, saying the film was “racially insensitive,” USA Today reported.
“While title selections for the series are typically made in the spring of each year, the Orpheum has made this determination early in response to specific inquiries from patrons,” Brett Batterson, president of the Orpheum Theatre Group, said in a statement obtained by Entertainment Weekly.
“As an organization, whose stated mission is to ‘entertain, educate and enlighten the communities it serves,’ the Orpheum cannot show a film that is insensitive to a large segment of its local population,” Batterson added.
Taking inflation into account, the Civil War epic “Gone With the Wind” is the highest grossing film of all time, according to Box Office Mojo. Even so, its treatment of black characters — referred to as “darkies” throughout the film — has been at the center of an increasingly heated debate.
The movie follows the life of Southern belle Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh), who grows up on a plantation and eventually falls in love with former blockade runner for the South Rhett Butler (Clark Gable). To many, the film depicts the Confederacy in a nostalgic, loving way while drawing its black characters in broad and demeaning stereotypes.
In 2015, film critic Lou Lumenick wrote that the film “buys heavily into the idea that the Civil War was a noble lost cause and casts Yankees and Yankee sympathizers as the villains, both during the war and during Reconstruction.” He suggested it should “go the way of the Confederate flag” and be phased out of American culture.
Outraged defenders of the movie, though, seemed to feel otherwise and quickly vocalized their objections. The loudest voice belonged to Fox News commentator and Memphis native Todd Starnes.
In two different tweets linking to a commentary he wrote on the theater’s decision, Starnes said, “Common sense has gone with the wind in my hometown of Memphis” and said the movie “has been done-in by a bunch of meddling, no-account, liberal Yankee carpetbaggers.”
https://twitter.com/toddstarnes/status/902192649964322816
https://twitter.com/toddstarnes/status/902192380413181952
“The cultural cleansing of my hometown has gone too far,” Starnes wrote on his blog, calling those who complained “culture jihadists.”
“And now our beloved film is gone with the wind — done in by a bunch of meddling, no-account thespian carpetbaggers,” he continued. “Many Memphians must be wondering what has come over this here town. To borrow a phrase from ‘Gone With the Wind,’ Liberals have come over it. Same as they’ve come over all of us.”
Starnes concluded:
“But there’s no use crying in our sweet tea, Southerners,” he wrote. “We must stand up to the scourge of the Yankee liberals. We must stand up and fight. In the words of Scarlett O’Hara, as God is my witness — we’re not gonna let them lick us.”
Some people who had seen the movie in Memphis agreed with Starnes.
“My grown daughter and I went together to see this movie during the summer screening 5 years ago. It is an Epic Movie that no one should miss on the big screen,” wrote Sherrye Britt, who said there was nothing racist about the movie. “Stop trying to rewrite history. The next thing you know they will ban To Kill a Mockingbird, Driving Ms. Daisy, and other iconic movies.”