Higher Criticism in Memphis

Lloyd Tilgham Binford, dour, dogmatic chairman of the Memphis Board of Censors, has long prided himself on being able to whiff a movie innuendo or spot a suggestive line even before it is suggested. Since 1928, 76-year-old Mr. Binford has kept the Lower Chickasaw Bluff pure by dooming or doctoring many a movie.

He once ordered sections deleted from Cecil B. de Mille's The King of Kings, because they showed the crucifixion and whipping of Christ. Movies discussing or starring Negroes have been ruthlessly excluded or edited, including Imitation of Life, Sensations of 1945, Brewster's Millions (TIME, April 16).

Last week Censor Binford banned The Southerner, which critics call one of the best movies of many a year (TIME, May 21). His reason: it portrays Southerners as "common, lowdown, ignorant white trash."

In his own way, Censor Binford was making Memphis as famed for prudery and intolerance as Boston. The son of a Southern infantry colonel, he left school after learning long division, became a railway postal clerk at 16. He went to Memphis, became an insurance company president, and also a staunch Baptist, Mason, champion of Southern womanhood and white supremacy.

Since he became the dominant member of Memphis' censor board, Hollywood has quietly fumed at his autocratic czardom. Last week, David Loew, producer of The Southerner, mobilized for a court fight. Cried he: "Binford must have been sniffing too many magnolias."

Even in the South, the battle cry was

sung. Atlanta's United Daughters of the

Confederacy endorsed The Southerner as portraying "courage, stoutheartedness and love of the land." The Memphis Commercial Appeal editorialized: "Under Mr. Binford's reasoning, few of the great reformers of history would have been allowed to write and speak. Jesus Christ, Himself, on occasion shocked and shamed people to better things."

But Lloyd Binford was bothered not at all. Characters in The Southerner, he repeated, were "illiterate mendicants," and no one in Memphis (pop. 292,942) should see such people.

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