The movie that Cleveland cinemas temporarily banned after incessant stink-bombing
The cinema is a pretty magical place.
Even if you’ve opted to watch an adrenaline-fuelled movie that has you on the edge of your seat the entire time, you’re still able to bask in the glory of sitting in a dark room, a huge screen lit up in front of you, while others sink into their seats, popcorn in hand, sharing a collective experience of art.
Sometimes, though, that peace gets rudely disturbed, as last year’s crazy reaction to A Minecraft Movie suggests, which is that you can’t always expect to watch a movie undisturbed; teenage boys were bringing chickens into screenings, screaming, throwing food, and essentially making the theatre a hellish experience for everyone else. That’s more of an annoyance than anything else, though, and to raise the stakes, let’s reminisce about when a French cinema was attacked by a pretty militant Catholic group for screening The Last Temptation of Christ.
Martin Scorsese’s film was being shown in the Saint-Michel cinema in Paris, only for the group to set it alight in response to the movie’s controversial depiction of Jesus indulging in various ‘sins’, with four of the 13 people who were injured suffering severe burns, and all because they just wanted to watch the latest Scorsese.
However, one of the worst events to take place in a cinema came in 2012 when 12 people were killed by a gunman when he opened fire during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises, in what was a truly heinous incident, with a further 70 people injured among those who were seated for Christopher Nolan’s film at a Colorado cinema. These events are luckily few and far between, although back in the ‘60s, a notable string of stink bombings affected cinema-goers in Cleveland who were simply trying to watch Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Sadly, it seems like racism was the likely cause of these attacks, which were ultimately harmless.
The film was released in 1967, shortly after interracial relationships were fully legalised in the United States, making it a landmark depiction of a romance between a Black man and a white woman, with Sidney Poitier and Katharine Houghton starring as the interracial couple in the acclaimed film, but some audiences were clearly outraged by the decision, and, as a result, stink bombs were set off in three cinemas across the city, including the Hippodrome Theatre, leaving patrons with no choice but to evacuate.
In an article published by The Cleveland Press, it was reported that “almost 400 patrons left the Stillwell when the stench bomb was set off about 9pm. 20 minutes later, police evacuated the remaining customers when they received a threat that a real bomb would be exploded”.
There were luckily no real bombs planted across any of these theatres, with police finding only “two plastic bottles containing a foul-smelling fluid but no explosives”, and so, the movie was temporarily banned from being screened in Cleveland, and the stink bombs subsequently stopped.
While it sounds humorous, this likely racially-charged response to the film, which was one of Hollywood’s first-ever positive depictions of interracial relationships, came at a time when many states had only just decriminalised such harmless acts of love, showing they still had ways to go.
