Why Jane Fonda movies were banned in a Kentucky county for almost 20 years
We’ve all got that one celebrity, maybe a singer or an actor, that we can’t stand. Maybe you’d even go as far as to say you absolutely despise them, but should you let that affect an entire county?
When I was a kid, I absolutely reviled Robbie Williams, sneering every time I saw a picture of him and shaking my head in disgust; I might have been just six years old, but I clearly sensed something I did not like. Maybe I knew he was going to get involved in something like a dodgy tax scheme later down the line, but my dislike was pretty harmless, though, stemming from the fact that I just really didn’t like him.
Over in Kentucky, however, a man decided to outlaw certain Jane Fonda films for almost 20 years, purely because he didn’t like her. Isaac ‘Ike’ Boutwell ran a movie theatre in Hardin County, although he had previously served in the Vietnam War as a pilot trainer, so you can see where this is going.
Fonda stirred up major controversy for her fierce political activism in the 1960s and 1970s, especially advocating against war, which had, of course, come to a head with the Vietnam War between the 1950s and the 1970s.
The actor had initially begun her career in various American and European productions, often opting for racy flicks like Barbarella and Circle of Love (in which she became the first American actor to appear nude in a European film), but she eventually turned her attention to projects that were much more politically-charged.
She appeared in Klute in 1971, which won her an Oscar, donning a short haircut and playing the subversive role of a call girl, which she then followed up with the Jean-Luc Godard film Tout va bien, which emerged during the height of the French filmmaker’s Marxist period. That same year, she travelled to Vietnam, which was enough to cause people to accuse her of treason, but then she did something that had people absolutely up in arms, and her career was, for a while, under serious threat.
She was photographed sitting on an anti-aircraft gun used to target American troops, appearing alongside North Vietnamese soldiers. This didn’t go down well at all, and she was branded ‘Hanoi Jane’, later admitting that she regretted the photo, even though she continues to be staunch in her anti-war activism.
However, that was enough to outrage many war veterans, and Boutwell was no exception; so, he somehow managed to get a handful of her films banned in Hardin County, including her Oscar-winning Klute and even the romantic comedy that brought her back to the screen, Monster-in-Law. The ban was put in place in 2005, lasting until his death in 2022, which is almost two decades of a personal vendetta being so bad that you feel the need to let it affect everyone around you.
It’s insane that Boutwell would go that far, but I guess that if you’ve got the power, you can easily choose to ban whatever you want. To be fair, if I had the power, I’d make sure no one would have to be subjected to Williams’ monkey biopic Better Man.
