Fearless and flamboyant, the late William "Bill" Kendall was an outspoken champion of art cinema and gay pride at a time when both concepts were met with suspicion or even hostility by most Memphians.
As manager of the Memphis "art" mov...
Fearless and flamboyant, the late William "Bill" Kendall was an outspoken champion of art cinema and gay pride at a time when both concepts were met with suspicion or even hostility by most Memphians.
As manager of the Memphis "art" movie houses of the 1960s and '70s, Kendall was the city's eccentric and proudly contentious patron saint of art, foreign, classic, camp and experimental cinema -- or "smut," as some of his bookings were defined by prosecutors.
Kendall was indicted on obscenity charges by the Shelby County Grand Jury for exhibiting such frank films as "I, A Woman" (1965) and "Without a Stitch" (1968), both from Sweden, and "I Spit on Your Grave" (1959), a forgotten French film -- no relation to the notorious 1978 revenge movie of the same name -- about a light-skinned African-American who heads South to investigate the lynching of his brother.
Kendall always beat the rap, as Bogart or Cagney might have said in one of the classic Hollywood movies Kendall sometimes revived when he was manager of such now defunct movie houses as the Guild Art Theatre on Poplar, the Studio on Highland and, briefly, the Bristol on Summer.
The Guild was a successor to the city's first art theater, the Ritz, which was inspired by the success of the Peachtree Art Theatre in Atlanta, which was devoted to foreign films. ("Gone with the Wind" author Margaret Mitchell was headed for the Peachtree when she was struck by a car and killed while crossing the street in 1949).
The Studio has since been converted into Newby's, a bar/pub/music venue, while the Guild is now the Evergreen -- still a theater, but home mostly to live performances. The tiny Bristol, meanwhile, has been replaced by a strip mall.
Kendall's fate was just as inauspicious. Although he enjoyed the spotlight, by the time he died April 19 of natural causes at age 88 at the Westminster Commons care home in Atlanta, he was more or less alone, although he still corresponded with some faithful and far-flung friends via shakily handwritten letters.
He had no children or surviving close family members, and was essentially indigent. Funeral arrangements were handled by the Fulton County Department of Health and Human Services, and Kendall was buried May 2 at Lakeside Memorial Gardens in Palmetto, Ga., in a "potter's field" gravesite marked by a number rather than a name.
News of Kendall's death traveled slowly, reaching friends mostly through Facebook postings. Citing privacy rules, Westminster and other agencies refused even to provide death and burial information for days. Friends were frustrated, but perhaps timeliness wasn't particularly important to Kendall, who championed such timeless filmmakers as James Whale, Buster Keaton and Orson Welles, as well as Fellini, Bergman, Antonioni and Andy Warhol.
A lifelong film fanatic, Kendall brought acclaimed, controversial and unusual movies to Memphians in the era before VHS, DVD, Netflix and the Internet, when there was almost no way to see "La Dolce Vita" or "The Bicycle Thief" except on a movie screen. He also revived such classic comedies as "The Great Dictator" and such camp favorites as "Flash Gordon."
"Any cinephile in Memphis, Tennessee, who saw a movie with subtitles during the '60s or '70s has one person to thank -- Bill Kendall," said Chris Ellis, a native Memphian and Los Angeles-based actor.
"Such movies were considered seditious filth by the local authorities, which very often they were, but by seditious filth I mean to include not only foreign films but the movies of Charlie Chaplin, W.C. Fields, the Brothers Marx and Laurel and Hardy," said Ellis, whose credits include "Armageddon" and "The Dark Knight Rises." "Thank God for Bill Kendall."
Local cinema historian Vincent Astor said Kendall was "a dedicated film fan, to the point of spending holidays in Europe inside movie theaters."
"I'm still keeping count of the movies I've seen," Kendall told reporter William Thomas in a 1996 interview in The Commerci