This day and age, we shouldn't still accept blatantly sexist or racist movies as honored classics. I refuse to give a free pass (and a good rating) to The Searchers or It Happened One Night (which I saw today) just because they have some great cinematography and/or other things going for them. There are enough classics and great movies that haven't quite reached a classic status even from the early days of film that tell genuinely interesting human stories without resorting to bigotry that is somehow justified in some movies just by being from a bygone era.   Nope, a bigoted piece of work should not become a classic for all time. That doesn't mean we shouldn't study these works for historical or whatever reasons, but it means we shouldn't accept them as part of a corpus of great and important works of art somehow despite their inner bigotry.