On HBO Max’s streaming menu, classic movie posters are frequently used to identify the title available to the subscriber. Per this report, in some cases, the same streaming service that offers scenes of rape, sodomy, and torture porn is photoshopping out tobacco use.

The most egregious example is McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Robert Altman’s 1971 masterpiece. In the iconic poster, star Warren Beatty holds a lit cigarillo. Can’t have that. So the anti-art Nazis at HBO Max have apparently used photoshop to erase the cigarillo and the smoke. What remains is bizarre: Beatty awkwardly holding up two fingers for no reason. …

To hide a cigar held by Kirk Douglas in Joseph L. Mankiewicz‘s There Was a Crooked Man (1970), HBO Max bizarrely covered it up.

As if that’s not un-American enough, HBO Max erased a cigarette from an actual photograph, a still photo used to promote Wong Kar-wai’s Fallen Angels (1995).

Had you told me even ten years ago that HBO — HBO! — the network that served as the vanguard in pushing television into adult entertainment, would someday engage in this kind of petty and profane censorship, I would never have believed it.

[This is a weird echo of the epilogue of the satire “Thank You for Smoking,” in which the antagonist senator goes on to digitally erase cigarettes from classic films. It’s so dumb, in fact, that Hollywood satirized it BEFORE Hollywood started doing it — Ed]