Gone With The Wind (1939)

[tabuno]

Sixty seven years after it was first released, thirty years after its first televised broadcast, and twenty nine years after it was declared by an American Film Institute (AFI) poll declaring that Gone With The Wind (1939) as the greatest American film, I endured watching the 1998 digitally restored movie on VHS tape cassette. By 1998, this movie was bumped to fourth by AFI placed behind Citizen Kane (1941), Casablanca (1942), and The Godfather (1972), and edging out Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Wizard of Oz (1939) that was released the same year as Gone With The Wind .

Based on this first viewing of the classic, I can't say that I can sincerely state that Gone With The Wind has stood the test of time. While this movie appears to be a monumental and paradigm-setting movie, it still looks like a struggling new art form in development that would not peak until years later. What was startling was the integration of both stage production and real setting cinematography making the movie look uneven and by today's standards artificial in appearance. Many of the scenes evoke the production standards that eventually laid the groundwork for grand musical productions such as West Side Story (1961) and Cabaret (1972), and Sweet Charity (1969) that provided even grander visual impact in terms of consistency and uniformity of cinematography. The acting again has the appearance of a struggling experimental art form transitioning from stage theatrical production to a more subtle and natural film performance that began to be experienced in such movies as Lawrence of Arabia twenty-three years later and The Great Escape (1963) twenty-four years later.

What Gone With The Wind achieved was a comprehensive outline of what was to come by demonstrating certain forms of film production that would be copied, imitated to this day. However, historical film-making would continue to improve and get better as experience with the art form flourished. In terms of finished products that owe some of their qualitative value to Gone With The Wind that I consider to be superior in terms of their sensory and literary impact include:

Pride and Prejudice (1995 television mini-series).

Dances With Wolves (1990)

Schindler's List (1993)

Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)

One of the strongest comparisons to Gone With The Wind and having an even more powerful impact on me in terms of historical depictions and relational upheavals would be:

House of Mirth (2000).

Even Excaliber (1981) had a more riveting, powerful energtic raw cinematographic aura based on many years of improvement in production values and understanding the medium of film. But ultimately it's Dr. Zhivago (1965) that truly addresses the superlative historical piercing of the heart and visual sweep of film (except a few weak scenes) compared to Gone With The Wind .

[Johann]

Great post, tabuno


Gone With The Wind is not a movie most men embrace and the reason is quite simple.

Ebert said it's "the rise and fall of a sexual adventuress" and he's right.

It's all about Scarlett's lust, not the civil war. And what man would rather see a movie about a southern "belle" than Gettysburg?

I've seen it quite a few times and I like it. (My mom is a Vivien Leigh fan and wishes she married a man like Rhett Butler. Sorry Dad- you know it's true :)

I like the humour in this movie- I laughed at Mammy: "waitin' for him like a spidah!"

I also loved the weirdness of the scene when Rhett holds Scarlett's head and says he'll crush her like a walnut- what a dynamic relationship Gable & Leigh create.
My mother's read every book about the movie and she told me that Vivien hated kissing Clark because his breath was like garlic.


Leigh is perfect for the role.
What other actress can you imagine playing that part?

[tabuno]

It would be difficult to avoid sexism in this comment because it will contain a subtle distinction regarding Gone With The Wind . Nevertheless, I found it extremely difficult to like Scarlett's character not for her independence and assertive disposition, but her apparent lack of empathy and compassion. She was so selfish to an extreme that it appeared that this movie was based on male sexism. Scarlett's emotional immaturity seemed to characterize what is today's main problem as it relates to many young adult males not females. Personally, in 1939, it would have been interesting to see the leading characters' genders reversed and see how the movie would have played out. Scarlett never matured throughout this movie and that seems to be more typical of men than women in society today.

What this movie seemed to be about was the aversion of males to an independent woman in the 1930s and thus perhaps even the female author depicted Scarlett as an anti-hero - that an independent woman couldn't be really a model character for women because she would be at the same time immature and irresponsible, controlled by her emotions instead of her wisdom. How many times was the actual hero - the male Rhett Butler - the dashing non-political, money, egotistical man at the beginning of the movie who eventually learned to love and attempted to continually advise Scarlett about the path she was heading. It comes down to how a vibrant male can have it all - money, women and fatherhood while poor Scarlett never had the fortitude to get passed her emotional infantilism.

Unfortunately, this movie as I've pointed out before was a reflection of the development of cinema as well as the development of the particular societal norms of the time. The two leading female characters are black and white characters that would have been much more intriguing and complex if they could have been blended into one female character facing Rhett Butler.

Jane Austin's Pride and Prejudice, on the otherhand, provides a much more complex female's take on an independent woman with compassion growing up in a strictly regimented society that in some ways could be hardly criticized nor put down. In summary, I find that Gone With The Wind is a much more male-oriented movie from the standpoint of the political correct male-dominated, power-authority relationship that existed and still seems to exist today. Male is good. Female who does not know her place is bad.

[cinemabon]

Ok you young whipper-snappers, let the old man set you straight. This film is the adaptation of the hottest book of its day, highly anticipated by its audience. Like Harry Potter is to today's youth, many people read the Margaret Mitchell book back in 1936 (this was before television and computers, folks. People read for entertainment!). When the famous producer David O Selznick promised to bring the book to the screen with the biggest budget for any film to date, it wetted the public's appetite. Segue.

In 1977, when audiences clamored to see "Star Wars" and "Close Encounters" that summer, a man named Tom Cooper went to the MGM vaults and resurrected the classic. To his horror, he discovered that revivalists in the 1960's recut the negative to create a 70mm version. Not only did they cut and trim the film, they removed the title sequence. Cooper worked diligently, preparing a new restoration using his own funds (and those of other parties) to strike a new 35mm print. At the old Wilshire Theater, he invited Olivia deHavilland (one of the few actors still alive at the time) to attend the premiere. Yours truly happened to attend that night. Klieg lights pointed the way, just like an old fashioned premiere, with flashbulbs popping and stars waving at adoring fans. The film opened to thunderous applause, especially when the words, "Gone with the Wind" slid sideways across the screen in giant letters, just as they did in the original print not seen since the 1940's revival. Ms. deHavilland beamed, a sweeter woman you never met, and Cooper's dream of bringing that film and many others out of the MGM vault succeeded until video tape ended the revival theater chain across America.

Taken in context, "Gone with the Wind" is the story of a selfish woman obsessed with her own feelings and desires, within the background of the civil war. However, the book also dealt with changing attitudes that were surfacing at the time... about the abuse of black people... and the self-righteous attitude of southerners; both unspoken taboos (Margaret Mitchell being from the south).

To many people, "Gone with the Wind" was a breath of fresh air at a time when cinema was relatively stale with gangster pictures and run of the mill fare. 1939 is considered the golden year in cinema history marked for several wonderful releases, many still stand up to scrutiny. The color, the scope, and the willingness to of Hollywood to stick its neck out a bit won the hearts of Americans across the land, and still keep "Gone with the Wind" on the all time list of most cherished and loved films.