Gone
with the wind (1939)
Gone With the Wind
Roger Ebert / Jun 21, 1998
"Gone With the Wind'' presents a
sentimental view of the Civil War, in which the ``Old South'' takes the place
of Camelot and the war was fought not so much to defeat the Confederacy and
free the slaves as to give Miss Scarlett O'Hara her
comeuppance. But we've known that for years; the tainted nostalgia comes with
the territory. Yet as ``GWTW'' approaches its 60th anniversary, it is still a
towering landmark of film, quite simply because it tells a good story, and
tells it wonderfully well.
For the story it wanted to tell, it was the
right film at the right time. Scarlett O'Hara is not
a creature of the 1860s but of the 1930s: a free-spirited, willful
modern woman. The way was prepared for her by the flappers of Fitzgerald's jazz
age, by the bold movie actresses of the period, and by the economic reality of
the Depression, which for the first time put lots of women to work outside
their homes.
Scarlett's lusts and headstrong passions have little to do
with myths of delicate Southern flowers, and everything to do with the sex
symbols of the movies that shaped her creator, Margaret Mitchell: actresses
such as Clara Bow, Jean Harlow, Louise Brooks and Mae West. She was a woman who
wanted to control her own sexual adventures, and that is the key element in her
appeal. She also sought to control her economic destiny in the years after the
South collapsed, first by planting cotton and later by running a successful
lumber business. She was the symbol the nation needed as it headed into World
War II; the spiritual sister of Rosie the Riveter.
Of course, she could not quite be allowed to get
away with marrying three times, coveting sweet Melanie's husband Ashley,
shooting a plundering Yankee, and banning her third husband from the marital
bed in order to protect her petite waistline from the toll of childbearing. It
fascinated audiences (it fascinates us still) to see her high-wire defiance in
a male chauvinist world, but eventually such behavior
had to be punished, and that is what ``Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn''
is all about. If ``GWTW'' had ended with Scarlett's
unquestioned triumph, it might not have been nearly as successful. Its original
audiences (women, I suspect, even more than men) wanted to see her swatted
down--even though, of course, tomorrow would be another day.
Rhett Butler was just the man to do it. As he
tells Scarlett in a key early scene, ``You need
kissing badly. That's what's wrong with you. You should be kissed, and often,
and by someone who knows how.'' For ``kissed,'' substitute the word you're
thinking of. Dialogue like that reaches something deep and fundamental in most
people; it stirs their fantasies about being brought to sexual pleasure despite
themselves. (``Know why women love the horse whisperer?'' I was asked by a
woman friend not long ago. ``They figure, if that's what he can do with a
horse, think what he could do with me.'') Scarlett's
confusion is between her sentimental fixation on a tepid ``Southern gentleman''
(Ashley Wilkes) and her unladylike lust for a bold man (Rhett Butler). The most
thrilling struggle in ``GWTW'' is not between North and South, but between Scarlett's lust and her vanity.
Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh were well matched
in the two most coveted movie roles of the era. Both were well-served by a
studio system that pumped out idealized profiles and biographies, but we now
know what outlaws they were: Gable, the hard-drinking playboy whose studio
covered up his scandals; Leigh, the neurotic, drug-abusing beauty who was the
despair of every man who loved her.
They brought experience, well-formed tastes and
strong egos to their roles, and the camera, which cannot lie and often shows
more than the story intends, caught the flash of an eye and the readiness of
body language that suggested sexual challenge. Consider the early scene where
they first lay eyes on one another during the barbecue at Twelve Oaks. Rhett
``exchanges a cool, challenging stare with Scarlett,''
observes the critic Tim Dirks. ``She notices him undressing her with his eyes:
`He looks as if--as if he knows what I look like without my shimmy.' ''
If the central drama of ``Gone With the Wind''
is the rise and fall of a sexual adventuress, the counterpoint is a slanted but
passionate view of the Old South. Unlike most historical epics, ``GWTW'' has a
genuine sweep, a convincing feel for the passage of time. It shows the South
before, during and after the war, all seen through Scarlett's
eyes. And Scarlett is a Southerner. So was Margaret
Mitchell. The movie signals its values in the printed narration that opens the
film, in language that seems astonishing in its bland, unquestioned
assumptions:
``There was a
Yes, with the capital letters and all. One does
not have to ask if the Slaves saw it the same way. The movie sidesteps the
inconvenient fact that plantation gentility was purchased with the sweat of
slaves (there is more sympathy for Scarlett getting
calluses on her pretty little hands than for all the crimes of slavery). But to
its major African-American characters it does at least grant humanity and
complexity. Hattie McDaniel, as Mammy, is the most sensible and clear-sighted
person in the entire story (she won one of the film's eight Oscars), and
although Butterfly McQueen, as Prissy, will always be associated with the line
``I don't know nothin' about birthin'
babies,'' the character as a whole is engaging and subtly subversive.
Remember that when ``GWTW'' was made,
segregation was still the law in the South and the reality in the North. That
the Ku Klux Klan was written out of one scene for fear of giving offense to elected officials who belonged to it. The movie
comes from a world with values and assumptions fundamentally different from our
own--and yet, of course, so does all great classic fiction, starting with Homer
and Shakespeare. A politically correct ``GWTW'' would not be worth making, and
might largely be a lie.
As an example of filmmaking craft, ``GWTW'' is
still astonishing. Several directors worked on the film; George Cukor incurred Clark Gable's dislike and was replaced by
Victor Fleming, who collapsed from nervous exhaustion and was relieved by Sam
Wood and Cameron Menzies. The real auteur was the
producer, David O. Selznick, the Steven Spielberg of
his day, who understood that the key to mass appeal was the linking of
melodrama with state-of-the-art production values. Some of the individual shots
in ``GWTW'' still have the power to leave us breathless, including the burning
of Atlanta, the flight to Tara and the ``street of dying men'' shot, as Scarlett wanders into the street and the camera pulls back
until the whole Confederacy seems to lie broken and bleeding as far as the eye
can see.
And there is a joyous flamboyance in the visual
style that is appealing in these days when so many directors have trained on
the blandness of television. Consider an early shot where Scarlett
and her father look out over the land, and the camera pulls back, the two
figures and a tree held in black silhouette with the landscape behind them. Or
the way the flames of
I've seen ``Gone With the Wind'' in four of its
major theatrical revivals--1954, 1961, 1967 (the abortive ``widescreen''
version) and 1989, and now here is the 1998 restoration. It will be around for
years to come, a superb example of
Cast & Credits
Vivien Leigh: Scarlett
O'Hara
Rhett
Melanie Hamilton: Olivia de Havilland
Ashley Wilkes: Leslie Howard
Mammy: Hattie McDaniel
Suellen O'Hara: Evelyn Keyes
Careen O'Hara: Ann Rutherford
Prissy: Butterfly McQueen
Gerald O'Hara: Thomas Mitchell
Directed by Victor Fleming, with scenes also directed by George Cukor, Sam Wood, William Cameron Menzies
and Sidney Franklin. Screenplay by Sidney Howard,
Jo Swerling, Charles MacArthur,
Ben Hecht and others. Based on the novel by Margaret
Mitchell. Photographed by Ernest Haller, Lee Garmes and Ray Rennahan.
Music by Max Steiner. Edited
by Hal C. Kern and James E Newcom.
Running time: 222 minutes. Classified G.