Directed by Victor Fleming
Starring Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh, Leslie Howard, Olivia de Havilland and Hattie McDaniel
Well, what more can you say about Gone With the Wind that hasn't already been said? Released in 1939 to almost unheard-of hype up to that point for a Hollywood release, it grossed eleventy billion dollars in modern currency and is still the all-time box office champ when adjusted for inflation. It garnered 10 Oscars including acting wins for Vivien Leigh and Hattie McDaniel, a first for an African-American actor. It's on almost every authoritative list of the best films of all time, usually comfortably in the top 10. Oh yeah, and modern wokes love to talk about this flick and apply 2021 cultural standards to a movie from almost a century ago. I think that just about covers it. In short, this is the perfect movie to start this whole marathon.
It's not entirely accurate to say that I'd never seen this movie before. I once had the last 30 minutes playing in the background while distracted by my go-to Hoyle Casino CD-ROM game that I still play to this day, so it's up to you to decide if that's cheating my rules or not. Since everything except Rhett Butler's final line and finding Vivien Leigh attractive (attractive enough for a skeevy paragraph - callback to my previous blog there! - but a paragraph that I won't write because this blog is supposed to be classy or something) was new to me, I'm saying it's all good, bro.
So,
is the movie good? In a word, yes, it is. For a movie that's almost
FOUR HOURS long with the overture, intermission and ending music that it
was originally screened with theatrically, it's also got an amazingly
simple setup. Welcome to the American South just before the Civil War
breaks out. We're immediately introduced to Scarlett O'Hara (Leigh, in a
fantastic performance). Scarlett is the alpha of the three sisters on
the Tara plantation, a drama queen who knows what she wants and will
stop at nothing to get it. For the entirety of this running time. What
does she want? Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard), dashing resident of a
nearby plantation who seems to reciprocate Scarlett's feelings but is
engaged and eventually marries his cousin Melanie (Olivia de Havilland).
The word "epic" gets thrown around a lot these days with the
constant stream of megadoom action movies, but it's truly fitting for Gone With the Wind.
This is a story that plays out over multiple settings and a long period
of time, and it really picks up steam when it enters its Civil War
phase, with a heartbroken Scarlett entering marriage #1 with a man who
will soon die of pneumonia on the battlefield. The film had a massive
budget for its time period, and it shows throughout the remainder of the
first half of this film. A majority of this segment of the story takes
place in Atlanta, with Union cannon fire raining down on the city and
Scarlett attempting to smuggle a now-pregnant Melanie out of the city
and back to Tara. She succeeds, but finds her childhood home in ruins,
vowing to return it to its former glory just as the music builds to a
crescendo.
All throughout the story thus far, Scarlett has been pursued by Rhett Butler (Clark Gable), visiting Virginia businessman who sees exactly what he wants in the confident, vivacious Scarlett. It's a dichotomy that still holds plenty of emotional relevance to this day, the classic case of loving someone who you know may never be good for you but burns you to your core anyway. In this way, the Rhett Butler character becomes a sort of tragic figure, especially as some of the tragedies that befall this couple in the post-war Reconstruction portion of Gone With the Wind.
Of course, eventually, Scarlett marries Rhett (after another brief marriage to a general store millionaire who passes along his lumber mill to her) and has his daughter. The final 45 minutes of the film focuses on this delicate and perhaps melodramatic family story, with the newly-minted Mrs. Butler still holding out some sort of hope in the back of her mind that this marriage will be just enough to finally make Ashley Wilkes jealous enough to leave his wife. At every turn through the movie's almost insurmountable running time, Ashley Wilkes and his wife have been present in the life of Scarlett, and they're immensely likable characters; EVERYONE in this movie is likable, even the complex Scarlett, whose scheming ways get a final comeuppance in what may be cinema's first true mic drop moment.
If a movie has maintained its place in the public consciousness for as long as Gone With the Wind has, it pretty much goes without saying that it has things that make it stick out from the pack. This film has two main things in its hat: the performances, with Leigh and Olivia de Havilland as particular aces in what feels like a never-ending sea of characters at times. Maybe even more than the Scarlett-Rhett story, this is the relationship that carries the movie. Rhett Butler disappears from this movie for long stretches, but Melanie is always there, the woman who stands between Scarlett and her life's pursuit but nonetheless becomes her best friend. The other key point in its favor is that this is still a gorgeous movie, a kaleidoscope of locations and sets and matte paintings. I'm sure audiences in 1939 were floored by how this movie looked.
And now, a few words about the various controversies surrounding this movie today. So, is Gone With the Wind's romantic portrayal of the plantation-era pre-Civil War south and its cartoonish depiction of slave characters outdated and offensive by modern standards? Yes, of course. But I knew that going in, because I already had my historical context - from a high school teacher (thanks Mrs. Copperud!) who gave us an excellent lecture on being able to see art through the prism of when it was created before we read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a novel which should still be required reading. That is where historical context should come from, from parents and teachers, not from Twitter, not from virtue-signaling corporations, and certainly not from a goddamned government board. Just the same as it wasn't up to the Christian Ad Council to tell you not to watch Married With Children or Beavis and Butt-Head in the '90s. Nobody has the right to determine what is or isn't palatable to you. You can make up your own mind.
Time to award my first rating of this project. Gone With the Wind gets *** 1/2 out of ****, with that half-star deduction coming because I think the movie goes on for a BIT too long. Trim twenty minutes (ten from the Atlanta shelling sequence and ten from the soap opera finale) and I believe this would have been a near-perfect film, like Went With the Wind.
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