Reviewing my top 5 Movies of all Time
Day 4 – Gone With the Wind
I am going to be straightforwardly honest
here. As much as this is a quintessential
film of the early 20th century in the sound era, it’s the one I
question the most often why it’s on my list.
Because this is where the ‘did I enjoy the movie” element of my top 5 definitely
comes into play. And it’s one of those
films where I am certain that I could name many other films that I would have enjoyed
at one time or another more than I enjoyed this film. I have heard shouts from friends of different
movies that could have made it onto the list.
And certainly I could take those into consideration. The problem is, Gone With the Wind hits so high on the moving
and timeless meter. Even if I didn’t enjoy the movie in that classic “I had fun”
way that I might have with others, it’s a movie that just sticks with me. And it’s a movie that sucks me in time, after
time, after time.
As a side note, before I move onto a fairly
conventional analysis of the film, I had one of the more bizarre experiences of
film watching when I went to see this film with friends. (The friends who came with me that night
certainly can attest) There was a theater in my area that played classic films
one Tuesday a month. This one particular
month they were going to play Gone with the Wind. I had convinced several of my guy friends to
go see that film. We all arrived at the
theater, but we showed up later than we wanted to. As a result we were not able to get tickets
to see the movie but then while we considered what we were going to do next,
someone came out and told us that they were considering running it on a second
screen given the enormous amount of people they had turn out for the screening.
So we got in line on the off chance we
would get to see the movie. Quickly a
large line of people came up behind us trying to do the same thing. We must have had several groups of women come
up to us while we were in line telling us how it was a women’s movie. We did not belong or have a right to be at
such a movie so we should be forced to go to the back of the line because we
were men. Ah the crazies that come out
when people get attached to a film in a particular way.
So I am going to do a fairly straight
forward analysis to examine why it is that I end up liking this film, almost
despite myself. Let’s start from the
ground up and take a look at the performances.
First of all there is Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara. Now pretty much I can tell you from the
beginning that this woman annoyed the crap out of me. She was temperamental, manipulative,
egotistical, vengeful, spiteful, and too cute for her own good. But there is something about her that you
cannot help but relate too. Maybe it’s
her drive that she displays from beginning to end. She seems to have no limits to her ambition,
but that makes her amazing in a crisis.
She is overly enamored with Ashley Wilkes, played by a simpering Leslie
Howard, but you can tell that she is led on by that person. And Scarlet seems to abuse the saintly
Melanie Hamilton (Olivia de Havilland), who eventually turns out to be more
saintly on the outside than she is within. And finally she keeps sticking it to the one
good guy in the picture Rhett Butler (Clark Gable). We hate her because she is us. And we like her because she is us. She is just herself at all times on screen. Scarlett O’Hara is a character striped of
artifice and left to just be herself in a society that was all about the show
of gentility. Vivien Leigh would later
play a role in a Streetcar Named Desire that was a lot like the role of
Scarlett, but much older, and to more tragic and horrifying results.
Then there is Rhett Butler. He is the perfect example of American ideals
of manliness and virtue, without being too virtuous. He is the American male who is drug into
society by a woman that seems to fascinate him.
And he comes in to change the little piece of the world that he sees
that is good. Unable to change it, at
least from his perspective, he eventually leaves the screen to one of the
biggest pronouncements in film history. “Frankly
My Scarlett, I don’t give a damn.” You
could say that there was no real depth to the role that Clark Gable was
playing. In fact you could say that he
was just playing himself up on the screen, as many screen actors of the day
did. (If you want to think modern screen actors who can’t play anything but
themselves, think Tom Cruise). Sometimes
a role is just meant for an individual.
And Rhett Butler was Gable at his finest. While mostly smirking and smiling on the
screen being his usual jovial self, by the time you got to the end and you
could see the pain on his face as his daughter was dying Gable reached inside
himself to act in a way that he rarely ever did. This role was Gable plus.
Even the lesser roles of Ashley Wilkes,
Melanie Hamilton, Mammy (Hattie McDaniel), Gerald O’Hara (Thomas Mitchell), and
a bevy of other roles, including the future TV Superman (George Reeves) in a
small role at the beginning of the film, contribute to the movement of the
film. These players drive the story
forward in beautiful and sometimes unexpected ways. From the Mammy who seems to
hold the house together, to the weak father who cannot seem to control his
daughter, to the weak Ashley Wilkes who cannot stand up and be a man, owning
his decisions, Gone With the Wind is
littered with fun roles that you can get into and love or hate.
But the truth of the matter is, Margaret Mitchell, the author of the novel and movie’s namesake, was not
necessarily trying to get us to love the characters. She was bemoaning the loss of another world
that had fallen into repute in the meantime.
Many southern authors, including William Faulkner, would portray a south
bruised and battered by what had happened in the Civil War and unable to get
beyond that. Mitchell through her work
exemplifying the beauty of this bygone era and displaying all of the
destruction that lay in its wake. From
the new ways that we treated other races to the carpetbaggers who would come
in and take advantage of the broken and battered south, Mitchell showed a
society that lay in tatters, hoping for the spirit to come out again.
As far as the story, it took at least four
different people to sit down and work out the screen play. The Herculean length of the novel that had to
be shrunk down into movie size took several treatments in order to get it into
a palatable size for audiences of the day.
The original draft was set to be a six hour movie and that was not going
to be workable. But many efforts of the
day were collaborative, including another work in my top 5, Casablanca. This did not seem to detract from the final
work as it had a coherent theme throughout the novel. It was about the south and its death and hope
for reclamation. Maybe the south needed
to die, being a society built on slave labor.
But Mitchell and the authors felt like it could be redeemed as
well. In Scarlett the audience could see
hope for tomorrow. They could see that
not only could the great Tara plantation be rebuilt, but the south could be
rebuilt too, through the strength and the will of the people who were in it.
The Cinematography was fantastic in its own
right. Although the cinematic effort in
this one was chalked up to three different people. The initial cinematographer, Lee Garmes, was
replaced because his footage was too dark.
Ernest Haller and Ray Rennahan, who was a Technicolor specialist, would
come in to replace him. And while a collaborative effort, they had some shots
that were masterful and iconic in their day.
The burning of the south with Rhett and Scarlett in the foreground, the
slow walk down the staircase of Scarlett O’Hara to the admiring gaze of Rhett
Butler, and the ending shot of O’Hara staring off into the distance are all
scenes and sequences that live on in film lore and are hard to remove from your
head. Even the colors of the film are carefully constructed to emphasize the story points. The color scheme is like that of a redemption piece. The beginning the colors are Green and Yellow, both bright and vivid and representing life and growth. With Death and Destruction the Color hues move to Red and then Black. The palate of the film eventually turns grey and bleak, but as we go through the death of the society and then the literal death of Melanie Hamilton the colors move to brighter greens and yellows again, picturing life and hope for the future. Scarlett has moved on. The South has moved on.
Gone with the Wind was such a monumental
effort in its day and would go on to win 7 Academy Awards of the 12 it was
nominated for and would win Best Picture and Best Director of the year. While knowing a lot about how the Hollywood
system works and having so many different people work on this effort, it was
probably impossible for any other effort to win that year. But the sheer sweep and scope of the film,
you would have to consider it to be the first Technicolor Epic of its day. There was at least one film in the black and
white silent era that you would have to consider epic, Eric Von Stroheim
directed an 8 hour version of his silent film Greed. (Which may be why when Gone
With the Wind looked like it was coming in at six hours long the producers
balked as Greed was poorly received) But
Gone With the Wind was the precursor
to all of the modern epics that we know in both scope and scale.
I know that many critics do not like Gone With the Wind. They claim that the movie has not held up
well. Mostly I think that’s because any
movie that contains any people of a race or ethnicity other than white has to
deal with the “neo-critics.” These are
people who have decided to make proclamations about the people from bygone eras
based upon today’s standards. These are
people who deconstruct Huckleberry Finn and make it out to be a racist novel because
of the abundance of one word in the commentary.
As we all pretend to be interested in maintaining the authenticity of
any era, let us consider one question. If
you are writing about people living in the 1840s and you did not use the “n”
word, couldn’t you be accused of whitewashing the era? You can find a litany or writings throughout
the era that would use such language.
Likewise with a film like this one, set in the pre-Civil War and post-Civil
War south, if we try to criticize we would whitewash what was happening.
I think Gone
With the Wind wears well as a piece of cinematic history, with good
performances, a story that can reveal the brokenness of us all, and the human
spirit that we have to overcome any obstacle.
Definitely worth a watch as a piece of film history and, I believe, more
than that.
This film is perfectly Toasty
Five Stars
*next up, the pies de resistance of my Top
5, Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece, Vertigo*
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