by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
“Just like a flame,
Love burned brightly, then
became
An empty smoke dream that is
gone with the wind.”
—
Herb Magidson and Allie Wrubel, “Gone with the Wind” (1937 song)
I’ll say one
thing right off: I am hugely opposed to censorship in any way, shape or form.
I’m a First Amendment absolutist who thinks the remedy for bad speech is good
speech, not speech suppression. That’s why I was horrified when I read the
commentary by John Ridley, writer-director of the film 12 Years a Slave, in the June 8 Los Angeles Times (https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-06-08/hbo-max-racism-gone-with-the-wind-movie)
demanding that the new HBO Max streaming service pull the 1939 film Gone
with the Wind off their site “temporarily”
and not restore it without some sort of front-and-back content explaining that
the film’s rosy view of the pre-Civil War South’s “peculiar institution” of
slavery was nothing like the real deal.
Two other
commentators added articles to the Times’
op-ed section. One, Carla Hall (https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-06-10/gone-with-the-wind-hbo),
which only appeared on the Times’
Web site, argued (as I would) that Gone with the Wind may be racist, but it should not be suppressed. Another author, Pamela Jackson (https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-06-12/gone-with-the-wind-hattie-mcdaniel-john-ridley),
wrote in a column published June 12 that she didn’t like Gone with
the Wind either, but suppressing it would
deprive HBO Max viewers of seeing Hattie McDaniel’s acting as Mammy — the first
performance by an African-American actor to win an Academy Award. (There
wouldn’t be a second until Sidney Poitier won for Lilies of the Field a quarter-century later.)
So on Monday, June 14 I decided to screen Gone with the Wind, all nearly four hours of it, for my husband and I. I ran the movie at
least in part as a fuck-you to all the P.C. Thought Police types who want to
suppress it “temporarily” and slap on it explanatory content to the effect that
the “Southern Way of Life” was based on white people literally owning Black people as slaves. The calls to ban (at
least “temporarily,” though such “temporary” censorship has a way of becoming
permanent) Gone with the Wind led
me to an ire-filled letter to the Los Angeles Times protesting the suppression of an acknowledged
American classic film — which they actually printed last Saturday, June 12,
along with two other letters defending the suppression. I suspect the defenders
of the ban haven’t actually seen Gone with the Wind in years — as I hadn’t either — and their memories,
like mine, don’t really match the film Charles and I just watched last night.
Like all major
movies, Gone with the Wind involved a
huge number of people in its manufacture, but there were two particular
individuals who had more than any others to do with creating this film. One was
Margaret Mitchell, a Southern woman who had briefly tried her hand at
journalism and playwrighting until she married her second husband, John Marsh.
Bored with life as a housewife, she started using her spare time to write a
book about the tales and legends of the Old South before and during the Civil
War. As a girl, she’d been taken by her family to see old Civil War
battlefields and monuments, and she’d got such an earful about the so-called
“Lost Cause” that for much of her childhood she hadn’t believed that the cause
had been lost: it was not until she was 10 that she realized the South had lost the Civil War.
Mitchell spent
10 years, 1926-1936, writing Gone with the Wind. Instead of working on the novel straight through, start to finish,
she divided it into chapters, put each chapter in a manila envelope, and filed
them in the order in which they would appear. That way she could work on
whatever section pleased her fancy instead of writing the story in the order in
which it took place. It’s not clear whether she originally intended the novel
for publication, but that decision was forced on her when John Marsh invited a
vacationing literary agent from New York to dinner at their home in Atlanta.
Over dinner, the agent lamented that he hadn’t seen any worthwhile manuscripts
in a while and asked Marsh if he knew anyone who was writing. “Well, my wife is
working on something,” Marsh said — and the agent got hold of three of
Mitchell’s manila envelopes, copied their contents and immediately decided
Mitchell’s manuscript had the makings of a blockbuster best-seller and possibly
a film adaptation as well.
The other
individual primarily responsible for the film Gone with the Wind was producer David O. Selznick. He had begun in the
late 1920’s and had risen fast through the movie industry, including stints at
Paramount, RKO and MGM before he left in late 1935 to form his own studio,
Selznick International. When Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind came out he immediately saw its film possibilities
and determined to grab the movie rights, even though he also had doubts about
the ability of his independent company to get the money to mount a production
of the size and scope that would do justice to the novel. Selznick also did
something highly unusual at the time: he hired George Gallup’s survey research
film to study movie audiences and find who they wanted to play the principal
roles in Gone with the Wind.
The result was
an overwhelming vote — about 65 percent — for Clark Gable to play the book’s
rakish leading male character, Rhett Buttler. At the time Gable was the leading
adult moneymaker in Hollywood (the top star in the business was the little girl
with the long curls, Shirley Temple) and the main attraction for Selznick’s
father-in-law and former employer, MGM production chief Louis B. Mayer.
Regarding the story’s female lead, Scarlett O’Hara, about one-third of Gallup’s
respondents wanted Bette Davis to play her — but, as Selznick recalled later,
there was just as much opposition as support for Davis in the role. Though
Selznick had finished his deal for the movie rights to Gone with the Wind in 1936, he soon learned that Mayer would allow
Gable to make Gone with the Wind
only if MGM’s parent company, Loew’s Incorporated, released the film. Selznick
had a distribution deal with United Artists that didn’t expire until the end of
1938, so he somehow had to maintain audience interest in a story he wouldn’t be
able to film for another three years.
Selznick’s
strategy was to hire a public relations genius named Russell Birdwell to launch
an ongoing publicity stunt called “The Search for Scarlett O’Hara.” Virtually
every actress in the U.S., and some from outside it as well, got to read for
the role, and Selznick had so many screen tests shot he ended up with 24 hours’
worth of them. A number of actresses more or less impressed Selznick, but it
wasn’t until December 21, 1938 that he found the woman he finally cast. His
brother, agent Myron Selznick, had signed a young British actress named Vivien
Leigh as a client, and on that fateful day he took her to the fire on
Selznick’s back lot — needing a sequence showing Union General William Tecumseh
Sherman burning down Atlanta, David Selznick had decided to gather up all the
standing sets on his backlot, pass them off as Atlanta and burn them for real
to clear the space for the big sets he needed for Gone with the Wind — and as the flames of the faux Atlanta burned around them, Myron walked up to David
and said, “Meet Scarlett O’Hara.”
Gone with the
Wind is probably the most documented
production in the history of filmmaking, at least partly due to Selznick’s
habit of writing down memos to his directors, writers and production staff to
make sure they understood what he wanted from them. Selznick’s memos and the
other surviving documents and interviews with people involved in the production
make it clear that he was deliberately setting out to make not only the
greatest movie that had been made to that time but the greatest that would ever
be made. He insisted that the
film be shot in three-strip Technicolor at a time when making a film in color
doubled its production cost. Louis B. Mayer tried to talk him out of using
color on the ground that the attractions were Gable and Mitchell’s bestselling
book and the film wouldn’t make a dime more in color than it would in
black-and-white. “I know, but the story demands color,” Selznick told Mayer — and Selznick was right
not only artistically but financially. Gone with the Wind continued to be shown theatrically long after color
films had become standard, lasting longer as a commercial property than it
would have in black-and-white.
Selznick scoured
the studios of Hollywood for the best actors to cast in the other roles as
well. He got British free-lancer Leslie Howard to play Ashley Wilkes,
Scarlett’s unrequited love interest, even though the 40-something Howard had
already been savaged by critics for playing Romeo in MGM’s 1936 film of Romeo
and Juliet and was reluctant to play
another character so much younger than he was for real. He borrowed Olivia de
Havilland from Warner Bros. to play Melanie Hamilton, Scarlett’s friend and the
woman Ashley finally marries and stays with through the rest of the story. He
cast veteran character actors Thomas Mitchell and Barbara O’Neil as Scarlett’s
parents, and for the principal Black role of the O’Haras’ house slave Mammy, he
got Hattie McDaniel, whose authority and power throughout the film made her a
worthy choice even in a stereotypical role. McDaniel was often criticized for
playing maids, to which she replied, “I have a choice — I can make $500 a week
playing a maid or $5 a day being one.”
Selznick also
relentlessly platooned people in and out of the behind-the-camera roles. For
the three years of preparation and the opening weeks of shooting he used George
Cukor as director — until, under pressure from Clark Gable, who thought the Gay
Cukor would turn the film into a “women’s picture,” Selznick fired Cukor and
replaced him with Gable’s friend and hunting buddy Victor Fleming. Later, when
Fleming had a nervous breakdown and was out for a couple of weeks, Selznick
hired Sam Wood — and when Fleming recovered he kept Wood on and had two
separate units shooting scenes for the film with different actors at the same
time. Though the first writer Selznick hired to adapt the book, Sidney Howard,
got sole screen credit, he put many other writers to tweak the script —
including Oliver H. P. Garrett, Jo Swerling, John Van Druten, Ben Hecht (who
wrote the fustian title cards that gave the audience important information
about the progress of the Civil War) and, briefly, F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Selznick also fired his initial director of photography, Lee Garmes, and
borrowed Bette Davis’s favorite cinematographer, Ernest Haller, from Warner
Bros. to replace him, largely because he didn’t think the colors in Garmes’
work were bright enough.
When Gone
with the Wind was finally released it broke
all box-office records, becoming the highest-grossing movie of all time and
retaining that status until the release of The Sound of Music in 1965. Indeed, if you simply count the number of
times people have paid to see it instead of trying to count how much they paid and then adjust for inflation (a
particularly difficult way to measure a film like Gone with the Wind which has had many theatrical re-releases in widely
varying economic contexts), Gone with the Wind is still
the most popular film of all time. It is a movie that set standards for what a
mainstream Hollywood production could be, and for decades after it was made was
held up as a sort of gold standard for artistic excellence as well as
commercial appeal. But it was also a film that bought into a lot of the
mythmaking Southern whites created about the Civil War in their efforts to
reverse their military defeat and return Southern Blacks to the status of a
permanent servant class, which they did successfully until the explosion of
Black civil-rights activism in the 1960’s. And it’s that mythmaking that is at
the heart of the current demand to suppress Gone with the Wind.
The Soft Racism of the
“Lost Cause”
“There was a
land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South … Here in this pretty
world Gallantry took its last bow … Here was the last ever to be seen of
Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave … Look for it only in
books, for it is no more than a dream remembered. A Civilization gone with the
wind … ”
—
Ben Hecht, opening title card, Gone with the Wind
To understand
the racial politics of Gone with the Wind
it’s important to understand both what they are and what they are not. In 1915 pioneering filmmaker D. W. Griffith had
made an even more openly and blatantly racist depiction of the Civil War and
its aftermath than Gone with the Wind. It was called The Birth of a Nation and is an even bigger problem for film scholars than
Gone with the Wind because it was
a pioneering work, an indispensable subject for film students because it was
the first feature-length film of real artistic integrity and power. It was the
film in which Griffith brought together all the experimental techniques he’d
been working on in his previous shorts — close-ups, panoramic shots, dramatic
intercutting to show two events happening in different locales at the same time
— and he established the basic grammar of film its directors have used ever
since.
The Birth of
a Nation was also a politically disgusting
piece of racist propaganda in which Black characters were shown getting elected
to Southern state legislatures (as part of a plot instigated by Northern white
“carpetbaggers”) and rolling their eyes, playing craps and devouring
watermelons on the legislative floors. When they’re not doing that, their main
preoccupation is chasing after virginal, innocent white Southern women with rape
(and worse) in their eyes. To add injury to insult, Griffith cast all his
“Black” characters with white actors in hideously unconvincing blackface. The
heroes of The Birth of a Nation are
the Ku Klux Klan, who not only force the Blacks to give up their guns and their
votes but ride to the rescue of white womanhood in an exciting climax that,
though the film was silent, Griffith stipulated be accompanied by Wagner’s
“Ride of the Valkyries.”
Though the NAACP
and other civil rights groups protested The Birth of a Nation from its release (and even before that they’d
picketed the same story, Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman, when it was done on stage as a play), Virginia-born
President Woodrow Wilson praised it as “history written in lightning” and
added, “And the worst thing is it is all so terribly true.” Not only was Wilson
the President, he had previously been a professor of American history and
political science, so his praise gave The Birth of a Nation an historical imprimatur that was reflected in the literature of the time.
Had anyone in 1915 seen The Birth of a Nation or heard about the controversy surrounding it, and
wondered, “Is it historically accurate?,” the books available in public
libraries at the time would have said it was.
Indeed, The
Birth of a Nation directly inspired a
revival of the Ku Klux Klan that became more powerful and influential than the
original had been — and not just in the South, either. By 1924 the Klan had
elected so many officials in Indiana they had essentially seized control of its
government. At the 1924 Democratic National Convention a resolution to denounce
the Klan failed by one vote. In 1927 the Klan staged a protest against racial
equality in New York City and seven people were arrested. One of the Klansmen
taken into custody that day was Fred Trump, father of the current President,
which sheds an interesting light on Donald Trump’s calls for “law and order”
and for the military to “dominate the streets” of American cities during an era
of mass protests for racial
equality and justice.
Gone with the
Wind is not The Birth of a Nation. David O. Selznick worked hard to soften the racism
of the original material. He’d experienced the controversy over The
Birth of a Nation firsthand because his
father had been one of its distributors, and he said in one of his copious
memos during the making of Gone with the Wind that he’d been offered the remake rights to The
Birth of a Nation but had turned them down
because he didn’t want to reawaken the controversy over a story that openly
glorified the Ku Klux Klan. The most problematic scene in Gone with
the Wind is the one in which Scarlett
drives her carriage through a low-brow area at night and is assaulted by both
white and Black miscreants. She is rescued by her old Black foreman Sam (Everett
Brown) and then avenged by a raiding party organized in a so-called “political
meeting” led by her then-husband, Frank Kennedy (Carroll Nye), who gets
conveniently killed. In Mitchell’s book that mysterious “political meeting” was
a Klan meeting.
The Birth of
a Nation can be described as a “hard”
racist film and Gone with the Wind
as a “soft” racist film. Gone with the Wind doesn’t contain the scenes of maniacal, slavering
Blacks just itching to rape Southern white women that weighed down The
Birth of a Nation. It also doesn’t present
the Ku Klux Klan at all, much less depict them as heroes. What it does do is soft-pedal the fundamental injustice of
slavery. Indeed, it barely mentions slavery at all; though Hecht’s written
prologue, quoted above, uses the S-word, the opening credits euphemistically
list the characters the film’s Black actors play as “servants.”
There are a few
explicit references to the slave status of the Black characters — like when
Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) threatens Prissy (Butterfly McQueen, whose voice
I had always assumed was a “trick” one she’d created for the character until
she was interviewed in a 1980’s making-of documentary and she sounded exactly
the same) with being “sold South.” It was a common threat owners made to rebellious
or insubordinate slaves to sell them from their plantations in Virginia or the
Carolinas or the so-called “border states” (the ones that had slavery but
didn’t secede) like Maryland to the presumably even harsher and nastier
conditions in the Deep South, though given that Gone with the Wind is set in Georgia it’s something of a mystery how
much farther south Scarlett could sell her. There’s also a curious scene taking
place between the end of the Civil War in April 1865 and the death of Scarlett’s
father that December in which he tells her she’s being too nice to the Black
characters and needs to treat them more harshly to maintain their subservience.
Gone with the
Wind is certainly a racist movie, but the
racism in it is “soft,” the sort of “Lost Cause” retrospective glorification
and whitewashing of slavery as a beneficent, paternal institution begun by
Southern journalist Edward Pollard in an 1866 book he actually called The
Lost Cause, in which he wrote:
We shall not
enter upon the discussion of the moral question of slavery. But we may suggest
a doubt here whether that odious term “slavery” which has been so long imposed,
by the exaggeration of Northern writers, upon the judgment and sympathies of
the world, is properly applied to that system of servitude in the South, which
was really the mildest in the world; which did not rest on acts of debasement
and disenfranchisement, but elevated the African, and was in the interest of
human improvement; and which, by the law of the land, protected the negro in
life and limb, and in many personal rights, and, by the practice of the system,
bestowed upon him a sum of individual indulgences, which made him altogether
the most striking type in the world of cheerfulness and contentment.
It’s not like we
didn’t know better. The evils of American slavery had been documented decades
before in accounts by Northern researchers and activists and at least one white
Southerner, Angelina Grimke. She was the daughter of a Southern planter and
slaveowner whose religious convictions led her to reject the “Peculiar
Institution.” In 1838 she published a book called American Slavery As It Is which documented, among other things, how often
recalcitrant or rebellious slaves were punished by being starved, beaten or
whipped. The realities of slavery were exposed in books by former slaves,
including the most famous one, the autobiography of Frederick Douglass,
published in 1845 with the provocative words “Written by Himself” on the title
page — a challenge to the whole idea that Black people were inferior to whites
and therefore deserved and even benefited from slavery. How, Douglass’s title
page said, can you justify enslaving a whole race when at least one of them can
write a book?
The most famous
anti-slavery book written before the Civil War was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle
Tom’s Cabin. She started publishing it as a
newspaper serial in 1851 and brought it out as a book in 1852. The first
edition sold 300,000 copies — more than any other novel to that time — and was so influential
that when Stowe met Abraham Lincoln in the White House in 1862 he told her, “So
you’re the little lady whose book started this Great War?” Though later
generations of Black people regarded Stowe’s slave characters as themselves
stereotypical and insulting, Uncle Tom’s Cabin set the template for anti-slavery stories — including
naming the white overseers, who directly supervised the slaves and ordered the
whippings and other punishments, as the real villains of slavery.
There’s an
interesting reflection of the villainous-overseer stereotype in Gone with
the Wind. The overseer on the O’Haras’
plantation, Tara, is Jonas Wilkerson (Victor Jory), a Northern transplant who
runs the plantation and essentially gives the O’Haras plausible deniability for
anything bad that happens to their slaves. He disappears during the Civil War
and later returns during Reconstruction as a Northern carpetbagger who tries to
take a leading role in the government of Georgia. Wilkerson even engineers a
$300 tax increase on Tara in the hope that Scarlett will default on the tax
bill and he will be able to buy Tara at auction.
Certainly Gone
with the Wind is part of the “Lost Cause”
mythology that, among other things, put up all those statues of Robert E. Lee
and other “heroes” of the Confederate rebellion that are now being fought over
and toppled — legally or otherwise — today. They were meant to send a message
to Black Southerners, “We may have lost the war, but we won the peace. You’re
back where you belong; you are our workforce and we are your masters, and
that’s as it should be.” Belaboring the racial politics of a movie that is far
more about the romantic and business intrigues of its white characters than the
condition of its Black ones is somewhat beside the point — though it’s occurred
to me that the current descendants of Hattie McDaniel’s “Mammy” role are the
Black urban professionals in Lifetime movies, who may have careers and
responsibilities but are still there to try to talk the white characters out of
the stupid things they have to do for Lifetime movies to have plots at all.
Yes, Gone
with the Wind is a problematic film,
Certainly, as I conceded in my Los Angeles Times letter opposing HBO Max’s censorship, it “portrays
slavery in a benign light, and it could not be remade today without a major
rewrite to dramatize the horrors of slavery and include multidimensional Black
characters.” It shouldn’t be taken as a serious piece of Civil War
historiography, even in a fictional context. It should be acknowledged as a
work of its time. But it also should not be censored, especially since it is a
landmark in film history and, though artistically as well as politically
flawed, a worthy piece of entertainment and the kind of thematically broad
epic, appealing to many different kinds of audience, today’s movie business
seems to have forgotten how to make.
Feminist Heroine or
Rape-Culture Victim?
In the 20 to 30
years (I can’t remember which) since the last time I’d seen Gone with the
Wind I’d remembered it as a feminist
parable whose progressive gender politics had at least partly made up for its
terrible racial ones. Indeed, in my Los Angeles Times letter defending the film I had written that Gone
with the Wind “presents a heroine who grows
from a shallow schemer into a woman of strength and power.” Now, however, I’m
not so sure; though Scarlett O’Hara has a fascinating character arc — spoiled
rich bitch who toys with men loses her wealth and social standing as her side
loses a war, then gains it all back again through her own grit and
determination — the gender politics of Gone with the Wind, though nowhere nearly as problematic as its racial
politics, still mark it as a work of its time and have some unpleasantly sexist
resonances when seen today.
Scarlett O’Hara
is introduced (in a scene that was actually the last one Vivien Leigh shot for
the film, since after five previous tries producer Selznick still hadn’t seen what he wanted from it) toying with a
couple of suitors called the Tarleton twins, who are so interchangeable the movie’s
credits have them backwards. It’s actually George Reeves (future TV Superman
whose mysterious death was the subject of Allen Coulter’s film Hollywoodland, featuring Ben Affleck in his finest performance) as
Stuart Tarleton and Fred Crane as his twin brother Brent. “Fiddle-de-dee,” she
says — and keeps saying throughout most of the first half of the movie, when
she isn’t putting off her dilemmas (including fending off most of the men who
want to marry her in her futile pursuit of Ashley Wilkes, who’s engaged to
marry his cousin Melanie for no better apparent reason than all the Wilkeses marry their cousins) by saying,
“Tomorrow is another day.”
One of Gone
with the Wind’s most interesting and least
spoken-of film antecedents is the 1931 MGM production A Free Soul. Though A Free Soul has nothing to do with slavery, the South and the
Civil War, it is a
two-men-one-woman romantic triangle with Clark Gable and Leslie Howard as the
two men. In A Free Soul Norma
Shearer stars as a young upper-class woman whose attorney father (Lionel
Barrymore) has just returned to practice following a stint in rehab for
alcoholism. (They didn’t call it “rehab” then — they called it “drying out” —
but the principle was the same.) Howard is her effete upper-class boyfriend and
Gable is the gangster she meets and falls for out of attraction to his sheer
roughness. In the end Howard shoots and kills Gable — obviously we’re supposed
to “get” that he’s “grown a pair,” as it were — and attorney Barrymore wins his
acquittal but drops dead in court of a heart attack just after finishing his
closing argument to the jury.
A Free Soul was one of the key films that helped make Clark
Gable a star, and set the template for a lot of his future vehicles: the macho stud who confronts the female lead, takes her down
several social pegs, and ultimately overpowers her into submission. Though at
least one of his frequent co-stars, Jean Harlow, was a powerful enough screen
presence to fight him back, he made most of his films opposite either Shearer or
Joan Crawford, who were easy prey for him. Rhett Butler fits the pattern of
Gable’s previous roles so well it’s not surprising 64 percent of the
respondents in Gallup’s poll waned Gable in the role.
He delivers the
goods, skewering the pretensions of his fellow Southerners in the early scene
in which he warns them that the North’s much greater industrial base and more
extensive railroads are advantages all the gallantry and honor in the world
won’t be able to overcome. When he approaches Scarlett, it’s in the same
Taming of the Shrew manner with which he
approached his other co-stars, especially in films like It Happened
One Night and this one in which the woman
has more money and a higher social status than he. And for all his skepticism
about the Southern cause, Rhett supports it first as a blockade runner (“for
money,” he insists), delivering supplies to the South and racking up huge
profits he stores in a bank in Liverpool, and then by volunteering for the
Confederate army just when it’s dawning on everyone else that the South’s cause
is lost.
It’s a measure
of Margaret Mitchell’s peculiar skill as a writer that she managed to convince
readers both in the 1930’s and since that Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler are
living one of the great fictional love affairs when the scenes between them are
highly combative and frequently quite nasty. Rhett opens by telling Scarlett
that “you need to be kissed, quite often, and by someone who knows how to do
it.” He shocks the crowd at a benefit dance for the Confederate cause by paying
money for a dance with Scarlett (which at least one crowd member denounces as a
“slave auction,” a bizarre bit of irony given that the whole point of Southern
secession was to preserve an economy that depended on the buying, holding and selling
of human beings as property!) when she’s supposed to be in mourning for her
first husband, Melanie’s brother Charles, whom she married just to spite
Melanie and who got measles and pneumonia at the front, dying a most unheroic
death.
Rhett keeps turning
up in Scarlett’s life, returning after the war when Scarlett is looking for anyone who can give her the $300 tax money she needs to
save Tara. She finds him in a Union prison camp, and he tells her he’s broke
because his fortune is tied up in England and if he tried to reclaim any of it,
his captors would notice and seize it all. After Frank Kennedy, Scarlett’s
second husband and a successful merchant she married because he could pay off the tax bill on Tara, conveniently
gets killed in the raid after that mysterious “political meeting,” Rhett
returns again and ultimately proposes marriage to her. She accepts and they
have a modicum of happiness, but they still do a lot of sniping at each other.
They have a
daughter, whom Rhett names “Bonnie Blue Butler” after the Confederate battle
anthem “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” but she dies in a fall from her pony in a riding
accident. Even before that, Scarlett has stopped having sex with Rhett because
having one child already spoiled her figure and made it virtually impossible
for Mammy to get her into the 18 ½-inch corset she wore before her pregnancy,
and she doesn’t want to risk her figure with another child. So one night Rhett literally sweeps her off her feet, carries her to their
bedroom and … thanks to the Production Code enforced on Hollywood between 1934
and 1966, the scene can’t get too graphic but it’s clear Rhett rapes her. When
she realizes that he’s impregnated her again, she throws herself down the great
staircase of Tara to induce an abortion and ensure that, to paraphrase her line
from the end of the film’s first half that “as God is my witness, I’ll never go
hungry again,” she’ll never get pregnant again.
Margaret
Mitchell managed in her novel to create two leading couples, the aristocratic
but ultimately weak Ashley and Melanie — who stay together for life and whose
son lives, or at least is still alive at the end — and Scarlett and Rhett, who
snipe at each other through most of the story. Scarlett and Rhett are the most
strong-willed characters in the tale, and they’re obviously at least
superficially “right” for each other, but they’re also so strong-willed that neither of them will make the
compromises needed to hold their relationship together. And after Rhett blows
off Scarlett and leaves her with his famous kiss-off line, “Frankly, my dear, I
don’t give a damn” — a word Selznick had to fight with the Production Code
Administration to get to use in the film at all — Scarlett is left alone
(except for all the faithful-to-a-fault Black ex-slaves who for some reason are
still working for her) with her precious plantation. Only her final thoughts
aren’t the goodbye-and-good-riddance-to-him-and-all-men ones a true feminist heroine would be uttering;
they’re a promise to herself to win Rhett back, no matter how much she has to
scheme to do it, because, “After all — tomorrow is another day!”
The Artistic Issues
So if Gone
with the Wind is racially problematic (to
say the least) and isn’t exactly the feminist tale that might make amends for
its racial stereotyping and whitewashed view of slavery, does it at least hold
up as a movie? Yes and no. Producer Selznick threw the entire armamentarium of
mature Hollywood at it; if The Birth of a Nation is really the birth of movies as an artistic medium,
Gone with the Wind is the full
flowering of the innovations of Griffith and others and the creation of the
well-oiled machine of classic Hollywood storytelling as they stood on the eve
of World War II.
Gone with the
Wind is very much a film of its moment.
While the novel had been published in 1936, at a time when the U.S. was working
its way out of the Great Depression and what was going on in those weirdly
named countries in Europe and Asia was a matter of profound disinterest to most
Americans, the film came out three years later, just as World War II was
beginning and many Americans feared we would get dragged into it as we had been
during World War I. As a film set on the home front during wartime, Gone
with the Wind avoids any depiction of
actual combat but brings home the horrors of war through the scenes of anxious
Southerners awaiting the arrival of the printed casualty lists, frantically
scanning them to see if their relatives are on them; and in the famous scene in
which Scarlett, a volunteer nurse in a wartime hospital, loses it completely
and wanders through an entire street full of wounded men. Selznick and
cinematographer Haller had to rent a construction crane to shoot that sequence
because no camera crane in Hollywood was long enough, or rose tall enough, to
film it.
The connections
between Gone with the Wind and World War
II continued after the film was released and after the U.S. entered World War
II in December 1941. Clark Gable enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps after his
wife, Carole Lombard, was killed in a plane crash in January 1942 while
returning from a public-appearance tour selling war bonds. The corps originally
wanted to use him only for training missions and propaganda films, but Gable
insisted on flying in actual combat and, according to one member of his unit,
volunteered for the most dangerous missions because “I think he wants to be
with his wife.” At least Gable survived the war; Leslie Howard didn’t. He was
killed in 1943 on a commercial airliner flying from Lisbon, Portugal to Bristol,
England through an area the Germans considered a war zone. German gunners shot
down Howard’s plane, and some accounts claimed they did so because they
mistakenly thought British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was on it.
Certainly the
fact that Gone with the Wind was made
about a major war on the eve of another, even more major war gave it even more
emotional resonance than it might otherwise have had. But it’s also a powerful
story, vividly told, with four principal actors almost perfectly “right” for their
parts (five if you count Hattie McDaniel’s role as a principal, which you
should) and the virtues of Hollywood’s technological and aesthetic maturity.
The problem with
Gone with the Wind as a work of art is
it really doesn’t extend itself beyond the virtues of Hollywood’s technological and aesthetic maturity. The
use of the expensive and elaborate three-strip Technicolor process helped the
film’s appeal — especially after color productions became standard and Gone
with the Wind could therefore still be
shown in theatres after audiences expected all films to be in color — though the currently
available DVD Charles and I watched has had its color toned down to the more
burnished brown-and-green look common to a modern color film instead of the
vivid, sometimes overly garish hues for which three-strip Technicolor was
known. Indeed, the first feature film shot entirely in three-strip had been
made four years earlier — Becky Sharp, directed by Rouben Mamoulian and based on William Makepeace
Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, a book
that had strongly, shall we say, “influenced” Margaret Mitchell when she wrote Gone
with the Wind.
The biggest
problem with Gone with the Wind was
aptly described by F. Scott Fitzgerald during his short stint as a screenwriter
on it. He wrote David Selznick a memo saying, “I still think it’s dull and
false for one character to describe another.” The characters in Gone
with the Wind describe each other to each
other at great length — indeed, it’s largely through their descriptions of each
other to each other that Mitchell and the filmmakers let us know how they want us to feel about them. Gone with the Wind is also one of the most obviously “planted” films of
all time. “Planting” was a highly valued skill among 1930’s screenwriters; it
meant dropping a hint early on in the action that suggested, and gave an
audience forewarning of, a major plot development later on. Done well, it could
give a powerful sense of unity to a film’s story. Done poorly or too obviously,
it just seemed like arbitrary coincidence-mongering.
The most obvious
and outrageous example of “planting” in Gone with the Wind is the sequence in which the dipsomaniac Gerald
O’Hara, adjusting (or failing to adjust) to life after the North has won the
Civil War, its soldiers have laid waste to Tara and Scarlett and his other two
daughters have been reduced to picking cotton themselves to keep the plantation
going, takes his favorite horse out on the grounds of Tara, tries to make a
difficult jump over a fence and falls to his death. Almost two hours of running
time later Gerald’s granddaughter Bonnie Blue Butler takes out her pony for her
first attempt at a sidesaddle ride (since Scarlett has been told it isn’t
“lady-like” to let her daughter use a man’s saddle), attempts the same jump …
and just to make sure we get the point, we get a closeup of an increasingly
frantic Scarlett as she says, “Just like Paw … just like Paw!” before, you guessed it, Bonnie takes the same jump
her granddad had, with the same fatal result.
One other
element in Gone with the Wind that seems
really bothersome today is Max Steiner’s overwrought musical score. He usually
worked at Warner Bros., where studio head Jack Warner told his music people, “I
want the music to start when it says ‘Warner Bros. Present’ and not stop until
it says ‘The End.’” Even here, in a non-Warner film (though it now bears the
Warner Bros. logo since Ted Turner acquired MGM’s film library and then Warner
Bros. acquired Turner’s media company), Steiner all too faithfully followed
instructions.
His music not
only almost never stops, it comments directly on the action and mirrors the
visuals so closely it was sometimes derisively referred to as “Mickey-Mousing.”
(The term originated out of Walt Disney’s belief that audiences wouldn’t accept
a sound cartoon unless picture and sound were kept very closely in synch, and it became applied to
live-action movies that also had an especially tight coordination between the
visuals and the soundtrack.) Steiner’s music is so relentless that when we finally
get a scene in which he shuts up — Rhett’s actual marriage proposal to Scarlett
— the scene oddly seems more
powerful from the absence of Steiner’s music.
When Gone
with the Wind was new it got the reaction
David Selznick wanted: not only enormous success at the box office but critical
acclaim as the greatest movie that had ever been or would ever be made. More
modern critics have soured on it; though Dwight Macdonald applauded it on its
1961 reissue (deliberately timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the
Civil War) as “adult entertainment” because of the complexity of its
characters, in 1973 Richard Schickel slammed it for many of the same reasons
anti-racist writers attack it today: “Frankly, my dear, I didn’t (and still
don’t) give a damn about the South’s yokel notion that it once supported a
new age of chivalry and grace. … I never could join Miss Mitchell in mourning
the era gone with her wind, which seemed to me far from an ill wind.” He also
dismissed it as romantic kitsch
typical of Selznick’s overall output. (https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/73mar/schick.htm)
I still like Gone
with the Wind, though its soft-racist
depiction of American slavery is pretty off-putting and how I ache to see a
self-actualizing Black character in the film. (I once had the fantasy that
Selznick and his writers had had one of the slaves at Tara teach himself to
read and write, get whipped for that transgression, ultimately escape and then
return as a Reconstruction politician humiliating the O’Haras by forcing them
to take orders from a man they’d once owned. I even wished that Paul Robeson
could have played this part.) But I’m not even sure it deserved the Academy
Award for Best Picture in 1939; though it has its own set of problems, Frank
Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
is a much nervier film, audaciously blending Right- and Left-wing political
sensibilities (Capra was a Republican and his writer, Sidney Buchman, was a
Communist) and featuring a star, James Stewart, who stretched himself beyond
his usual range instead of neatly fitting into his comfortable groove the way
Clark Gable did in Gone with the Wind. — 6/15/20, 6/16/20, 6/17/20
•••••
My previous thoughts on Gone with the Wind:
Our roommate John P. had the TV tuned to TBS, which has been
running a salute to Academy Award-winning movies in preparation for tomorrow
night’s ceremony, so we watched the second half of Gone with the Wind (I’m not sure which version this is — there’s only
one commonly circulated version as far as content is concerned, but there’ve
been several reissues with different color values, and some critics lambasted
Ted Turner for allegedly turning down the color values on the most recent release, thereby making it look
more like a modern color film and
less like a film of its period), then all of The African Queen. The part of Gone with the Wind we saw was what John considers the weakest part of
the film anyway — the “soap-opera” part that begins with the death of
Scarlett’s second husband (at a mysterious “political meeting” that was
actually a Ku Klux Klan night-ride in the book, but David Selznick didn’t want
the NAACP on his back so he just made them an ordinary night-riding party that
kept their bedsheets on their beds back home) and goes through her marriage to
Rhett Butler, Melanie’s death, her last disillusionment with Ashley and Rhett’s
leaving her, with the famous curtain speech, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a
damn.” (Given the realities of the Production Code and how hard Selznick had to
fight to get that line in the film, it’s no surprise that he had a “protection”
scene shot in which Gable said, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t care.”) The colors
seemed as rich and stylized as I’d remembered them — the inside of Tara in
particular had so much red carpeting it looked almost like a whorehouse
(Scarlett’s idea of making Rhett feel at home?) — with those famous sunsets
still glowing bright orange (brighter and more orange than the real thing) —
and Vivien Leigh’s performance is beautifully balanced, far better than Victor
Fleming’s sledgehammer direction or Gable’s playing Rhett Butler as Gable,
coasting through the role on sheer magnetism and screen “presence” instead of
actually doing something with it
the way Laurence Olivier or Ronald Colman might have done. — 3/24/96
