Wednesday, June 17, 2020

Gone with the Wind (Selznick International/MGM, 1939)


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

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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