#it probably had more to do with eve but i choose to believe o'hara had been living her best life

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Gone with the Wind; AFI #6

Our next film for review is the classic epic drama, Gone with the Wind (1939). This movie was the big award winner from a year that is often considered the best year for movies in American cinema history. The film won 8 Oscars including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Actress. Notably, the film also had the first win for a black actor with Best Supporting Actress going to Hattie McDaniel (although she had to get special permission to sit in the back of the room since the awards took place at a segregated hotel). All these wins came against competition like The Wizard of Oz, Wuthering Heights, Stagecoach and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Although this film is considered to be one of the best American films of all time, there has been a lot of complaints about the depiction of house slaves and slavery in general in this film. I want to discuss why it is still great and the takeaway from the film, but first a quick synopsis of the plot will help. This movie is almost 4 hours long, so it will be much more condensed then usual, and I relied heavily on Wikipedia and IMDB entries to summarize this particular film. I do want to do the standard...

SPOILER ALERT!!!! IF YOU ARE AMERICAN, THEN YOU SHOULD PROBABLY WATCH THIS FILM AS ALMOST A CIVIC DUTY!!! IT IS A MAJOR PART OF AMERICAN CINEMA HISTORY AND SOMETHING THAT SHOULD BE EXPERIENCED!!! IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN IT, I IMPLORE YOU TO GO AND WATCH IT BEFORE READING ANY FURTHER!!!

In 1861, on the eve of the American Civil War, Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh) lives at Tara, her family's cotton plantation in Georgia, with her parents and two sisters and their many slaves. Scarlett learns that Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard), whom she secretly loves, is to be married to his cousin, Melanie Hamilton (Olivia de Havilland), and the engagement is to be announced the next day at a barbecue at Ashley's home, the nearby plantation Twelve Oaks. At the Twelve Oaks party, Scarlett makes an advance on Ashley, but instead catches the attention of another guest, Rhett Butler (Clark Gable). The barbecue is disrupted by news of the declaration of war, and the men rush to enlist. In a bid to arouse jealousy in Ashley, Scarlett marries Melanie's younger brother Charles before he leaves to fight. Following Charles's death while serving in the Confederate States Army, Scarlett's mother sends her to the Hamilton home in Atlanta, where she creates a scene by attending a charity bazaar in her mourning attire and waltzing with Rhett, now a blockade runner for the Confederacy.

The tide of war turns against the Confederacy after the Battle of Gettysburg, in which many of the men of Scarlett's town are killed. Eight months later, as the city is besieged by the Union Army in the Atlanta Campaign, Melanie gives birth with Scarlett's aid, and Rhett helps them flee the city. Once out of the city, Rhett chooses to go off to fight, leaving Scarlett to make her own way back to Tara. Upon her return home, Scarlett finds Tara deserted, except for her father, her sisters, and two former slaves: Mammy (Hattie McDaniel) and Pork (Oscar Polk). Scarlett learns that her mother has just died of typhoid fever and her father has become senile. With Tara pillaged by Union troops and the fields untended, Scarlett vows she will do anything for the survival of her family and herself.

(Little bit of a side note, this seems to be where several of the commenters on IMDB thought the movie ended as the phrase “ends with Scarlett vowing never to go hungry again” showed up more than once. This is the point of the intermission and the two halves are very different from each other, but this is by no means the end of the film. It is a very good time to take a break if you are watching it so I suggest taking more than the intermission time to stretch your legs. This is a really long movie.)

As the O'Haras work in the cotton fields, Scarlett's father attempts to chase away a scalawag from his land, but is thrown from his horse and killed. With the defeat of the Confederacy, Ashley also returns, but finds he is of little help at Tara. When Scarlett begs him to run away with her, he confesses his desire for her and kisses her passionately, but says he cannot leave Melanie. Unable to pay the Reconstructionist taxes imposed on Tara, Scarlett dupes her younger sister Suellen's fiancé, the middle-aged and wealthy general store owner Frank Kennedy, into marrying her, by saying Suellen got tired of waiting and married another suitor. Frank, Ashley, Rhett and several other accomplices make a night raid on a shanty town after Scarlett is attacked while driving through it alone, resulting in Frank's death. With Frank's funeral barely over, Rhett proposes to Scarlett and she accepts.

Rhett and Scarlett have a daughter whom Rhett names Bonnie Blue, but Scarlett, still pining for Ashley and chagrined at the perceived ruin of her figure, lets Rhett know that she wants no more children and that they will no longer share a bed. One day at Frank's mill, Scarlett and Ashley are seen embracing by Ashley's sister, India, and harboring an intense dislike of Scarlett she eagerly spreads rumors. Later that evening, Rhett, having heard the rumors, forces Scarlett to attend a birthday party for Ashley. Incapable of believing anything bad of her, Melanie stands by Scarlett's side so that all know that she believes the gossip to be false. After returning home from the party, Scarlett finds Rhett downstairs drunk, and they argue about Ashley. Rhett kisses Scarlett against her will, stating his intent to have sex with her that night, and carries the struggling Scarlett to the bedroom.

The next day, Rhett apologizes for his behavior and offers Scarlett a divorce, which she rejects, saying that it would be a disgrace. When Rhett returns from an extended trip to London, Scarlett informs him that she is pregnant, but an argument ensues which results in her falling down a flight of stairs and suffering a miscarriage. As she is recovering, tragedy strikes when Bonnie dies while attempting to jump a fence with her pony. Scarlett and Rhett visit Melanie, who has suffered complications arising from a new pregnancy, on her deathbed. As Scarlett consoles Ashley, Rhett prepares to leave Atlanta. Having realized that it was him she truly loved all along, and not Ashley, Scarlett pleads with Rhett to stay, but Rhett rebuffs her and walks away into the morning fog, leaving her in tears on the staircase. A distraught Scarlett resolves to return home to Tara, believing that one day she will get Rhett back.

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While discussing this film with my mom, she mentioned that the film has had a different effect on her each time and she felt like it was because she was a different person each time she saw it. I have had the same experience and I find that rewatching the film is a good way to see how your own perspective has changed over time. I first saw this as a teen and thought Rhett Butler was a cold man who could could not forgive a suffering Scarlett who was trying to figure out her priorities during a trying time. In my twenties, I could only focus on the depiction of slavery and thought that people should not watch the film at all. In my thirties, I hated Scarlett and wished that she had died instead of her friend or the daughter because she was dramatic and made bad situations worse. I recently turned forty and watched it again...

I still find Scarlett to be dramatic and the cause of many of her own problems, but at the same time I would expect this from somebody her age (I think I finally separated the age of the actress from the age of the character) with her “Princess of the South” upbringing. I can’t really empathize since her life was much easier than mine, but I can sympathize after working with many rich teens who are spoiled and don’t know how to act in an emergency. I think I understand better about how the author of the book was trying to portray this plantation lifestyle as almost royalty and the slaves were like the 1850s Southern United States version of royal attendants. I find the language very cringy, but all of the house slaves at the O’Hara plantation have their place in the story. This is probably an accurate depiction of what somebody from the old South would want to glamorize plantation life as being to people living in the 1940s, and thus historically valuable. I find Rhett Butler to be somewhat similar to Han Solo: somebody who looks out for his own best interest but softens for good people and good causes. He seems to do good things except when he gets drunk and forces himself on Scarlett (marriage and sexual assault are not mutually exclusive). He is otherwise pretty faultless, but that scene drops him quite a few pegs in my eyes.

One thing that sticks with me each and every time is when Scarlett is working at the army hospital and the doctor wants her to help with an amputation. They have nothing to numb the pain and there is a young man screaming not to cut into his leg...I can’t even imagine yet I know that this was not even uncommon during the height of the war. I remember watching a documentary on the Civil War and a real photo showing a pile of amputated limbs at a makeshift tent hospital. The pile looked to have more than 100 limbs and I am sure they did not have enough morphine for all of these men. The best field doctors were said to be more strong and stoic than accurate since being able to saw through a man’s leg quickly was a major commodity. This horrifically honest portrayal of war in the midst of the Nazi threat and a couple of years before the entry of the U.S. into WW2 took courage. I was able to sublimate a little more during this viewing since there was no on-screen cutting. I also tried to imagine the man doing the voice over and screaming “Don't cut my leg!” in a sound studio. It helped. Another thing that I didn’t know during previous viewings was that when she exits the building and sees the hundreds of soldiers in the streets, half of the bodies on the ground are manikins. Look very closely at the middle picture above...half over those bodies are fakes.

I learned a lot from the extras that were with this movie since I borrowed my friend’s DVD box set. It was unexpected to me that the three slaves were my friend’s favorite characters (Pork, Mammy, and Prissy), since my friend is a black woman in her 70s and grew up during the Civil Rights movement when films that depicted slavery in this way were generally looked down upon. My friend said she was glad to see black actors at all from the era and the movement had to start somewhere. The actors seemed to be of the same opinion with Hattie McDaniel saying she would rather portray a maid and get paid like an actor than have to actually be a maid. Speaking roles for black actors were very few, especially in big budget movies, so there was not a lot of concern about the character being portrayed. This makes since, especially after the Great Depression. Having a role playing a stereotyped house slave still meant a great paycheck at the end of the week. I also liked that one of the things that Rhett Butler wanted and had difficulty getting was approval from Mammy concerning the courtship of Scarlett. Mammy was a slave, but she knew a lot of secrets and was not powerless.

My favorite character this time around was Melanie Hamilton because she is just a good person. She is not helpless and she doesn’t complain about her problems, she just handles her business and keeps supporting her family with a strength that I am not likely to truly know. I was saddened to hear that the actress recently passed away as, similar to her character, she seemed like a real survivor that would live forever. Apparently the actress, Olivia de Havilland, was not nearly as demure and liked to play jokes on her fellow actors. She also made a lot of fun about the age gap between Vivien Leigh and the actress playing Scarlett’s mother (there was a real life age difference of 4 years). Havilland also had the crew tie her to a chair that Clark Gable was supposed to lift her from and he nearly threw out his back.

It is a little surprising how much adversity occurred on set since there were a lot of injuries, actors who didn’t really like their character (Vivien Leigh described her character as a “raging bitch”), giant sets that were lit on fire so only one take was possible, and the portrayal of the South and slavery in a favorable light. However, like so many other films on the AFI list, it seems like the difficulties are what bonded the groups together to make classic cinema. It seems like a little adversity and strife can bring out the best in film makers.

So does this movie belong on the AFI list? Maybe more than any other movie ever made. It is the top film from the pinnacle year of the Golden Age of Hollywood. It is a historical drama about a singularly American topic based on an American best seller. I think a list about great American movies should probably start with films like this and go from there. Absolute classic. Would I recommend it? Yes, and I would actually recommend multiple viewings because your interpretation will change throughout your life. This is a superiorly good movie that should be viewed, no matter how it is interpreted. Just make sure to plan a break because this movie is epic in scale and in run time. Still totally worth it.