The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Historical romance

DIRECTOR

Victor Fleming

WRITERS

Sidney Howard (screenplay); Margaret Mitchell (novel)

STARS

Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable, Leslie Howard, Olivia de Havilland

BEFORE

1915 D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (or The Clansman), an epic chronicle of the Civil War, is condemned as racist.

1933 George Cukor directs Little Women, a Civil War era family drama adapted from the novels by Louisa May Alcott.

AFTER

1948 Vivien Leigh takes the title role in Alexander Korda’s adaptation of Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.

Now viewed nostalgically as a relic of a long-gone Hollywood, Gone with the Wind was itself a rose-tinted portrait of a bygone age. Its preamble pays tribute to a lost America, in a paean to 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…” In 1939, America was still smarting from the grinding poverty of the Great Depression, and audiences were swept off their feet by the movie’s sheer scale, romance, and blazing color palette.

"A landmark in movie history, and only the very blasé can say of it that frankly they don’t give a damn."

Philip French
The Observer, 2010

Epic adaptation

What is now regarded as a great historical epic was a work of fiction by Margaret Mitchell, whose best-selling Civil War love story was first published in 1936. Before the year was out, producer David O. Selznick had committed to making the movie version. It was a gargantuan task. The draft screenplay ran to six hours and took four writers to edit. It is said that 1,400 unknowns and dozens of stars were seen for the role of its heroine, Scarlett O’Hara. Having waited a year for actor Clark Gable to be free, Selznick then fired director George Cukor just three weeks into filming and replaced him with Victor Fleming.

Dressing Scarlett (Vivien Leigh) for the ball, Mammy (Hattie McDaniel) upbraids her newly widowed mistress for trying to ensnare a married man.

Love, loss, and longing

The movie is, at heart, a love triangle writ large: Scarlett (Vivien Leigh) is in love with Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard), who is engaged to marry his cousin. On the rebound she catches the eye of Rhett Butler (Clark Gable). The violence of war aptly reflects the tortured love affair between Rhett and Scarlett, captured in stunning Technicolor by cinematographer Ernest Haller.

The movie’s depiction of, and open nostalgia for, the slave-based society of the Old South betrays many questionable assumptions, but some of the novel’s more openly racist passages are simply sidestepped. Hattie McDaniel, who played Scarlett’s house slave Mammy, won one of the movie’s 10 Oscars—the first African-American to be so honored.

Ultimately this is Scarlett’s story. While the movie ends with her alone, undone by her own selfishness, it is also a metaphor for America as a land of hope and regeneration. Although she is rebuffed by Rhett, who shuns her desperate pleas for reconciliation with a curt, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” the last line of the movie belongs to Scarlett. “I’ll go home,” she says, thinking of her home at Tara, her family, and her roots, “and I’ll think of some way to get him back. After all… tomorrow is another day.”

The movie’s premiere in 1939 in Atlanta, Georgia, drew one million people to the city. This poster dates to 1967, when the movie was rereleased in a wide-screen print.

Born in Darjeeling, India, in 1913, Vivien Leigh shot to international fame with Gone with the Wind, becoming the first British actress to win a Best Actress Oscar. She was equally accomplished on stage and on screen, and won her second Oscar for playing Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, a role she had first played in the theater. Described by director George Cukor as “a consummate actress, hampered by beauty,” Leigh had a troubled private life; her fragile mental and physical health resulted in a limited output. She succumbed to tuberculosis in 1967, and died at 53.

1939 Gone with the Wind

1951 A Streetcar Named Desire

What else to watch: The General (1926) ✵ Little Women (1933) ✵ A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) ✵ Cold Mountain (2003) ✵ 12 Years a Slave (2013)