75 Years of Gone with the Wind

I initially planned on writing a review proper of Gone with the Wind for today, the film's 75th anniversary, but time and what is turning into a runaway December (stress, way too much ambition, occasionally realizing that ambition, more frequently not realizing that ambition, and then more stress tend to find a way to affect this month more than any other in my world).  Someday I want to get a review of this film, one of those gold standards of cinema, part of that Holy Quintet of Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Lawrence of Arabia, and The Godfather where you should hang your head in shame if you haven't seen them all (in a weird conundrum, whenever I mention these five films to someone, there's always at least one that they've hit, and at least one that they're "getting around to" but never actually seem to get around to-if you're one of these people, move that movie to the TOP of your Netflix queue right now (I'm serious-get on it), and prepare yourself for something absolutely incredible).

Gone with the Wind has an impressively lasting memory.  It says something about the film that 75 years after its release date we say "of course" when it's mentioned that the film won the Best Picture Oscar, even though it tops some of the other greatest films ever made like Wuthering Heights, Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and the equally classic The Wizard of Oz (seriously-the rest of the list includes the original Goodbye, Mr. Chips, the Bette Davis sudser Dark Victory, the Ernst Lubitsch gem Ninotchka, Lewis Milestone's frequently copied Of Mice and Men, and the classic Love Affair...and this doesn't even take into account films like The Rules of the Game, The Women, Gunga Din, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Destry Rides Again all being out that year...there's a reason 1939 is considered the undisputed pinnacle of movie-making).  It's easy to name check as the definition of a big, grand, soap opera style of a movie that has terrific acting, and while it's never quite groundbreaking art in the same fashion as Citizen Kane or La Dolce Vita, it's probably the best and largest piece of epic entertainment Hollywood will ever be able to produce.

I saw Gone with the Wind for the first time when I was roughly thirteen-years-old.  I had never seen it before, but knew that it was the sort of movie that I had to own, and so I remember buying it on VHS at the same time as the great, epic romance of my youth, Titanic.  Both films sort of created an impossibly high standard for what would become my favorite genre of movie (the romantic epic), as they are arguably the two best films of that particular trope, and because there aren't that many romantic epics coming out of Hollywood to begin with; there's too much risk involved in putting that much money into one particular basket, and for every Gone with the Wind or Titanic, there's a dozen Duel in the Suns, overwrought and ready to bomb.

I think what initially drew me to the film was the modernity of the lead performance by Vivien Leigh.  Leigh gives two of the greatest performances in the history of film, which sort of overshadowed her in every other movie of her career (though you're a fool if you haven't seen the marvelously enchanting Waterloo Bridge, one of my personal favorites and a movie I am intent on telling everyone I know to see), but when they are Scarlett O'Hara and Blanche DuBois, you can't really pity the actress.  I love how very bold and of-our-time Leigh's work is in both these pictures, but especially as Scarlett.  You change around some of the dialogue and you could easily see Scarlett as a Mean Girl or especially as a carefree member of The Bling Ring.  She'd be sneaking onto her iPhone when Melanie was reading from David Copperfield or be wearing a halter instead of her rouge dress, but there's something deeply modern in her work in that it translates.  Olivia de Havilland, Clark Gable, Hattie McDaniel, and Leslie Howard all give really sublime performances, in many cases hitting career bests, but Leigh is sort of in another world.  It was incredibly risky to cast her initially.  She was a complete unknown and other actors like Tallulah Bankhead, Bette Davis, Claudette Colbert, Paulette Goddard, Katharine Hepburn, Loretta Young (the actual list of actresses rumored to play this part is basically every woman of this era outside of perhaps Garbo) would have been better Box Office insurance, and she actually got fourth billing when the film initially ran, but you needed an unknown who could eventually become a legend, and that was what Leigh was.

I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about the journey I eventually had with Gone with the Wind.  As I got older (and have seen this movie MANY times), I learned that there were parts of the film that were unsavory, particularly the depiction of the slaves and the marital rape scene.  Of course I wish that you could erase these aspects, and quite frankly, even in 1939 the depictions of African-Americans in this film seem unusually dated, though the film itself did open doors for the African-American community in some aspects (it led to Hattie McDaniel, of course, becoming the first African-American to win an Academy Award, though she famously was denied entrance to the Atlanta premiere of the film due to it being in a segregated theater, something that made her friend Clark Gable so mad that he almost didn't show, until she personally asked him to).  However, it does remain an interesting look at where we've come cinematically.  You could never make a film that looked like Gone with the Wind in Hollywood today, and I mean that in a good way-an epic film would never have, while not necessarily glamorizing slavery (though it comes close with that horrible opening title card, which always makes me cringe), been able to sort of skirt around the issue.  In fact, had it not been for McDaniel's extremely strong performance and a couple of key elements being removed from the novel, this film would be relegated into the cinematic dustbin in a similar way to The Birth of a Nation, another monumental picture that is weighted down by its racist roots.  David O. Selznick, GWTW's producer, probably cemented the film's legacy when he decided to skip several of the most racist moments from the book (principally that Rhett and Ashley were members of the KKK and the use of the n-word), though Selznick, a social liberal at the time, certainly would have gone further in creating a more equality-driven film were it not for worry about Box Office receipts in the South.  Still, as with most art, you occasionally have to ground the film in a time-and-place, and while not dismissing or looking past the racist or sexist attitudes of the film, at least appreciate if there is something  remarkable in the other attributes of the motion picture for fear of dismissing all art that doesn't match the viewpoints of the current era.

The film continues on with us today, and thankfully we still have one of its stars with us to celebrate the 75th year of the movie (the 98-year-old living legend Olivia de Havilland, one of the greatest actors of the era, and, if her health is up for it, the PERFECT choice to present Best Picture this year at the Oscars instead of Jack Nicholson yet again).  The film continues on with me as well.  It's one of those films with its scale, scope, and acting that makes me remember why I sit through hundreds of movies a year, even if the vast majority underwhelm me.  It's because on occasion I get a film that totally just leaves me breathless, waiting to see what can happen next-that's what Gone with the Wind will always do for me. It's a film where all of the magic dust of Golden Age Hollywood is flying at full force, and you get to see why they once called it Tinseltown.