I was proselytized for this movie many years ago by an ex, who insisted that we attend an original version with the real original credits etc. I thought it was a vast, sprawling soap opera with some very good cinematic moments, as well as some truly cringeworthy stuff.
Looking back on it, the story seems pathetic to me now. All about a spoiled brat who takes around 20 years, and 4 movie hours, to grow up, just in time for the fade-out.
What do you think? Does this movie stand the test of time? Is it really a classic, or just a lumbering elephant in crinoline?
Got sucked into re-watching it a few weeks ago while channel-surfing after not having seen/read/thought about it in years. Was spellbound … and not in a good way. I mean, I knew it was racist, but I didn’t remember it being THAT bad. :eek:
Slavery is an abomination, and should never have been sanctioned under the Constitution. But if the South wants to secede, let 'em go, and they can sort it out themselves. Ain’t worth fighting a fratricidal war over.
Last word: Slavery was never the issue. Secession was. And the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t free a single slave. It merely reinforced their status as property.
This is Cafe Society, so that discussion probably isn’t on topic, but we’ve had plenty of Great Debates threads on the subject if you want to discuss that point.
And except for Abolitionists (who rightfully believed that slavery should be abolished), the main concern of the North was the spread of Slave Power into the western territories.
As for slavery, I was as amazed as everybody else here that the slaves in real life didn’t overly love being slaves. Of course, I think that the movie is a great sociological document, and can be used for another 100 or more years in giving accurate measurement of how people live and feel, especially until the slaves are freed.
/sarcasm.
WTF, “still relevant”??? It’s a fucking fiction, made from a fucking novel! It’s not a fucking documentary, or a fucking social science experiment. It’s as relevant as a fucking fiction made from a fucking novel can be, about something that happened 60 fucking years before it was written, and about a time that the fucking novel itself says is no longer relevant. So, to say that something has passed into history, never to return (if it ever existed), then, yes, it still is not coming back, and it still will never return, so, that part is still fucking relevant.
Awesome movie. I have seen it countless times (it isn’t that difficult to do when you grow up in the South and various teachers make you watch it every year every grade past 6th grade sometimes multiple times) and I have owned it in various formats as an adult.
I really want a plantation house that looks like Tara and a girlfriend that looks like Scarlett but with just a little less attitude. People in this thread are mostly just blowing it off but how many other movies are as truly famous as GWTW? That means something especially because it was released in 1939 and people still watch it for fun. The Wizard of Oz (released in the same year), Casablanca and only a handful of other movies have had that kind of staying power. The run time is a little long but it uses the time well to build several different iconic characters.
I watched the movie a couple of years and thought it held up pretty well. I wouldn’t call myself a big fan of woman’s drama film. It does have one of Hollywood’s most charismatic stars, Clark Gable, in his most famous role. I look at the "South-as-good-guys’’ tone as a science fiction story.
I agree that the ‘relevant’ question isn’t really relevant itself. Gone With the Wind is almost exactly as separated from the Civil War chronologically as we are from the release of GWTW (a little over 70 years give or take in either direction). There is some Southern romanticism involved but there isn’t supposed to be any historical message behind it at all. It it just a classic character driven love/tragedy story that uses the Civil War as its setting because the book’s author, Margaret Mitchell was from Atlanta. I doubt she had any special affection for Yankees in general but that wasn’t the point to the story. The real story was just about Scarlett and how she could manipulate everyone except Rhett in the end.
