Gone With The Wind after 75 years - still watchable? Still relevant?

Cafe Society
21

I’m not sure why this makes you so angry, but I will try to elucidate more clearly what I was asking.

Any period movie can be relevant to a contemporary audience if the drama reflects issues that are still present in peoples’ lives, such as being in love with someone who doesn’t love you back, or being poor and hungry and scheming to get money. One might argue that these and other issues treated in this movie do still happen to people. I suppose my question should have been, are these issues dealt with in a way that still speaks to contemporary audiences?

I hope this clarifies things for you, bless your little heart.

22

I think it’s a very beautiful film. For a long time, I had only seen it on television, and then got the opportunity to see it in the theater, and it’s definitely a film made for theater, just because there are so many scenes that are immense…the Confederate hospital scene, the burning of Atlanta scene, some of the Tara scenes; they just call out for a big screen. Some of the acting is superb. Leigh is outstanding, all fire and seduction, and Gable does sardonicism better than anyone else. Hattie McDaniel takes a role that could very easily be a minor one and takes over the shot when she’s in it.

Leslie Howard is wasted. He gets one good speech about how the world has changed and he’s too weak to change with it, but he spends most of his time staring nobly in the distance. Olivia de Havilland is almost criminally underused.

I think the film is ironic as hell, and I think it was a good film at the time and is still a good film today, for all that its racial attitudes aren’t particularly enlightened.

23

The aggressive and hostile tone of his post probably could have been said a little more eloquently but I agree with his point in general. GWTW is set before and during the Civil War. The book was released during the Great Depression. The Model-T was old even then and people could fly coast to coast on airliners if they had the money for it. WWII had already started in Europe when it was released as a movie. In short, the people that saw it during its original release had no personal experience with the time period that the movie was set except for a few extremely old people. A similar story could have been set during the Revolutionary War or any other one for that matter. It is like a Shakespearean play. The accuracy of the setting isn’t that important, the story of the characters is the point.

Contrast that with works such as the Grapes of Wrath that was released as a work of true contemporary historical fiction to describe the lives of many people during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl. GWTW never had that same goal and it is only modern political leanings combined with ignorance of history and timelines that lead some people to believe that it should be viewed as something more than just a fictional character driven drama.

24

Nitpick, but during and after…mostly after. For all that people call it a Civil War novel, it’s really more of a Reconstruction novel. And I wonder if that actually is relevant. It came out in 1936, and I wonder if part of the reason that the book was so popular (Pulitzer, best seller for two years), is that it was the story of a woman who lost everything and then was trying to survive and get her life back. I wonder if a lot of people saw the Reconstruction South as portrayed in the novel as sort of a mirror of the Depression, and that it was relevant for that reason.

25

People say that but I don’t see it myself. Sure, it has plenty of black slaves in it but we all know black slaved really existed and they weren’t portrayed negatively at all in GWTW. Mammy is one of the strongest characters in the story in her own way. Prissy is a beloved member of the household as well. She has to play a fool sometimes but she is young and nothing she says or does would be out of line for any minor comic relief character of any race.

I have come to the conclusion that you can’t make people happy no matter how you portray slaves in stories. If they are treated well, it is considered revisionism, treated too badly is promoting contemporary racism, over-educated and well spoken is denying reality but uneducated is just blatant denigration of their intellect. You just can’t win.

GWTW is one of the best pieces of feminist literature ever created. Margaret Mitchell really built up the female characters, especially Scarlett but also more minor ones like Mammy in ways that few authors or movie makers do even today. She was balanced and gave them real flaws as well as strengths. It is a shame to think that she would get booed off the stage at some so called progressive rallys today because she wasn’t privileged enough to be born 50 years later and been on the e-mail distribution list about what is an acceptable setting for a story and what isn’t.

26

Relevant?

Part of the movie is about how people endure unendurable situations. How people manage to survive when their whole world is torn apart. How people manage to continue on when there is no reason to think anything is ever going to go back to normal again.

That part of the human condition is as relevant now as it was…ever. As a great philosopher once said, “How we face death is at least as important as how we face life.” Bits of that question can be seen in the best of movies, and the worst of movies. It’s in The Pianist, and it’s in Independence Day.

As for the movie, I have a friend that thinks Lawrence of Arabia is the greatest movie. He wishes it was hours longer - he gets wrapped up in the world of it totally. I feel the same about GWTW. Even if I think Scarlett needed to be spanked (and not in that way!)

27
28

Overwrought film made from an even more overwrought novel.

While it might have been entertaining to a 1939 audience (especially in the American South) its myriad racist and sexist portrayals make it nearly unwatchable now over 75 years later. Even network television realizes this as it used to be shown once a year and now it is relegated to DVD only (cable wants no part of it either it seems).

29

I haven’t read or watched it in a few years, so maybe I’d have a different opinion now, but I’ve always loved both the book and the movie. It’s a time capsule of when it was made (1939 was its release year) and a relatively decent look at the time it’s portraying. I feel it often says more about the 30s than the 1860s.

So yes, there are cringe-worthy levels of racism, sexism, and classicism, but it’s a captivating story to me, and told beautifully. Some of the themes are timeless, like unrequited love, unhealthy obsession, struggles with poverty and oppression. Love or hate Scarlett, she’s dynamic and intriguing, and not just a pretty face waiting for a man to rescue her entirely.

30

I’m surprised at the responses.
I’ve seen the film many times, and own the DVD. I’ve read the novel, and so has MilliCal.

I’m very impressed, on many levels. Mitchell did her homework, and got the details of the Civil War right. I didn’t think a Catholic plantation in Georgia sounded probable, but it was, and Mitchell based a lot on her own family background.

As far as the movie, I was impressed how far it broke from the Hollywood mold – not just in length, and the extravagant use of Technicolor in the 1930s, but it how it treated the horrors of war without flinching. You only have to look at how Hollywood candy-coated other works, like Frankenstein, to see how different GWTW was. It’s surprisingly adult, for the time.

Finally, there’s the issue of slavery and its treatment. You have to look at this as if it’s a Civil War drama seen through the eyes of a Southern Belle. This is the way she would have expected the slaves and the “carpetbaggers” to act, unhistoric as it is. James Loewen can condemn the film as Hollywood propaganda (and, to some extent, it is), but this is the way the war looked to Southern eyes. And I suspect that this is the way slavery actually did look, for the most part. We’d cringe at it today, but black slaves probably did usually act in that literally servile fashion because they were molded to it by beatings and conditioning. We might think that they ought to be resisting and lashing out every step of the way, but that’s not the way people will end up reacting under the circumstances. Django Unchained isn’t just fiction, it’s wish fulfillment. I recently saw Twelve Years a Slave, based on the true story. Certainly Solomon Northup rebelled and tried to escape – but most of the time he didn’t. Look at the scenes where he interacts with the white slaveowners, and he’s as subdued as the bunch in GWTW. On those occasions when he reacts out of serv ile character, he gets beaten, or worse.

My enjoyment of the film is frequently broken by knowledge of the events or characvters. One of the Tarleton twins is Superman. The soldier dying in the church has the voice of Jiminy Cricket. The burning of Atlanta destroyed the gate King Kong was behind. And, speaking of King Kong, it played in the 1960s on WOR’s Million Dollar Movie, which used the music from GWTW, so my first association of the music is with cheap or old monster films. But it’s a great film, for all that.

31

I’ve only seen it once, and it was only about 60 years old at the time. Much to my surprise, I thought it was a fantastic film. I suppose the last 15 years might have been cruel to it, but I doubt it.

32

Long response when I’m not mobile, but easily on my Top Five Favorite Films list.

33

As one who grew up in Atlanta, I found the film (and book) to be a fascinating peek into how the “Old South” became the “New South”, with Scarlett representing everything, both positive and negative, about the “New South” - her grasping, money-hungry, forward-looking, religiously and socially irreverant behavior and attitudes fit in perfectly with the Atlanta I grew up in. It’s no surprise that Ted Turner loves this movie for I am sure he sees himself in Scarlett… God knows the parallels are there for anybody who wants to look for them.

So, yes, still relevant… but like Dickens, probably not as widely relevant as many of its fans want you to believe. If you grew up in, say, Seattle, there’s a lot you would miss because you’re not immersed in the milieu.

34

You don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve come across it multiple times on television, recently.

35

No doubt. It’s shown on TCM quite often - I have no idea where Nevadaexile got the idea it’s not on cable. Hell, it’s on next Monday on… TCM.

36

I demand to know what you are talking about because it makes no sense. In particular, what are you seeing in the ‘sexist portrayals’? There aren’t any in my view. Scarlett O’Hara is one of the strongest and most iconic women in all of literature or movie history. Even the minor females like Mammy, Prissy and others have their own distinct personalities with strengths as well as weaknesses. None of them are portrayed as anything less than the embodiment of people that have really existed.

Please explain why you think it is a sexist or racist work because I truly do not understand those criticisms. I have the sneaking suspicion that the people making these types of claims have never actually seen the movie or even read the book because these types of complaints are off the wall from my viewpoint.

This is the Cafe Society on the SDMB. I think people can do better with their arguments than curl up in a ball in the corner and yell ‘South -bad!!!’ repeatedly. What is the intelligent argument here?

37

I’ve always found the story telling quite riveting. GWTW convincingly portrays a life and society destroyed by war and then rebuilt through the characters of Scarlett and Mammy. Scarlett is such a flawed and yet courageous character. I love this movie.

38

Well, the film was based on the novel. Margaret Mitchell was a Southern belle who didn’t know the South lost the war until she was in her 20s, I understand. I assume she was raised on her grandmothers’ stories about life in the good old days.

39

I always loved Tara’s Theme.

40

If it weren’t for Gone with the Wind, we’d’ve never had this

My mother loved GWTW (she was 10 years old when it came out), and would fall about in fits whenever she saw this sketch.