I remember watching it quite some time ago. I think Vivien Leigh’s performance still makes it watchable, or at least watchable for an hour or two. It does drag on.
OK, everybody-I’m better now. :o
Uh-huh.
Your post is a perfect exemplar of the phrase “that’s mighty whit of you.”
Relevant to raising a daughter, in my case. But I think people are missing something important (and not just within this thread, but almost always in discussions of GWTW): Scarlett is a bitch. She’s mean as a snake, manipulative in all the ways that drive feminists crazy, she derives her power through her pussy as literally as Belle Watling does…she shows us everything that’s frustrating and terrible and wrong with a society that only allows women “power” through sexuality and marriage due to overly rigid prescribed gender roles.
My daughter got it. Her question, around the seduction of Frank Kennedy: “Mom, why doesn’t she just open her own sawmill? Why is she stealing his sawmill?” Whew. Good question, kid…let’s talk about how women weren’t allowed to have their own bank accounts or lines of credit. Let’s talk about how hard it is to start a business when you have no capital to start it with. Let’s talk about how limited women’s options were, and how marrying into a business was often the only way they could get in.
We’re not actually supposed to like Scarlett’s actions - although Vivian Leigh is so charming and likable in the role that you can’t *help *but like Scarlett while you still want to smack her…which is exactly how everyone around her in the story felt. They knew she was evil, but she was so darn likable. When we like someone, it’s too easy to excuse their evil ways, to enable their behavior, to rationalize that they act like that because of [Choose all that apply: fear/ignorance/ambition/something that happened in their past/the demon liquor] and to encourage their bad behavior even though you know it’s wrong.
Some of the details in GWTW are still very relevant to discussions of business and economics today. How many of our discussions about the minimum wage mention the “race to the bottom?” Scarlett shows us a shrewd business woman without a heart, racing all the way to the bottom by using abused convicts because she can pay them less than her competitor using free men, and she’s judged harshly for it.
The scene which always stood out for my mother, for some reason, was of Scarlett eating before the barbeque, because no respectable young lady would be seen “stuffing her face” in public. My daughter was similarly appalled by that scene, which lead to some really great discussion of the gender based rules that still exist around public behavior - ladies don’t fart or burp in public, ladies must wear shirts, ladies who get drunk in public are judged responsible for bad things that happen to them as a result… Ladies may not wear uncomfortably tight corsets today, but what about uncomfortably tight jeans and heels?
Scarlett of course teaches us that money cannot buy happiness, although a lack of money can certainly buy misery. But I will give her some credit: for all her greed and ambition at the expense of others, she’s also generous sharing food, shelter and clothing with the starving soldiers. I like that scene a lot, where a bunch of people with very little to spare share what they have. That’s my favorite glimpse at the moral heart of Scarlett-that-could-be, if she wasn’t so afraid of personal poverty. And aren’t most of us the same? We have moments of generosity, even though most of the time we ignore the beggars on the street and the calls for charity donations, telling ourselves we don’t have enough to spare. What makes us stop and help in those moments, but not others? Melly offers one answer: because those soldiers remind her of Ashley; when a cause is near and dear, generosity is easier.
I could go on and on, but I’ll stop. I love GWTW as a morality play, and think it’s still exceedingly relevant in that sense.
You can also see it on the big screen today and October 1st through a TCM collaboration.
I’m going today (Stroudsburg, PA). It’s relevant to me, as it was my mother’s favorite book and film. I saw it with her in 1973 - the year before she died. I wish like anything she was here today to see it with me again.
UT~
Sigh , I wish I could write like this.
Note: one thing that helps me view some of the horrible stereotypes is if I just tell myself that Prissy’s probably mentally retarded.
Mostly, I just watch for the costumes. Gorgeous, gorgeous costumes.
I don’t get the “hate on Prissy” issue - she’s a product of her times and environment and her subservient, ditzy, idiotic attitude would be adopted by a slave who (a) doesn’t want a lot asked of her, (b) doesn’t want to do a lot, and © doesn’t want to get beaten because of (a) and (b).
In other words, it’s a survival mechanism.
As far as relevance, a recent poll found that approximately 1/4 of Americans thought secession was a viable idea. Yeah, worked so well the first time.
Speaking of, I’ve never understood the charge that GWTW romanticizes antebellum life. For starters, you see exactly one day of antebellum life, and that spent getting ready for a party at the mansion of the wealthiest family in the area- OF COURSE it’s going to look appealing. Also, you’re not seeing it through the eyes of socio-economic scholars but through the pov of a spoiled and self-absorbed and babied 16 year old brat- of course it’s going to seem frivolous and carefree. But even in that very minor snapshot at Twelve Oaks* you see a foolhardy bunch of provincial pompous men who run off to war as if it’s to sign up for the softball tournament (most to not return upon finding out that in fact Yankees could fight pretty damned well) and Rhett Butler- the voice of reason for most of the film- calls them on it in his cotton, slaves, and arrogance spiel.
As for the depiction of blacks, Mammy is one of the most intelligent and complex characters in the movie (and far moreso in the novel, but for this post I’ll pretend the book doesn’t exist). She is intensely loyal- which somebody who had spent her long life in service (or bondage if you prefer) to this family- would be. She’s not a simple field hand or happy darky like some characters in other films (including some characters the great Hattie McDaniel had to play) but a woman who is both enslaved and exalted- she is not technically free but she can boss around and backtalk her mistresses and knows there is little to no chance she is ever going to be sold; she’s basically gone as far as somebody can go in slavery, and it’s through her wits and personality. The scene when she tells Scarlett “I ain’t noticed Mister Ashley asking for to marry ya” is one of the biggest slaps Scarlett gets, and when she tells the widowed Scarlett that “Savannah’d be better for ya” you can tell that she knows Scarlett better than her own mother does, better than Melanie does, better than Scarlett herself does. Rhett says it best: she’s a wise old soul, and he means it when he says she’s one of the few people on the planet whose respect he gives a damn about.
As for the realism of a house slave having deep feelings for the family that owns her- that happened. I don’t have any rose colored glasses about slavery, but the testimony is solid that many black slaves and white slave owners had genuine affection for each other; it’s impossible to spend an isolated lifetime in daily contact with somebody without strong feelings one way or the other forming, and a house slave is not a nameless field hand but the person most likely to consider themself a member of the tribe if not the family. (Again, I won’t go into the book, but I will say Mammy is even more complex in there and has a couple of great scenes that didn’t make the movie.)
As for Prissy- well, she comes across as silly and airheaded. So do Scarlett’s sisters and some of the county girls. And something I will mention from the book because it’s relevant: Prissy’s a child. She’s a tween who’s away from home for the first time, and her lies about knowing how to “birth babies”- how unrealistic is it that a tween would exaggerate her capabilities to get the respect of authority figures and without really thinking through the possible consequences? I’d say nearing 100% under the right situation.
And as far as her being hysterical and having to be slapped- why the hell wouldn’t she be hysterical? Even an illiterate not particularly bright slave in 1864 knows that women scream and bleed and often die in childbirth, and oh yeah, there’s that matter of tens of thousands of soldiers who are about to swoop in on the city, and this is one of the houses they’re bound to hit, and even said illiterate adolescent slave must have some notion of being gang raped.
I actually always loved the scene of Prissy “packing”- shoving the trunk shut and sending the dishes crashing: this shows that Prissy ain’t that stupid or sly, she just wants to get the feck out of Atlanta.
Pork the butler is the closest to a stereotypical character, but even he has some dimension. He’s loyal- and that’s not at all hard to believe that one in his situation would be- and he’s also old- what’s an old house servant supposed to do? Is it unrealistic he would think picking cotton- which has ENORMOUS repercussions- is beneath him? Or that he’d want to cling to some verisimilitude of peacetime normality by not having to do fieldwork and tie up cows and the like?
And the field hands: notice that they’ve all run off. Only Mammy and Pork remain, and they weren’t even all of the house servants. The fact that most of the slaves ran away when they could shows that they’re not exactly delighted to be slaves, and is also realistic. (Sadly, IRL most who left to follow Sherman were abandoned, and while Sherman was one of the most racist generals of the war a large part of his detaching the freed slaves was necessity- he didn’t have the food to spare and they were slowing him down.)
Big Sam is seen living in a shanty town. These places really did spring up all over the south and were occupied by former slaves, deserters (before the war ended) and drifters (afterward) from both sides as thousands were left without means of making a living. He returns to Tara- hardly surprising for him to do so- it’s food and security, and now he’s there by choice.
Just as the first line of the novel is “Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful”, neither is she meant to be likable. She is self absorbed, naive, scheming, and amoral. She is an unloving wife, an indifferent mother, oblivious to the suffering of those around her (example- her disregard of Mammy’s obvious back pain on the morning after her sex with Rhett, or her “oh that’s all” dismissal of Ashley’s desire to be independent of her). But she’s also very admirable: it would be VERY easy for her to cut off her folks [black and white] like they were camp followers- her sister Suellen certainly would have- but she tries to sell herself to Rhett, quite literally, and then seduces Frank Kennedy as much to provide for them as for herself. She is not without conscience- she has real guilt for how she treated Frank Kennedy, and suffers PTSD from her wartime experiences and presumably over killing the Yankee (even though that was justifiable). She’s not Melanie, who is a truly sweet and Christian (in the best sense) soul, but without her seemingly selfish acts Melanie and everybody else living at Tara would have been at best reduced to poverty (probably including Ashley if he’d gone to NYC- Ashley is just something of an inbred effete loser by this point).
As for Margaret Mitchell, it’s true she refused to take a class that had a black student in it when she was a college student. She also gave tens of thousands of dollars to Morehouse College (an all black college in Atlanta) and did so without press and even though she wasn’t as rich as you’d think from the novel. (She wrote when movie deals weren’t as lucrative and taxes were a lot higher.) It would be interesting to know how she’d have reacted to the civil rights era, but she was killed in its infancy.
I truly don’t understand the notion of not being able to enjoy a film because it’s a product of its time or only shows a particular viewpoint. In fairness I should admit I would not watch Ender’s Game because of its authors comments on homosexuality, but if I did see the movie I’d like to think I’d judge it on its merits.
There were two films released in 1971 and set in Russia that I consider masterpieces. One is Fiddler On The Roof, the other Nicholas and Alexandra. Both center on a family with five children caught in a topsy turvy changing world. In one, a young Communist is one of the good guys, and victimized by Imperial forces, and in the end the entire family and their entire community suffer oppression and then are driven into the terrifying unknown because of the whim of the Tsar and his advisors; in the other, the young Communists are oppressors, and the Tsar is seen as a loving father who wants to rule well and is not consumed by hatred- yet his actions lead to the deaths and starvation of many. I truly enjoy both films, and I don’t think that Nicholas and Alexandra not spending much more time on the people oppressed by the Tsarist policies or showing the Tsar as a monster makes it an unwatchable or even unrealistic movie any more than Fiddler not spending more time showing the bloodshed later caused by Perchik’s fellow revolutionaries or trying to paint Tevye in a more negative light for his own anti-Christian prejudice makes that film seem more apologistic.
More later.
*I’ve said many times that the set for Twelve Oaks is one of my leading complaints about the movie. They literally used the plans for a film set at a Tsar’s palace, not a Georgia planter’s mansion, which would have been maybe 1/8th as grand. I don’t even know that Sherman would have been able to torch that monstrosity without demolition teams mining it.
Sampiro, your’s is the best and most sensible post in this thread.
Agreed. Any time this board needs expert commentary on Southern culture…Sampiro comes through.
apropos de rien, I think Rhett Butler is awesome. His reputation as a scoundrel seems to be based on taking women for buggy rides without a chaperone; dancing with widows; and dallying with prostitutes (and possibly fathering a son by one). On the other hand, he’s noble, dashing, confident, and deeply fond of the two women at the moral center of the movie, Mammy and Melanie.
His infatuation with Scarlett has to go on the minus side of the ledger.
I’m always surprised when I hear people talk about how “epic” GWTW is. It has always struck me as a studio-bound, almost claustrophobic movie. Although it does contain a few spectacular set pieces, like the burning of Atlanta, most of it consists of interior shots. Many of the scenes take place in small rooms. Quite a few exterior shots were done with well-executed but still obvious matte paintings. And yes, I’ve seen the film on a big screen (most recently in one of those restored movie palaces).
The film’s focus on the petty, shallow character of Scarlett makes the film seem even smaller.
Well, and also the professional gambler and drifter living by his wits thing. But yes, the book is pretty clear that the strict antebellum code of propriety (or at least hypocrisy) was rather outdated and bizarre even by the standards of the time when it was written. I don’t think the average 1936 reader was expected to consider Rhett a particularly shocking or licentious character.
I was about ten when I went through a phase of thinking GWTW the most fascinating book ever and taking it out of the library about every other week (thus prompting my slightly concerned mother, who was born in 1927 to a mother born in 1898, to protest gently that “after all, it’s only a novel”—first and only time I actually encountered a living remnant of traditional prissiness about “novel-reading”).
The novel’s normalization of slavery didn’t really register with me at that age, though I remember liking the strength and moral solidity of Mammy’s character and Dilcey’s, probably because it was comforting to be able to see (at least some of) the slaves as real people. But the gender-relations aspect really struck me, and I still remember one of the early lines: “at no time before or since had so low a premium been placed on feminine naturalness”. Growing up in the 1970s when “naturalness” was the watchword, it was fascinating though horrifying to see how restricted the lives of women—even wealthy privileged white women—had been a mere century or so ago.
The ways in which Scarlett is “petty” are kind of the point, ISTM: not a limitation in the film but a study in limitation. A woman like Scarlett in any environment would probably always have been something of an unscrupulous and selfish bitch, though somewhat redeemed by the strength of her courage, determination, and clearheaded executive ability. But what made her more or less a monster of sociopathically wielded charm and duplicity was the suffocating restriction of her life as a woman in that society: being ruthlessly manipulative and deceitful was her substitute for being an openly unscrupulous “buccaneer” or “scoundrel” like Rhett.
Coincidentally, while this thread has a comparative moral analysis of The Godfather and GWTW, I was at a writers workshop the other day with a gentleman who was a pilot for the Dixie Mafia (a term he says he wouldn’t dare use) back in the 70’s. He’s laboring to complete his memoirs before he passes from prostate cancer; and his insistence on lyrical prosody (a peculiarly Southern literary affliction) is unfortunately slowing his pace.
I hope he finishes it. Sampiro makes a good defense of GWTW, but he’ll be the first to agree that the South merits more coverage than just Tara and Yoknapatawpha. They’ve been allowed to suck up all the air in the room.
Hope so! I’ve been waiting for you to turn up in this thread.
Someone upthread mentioned that incident with Rhett and the girl in Charleston. (He took her buggy riding–in the late afternoon! without a chaperone!–and they ended up walking home because the horse ran away and wrecked the buggy. Because the accident had kept them out a large chunk of the night, everyone assumed the worst and expected Rhett to marry the girl to save her reputation. Rhett didn’t see why he should marry someone he didn’t love simply because of an accident, so the girl’s brother called him out, and Rhett killed him rather than let himself be killed over what was essentially nothing.
I always thought that this showed one of the major hypocrisies of Old Southern society–it never even occurred to anyone to take Rhett and the girl at their word. So someone got killed simply because they preferred to believe the worst and force two people into marriage rather than accept that nothing untoward had happened!
I don’t recall that, although I’ve only read the novel twice. I’ve seen the film several times.
It was briefly mentioned in the movie at the barbecue sequence when Rhett is first introduced. The book goes into more detail. (No mention of the buggy accident or the duel in the movie–he just “took a girl buggy riding in the late afternoon without a chaperone…and then he refused to marry her!”)
The Dastardly Bastard as protagonist.
Actually I do. I know it’s a well made film, like GWTW but I feel no emotional connection to the characters in either film.