(Continuing The Godfather from week 3)
Prissy:Mammy, here’s the SDMB’s movie.
SDMB: You can take it all back to the film closet; I won’t watch a moment.
Mammy: Yessam you is, you’s gonna watch every moment of this.
SDMB: No … I’m … NOT!
But it’s worth a try anyway.
For those who have bravely suffered through Citizen Kane, Casablanca, and the Godfather, I offer you a chance for therapy. You can watch Atlanta burn. It’s time for Gone With The Wind.
And after all… next week is another week!
One bumpshadump to see if there’s anyone interested in this week’s forced feeding.
May Miss Heresy peep in just to say I think they should have canned the Brits? Leslie Howard was hopelessly miscast as Ashley Wilkes. And—as good as Vivien Leigh was—I think Carole Lombard (who was a very good dramatic actress, too) would have made an excellent Scarlett. Oddly, I think she was the only actress within a 500-mile radius who wasn’t even tested . . . Thank GOODNESS Bette Davis or Katharine Hepburn didn’t get the part! Lordy, they’d have been unbearable.
Other than that, I think it was a pretty good movie, if you can get past the whole pro-South, happy slaves thing. But not on my top ten, certainly.
I didn’t watch it and I don’t intend to. Let me tell you why, about 15 years ago I did watch the movie. After all, it is a classic, I had never seen it before and it was on tv. It turned into a very long four hours. I was utterly bored, I couldn’t develop any interest in any of the characters. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it is a bad movie, what I’m saying is that I didn’t like it at all and I wouldn’t care to repeat the experience (well, that’s not entirely true, I might be willing to repeat it in a theater, maybe the circumstances in which I watched it were not ideal, so I’m willing to give it another chance, but not at home).
But I’m willing to part with a little bit of trivia about that movie. Did you know that during the burning of Atlanta scene, what was burning in the background was the island wall from King Kong ?
I have seen the movie a few times and I do own it so here are my observations.
Is Scarlette so blind as to not see that the totally bland and nice Ashley and the totally bland and nice what’s her name are made for each other.
There is a really cool shot with this huge shadow lurking over Scarlett but I don’t remember exactly where in the plot.
The scene where Scalett comes out of the hospitable and the streets are filled with wounded and the camera goes up to a huge overhead crane shop is still very impressive.
I think the use of color in the film is one of the better aspects. They don’t really get garish and of course some scense are awashed with a particular color and the effect is really cool.
A chick in a corset is always a good thing but the scene where all the ladies have to take a nap and we get about 30 chincks in corsets laying all over each other is a great thing.
I am the last person to tease people about hurried spelling errors . . . OK, the second-to-last. But there is something so delicious about Scalett leaving a hospitable for an overhead crane shop, and 30 chincks in corsets, that I must good-naturedly tease Zebra . . .
Hey look at the time! All post between 2 am and noon shall be excused spelling and punctuation errors!
Sorry, Zebra . . . But they were just TOO funny . . .
It’s allright. Mainly the worst thing about this thread is having to actually think about Gone With the Wind.
Another thing about the film is the bit where all the confederate soldiers are going off to some desperate battle and some little black is playing the drums for them and crying about the prospect that these guys might not be able to keep him and him family as slaves. That part just bothers me to no end.
I’m not really sure what y’all are looking for in this thread, but I’m just going to critique this movie as I see fit, and if y’all got problems with my critique, just chime in.
I finally sat down and forced myself to watch most of this movie. [sigh] I found Scarlett, Melanie, Ashley, and Rhett to be annoying beyond belief, and wanted to slap some sense into these self-centered, insensitive people. While Melanie tended to be nice, she was just a little too nice to be realistic. She’s basically a stereotype of the genteel, upstanding, sickly sweet, stick-by-your-man wifey. [insert rolleyes here] But even with all of this sensitivity on Melanie’s part–she doesn’t look down on Belle for being a 'ho–how can she not be aware of the horrors that enslaved African Americans went through at that time?
One of my favorite characters was Belle Whatley. She was the most realistic and IMHO the most honorable because she had a conscience and she genuinely tried to be helpful. And I love the irony–intentional or not–that this “Southern Belle” was a prostitute, which does lend a subtle commentary on the whole system of slavery and the myth of the Southern gentry as little better than a prostitution ring.
I also thought that Mammy and Prissy played their roles to perfection. Within the constraints of the “Mammy” and the “simple-minded darky” stereotypes, the actresses who portray Mammy and Prissy lend them a depth of intelligence–a deliberate awareness that the African Americans playing these enslaved African Americans are playing roles within roles. It is Mammy’s and in particular Prissy’s deliberate deception in hiding their true intelligent natures and dislike of Scarlett that inform the audience of the whole myth of the South as sight of civilization and class that is largely lost on the central characters. Unfortunately, I think audiences generally get too caught up in the glamour and romance of the central characters to realize the critical nuances in play in the movie. Still, Belle, Mammy, and Prissy each in their own ways provide a level of moral indictment of the South’s complicity in the enslavement of human beings.
GWTW pisses me off because it contain the most famous and undoubtably worst performance from Leslie Howard, aka Ashley. I’m in love with him - old, skinny, bald guy with a tremulous voice and huge intense eyes. He is very very good in The Scarlet Pimpernel, Of Human Bondage, The Petrified Forst, and Pygmalion (the movie version of the play on which My Fair Lady was based, and he kicks Rex Harrison’s ass, (hope no relatives of Harrison’s are reading!)), but he did not want the part in Gone With the Wind and made no effort to hide it. As a result, Ashley, who is irritating enough in the book, is in the movie a Grade-A wuss. After seeing him in The Petrified Forest I can see why the producers may have wanted him for such a head-in-the clouds-character, but in renders the movie nonsensical because there is no earthly reason why such a dynamic personality as Scarlett would moon after him for so long. Plus, he is at least 20 years to old for the part. It makes me sad when I try to tell people who Leslie Howard was and I always have to end up saying, “Sigh…You know Ashley from Gone with The Wind?”