Gone With the Wind (1939)

 

1) Gone With the Wind’s producer, David O. Selznick, is credited by our Flashback textbook as being a “creative producer” (p. 113). Defined, this label refers to a “powerful mogul” who supervises the production of a film in such exacting detail that they are virtually its artistic creator (p. 113). Under Selznick’s supervision, Gone With the Wind won eight Academy Awards and earned the largest box office take in history with 400 million dollars. Adjusted for inflation, it still trumps any film to date. The Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer blurb in the book further praises Selznick, stating he is “widely regarded as the finest producer in Hollywood history” (p. 156). Gone With the Wind had five directors hold the reigns, with Victor Fleming taking eventual billing, but Selznick was a constant whose overseeing made the film work. As a motion picture, Gone With the Wind was a “vindication of the studio system as practiced by its most skilled adherents” (p. 156). Its production was massive, with a budget estimated to be well over three-million dollars. At the heart of the film were its two leads: Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara and Clark Gable as Rhett Butler. Their characters were stubborn, brazen, and a “far cry from the straight arrows Hollywood thrived on” (p. 156). This worked greatly in the film’s favor, providing flawed but realistic characters who balanced one another. Scarlett was a manipulative schemer who wrought havoc in the lives of the men she crossed and Rhett had the experience to know her games and survive them longer than any other man. The film captured the feel of a saga, tracking the ups and downs and struggles for survival and love amid the aftermath of the Civil War of Scarlet O’Hara. It’s a packed, complete, and ultimately satisfying film with a consistently dazzling presentation of visuals. No doubt the epitome of a grand studio production, Gone With the Wind stands as a monstrous collaborative effort in the Golden Age of Hollywood. 

2) Article URL: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19980621/REVIEWS08/401010323/1023

Roger Ebert is arguably the most famous film critic of all time, with a career reviewing film that goes back to his first review, for La Dolce Vita, in 1961. He’s been a frequent contributor to the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper since 1967. He is the first film critic to win both a Pulitzer Prize and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. His body of work speaks for itself.

The Ebert article I’ve linked to is his look back on Gone With the Wind at the time of the film’s 1998 restoration. As is customary with a great deal of Ebert’s reviews, the analysis is very concise. Using less than 1,400 words, all major aspects of the film are covered: background, story, characters, acting, and cinematography. One portion of the review that I was drawn to was Ebert’s acknowledgment of the obvious glossing over of slavery. Concerning the historical presentation of southern America, Ebert notes that Gone With the Wind “sidesteps the inconvenient fact that plantation gentility was purchased with the sweat of slaves (there is more sympathy for Scarlett getting calluses on her pretty little hands than for all the crimes of slavery).” This is a common criticism of the film and naturally the book it was based on. The portrayal of the South is very generous; very sympathetic. Slavery is shown to be one of the reasons why the South was so wonderful and Ebert brings up the opening printed message as proof. He quotes it: “Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered.” This definitely puts a positive spin on a permanent scar on America. The film champions values and a way of life that is classically Southern and at the same time polarizing. But this is what makes Gone With the Wind what it is. It’s what gives it its punch. “A politically correct Gone With the Wind,” Ebert says, “would not be worth making, and might largely be a lie.” To the films credit, however, Ebert says the film gives its major African-American characters complexity and genuine humanity. The remainder of Ebert’s review is an effective summation of why the film still holds up generations later.

 

3) A major part of Ebert’s review focused on the character of Scarlett O’Hara and what he claims was her significance in the grander scheme of women’s portrayal in cinema and status in the world. This was something I had definitely not considered much, so it made for a thoughtful read. Ebert proposes that the character of Scarlett O’Hara was not a woman of the 1860s, but a “free-spirited, willful modern woman” of the 1930s. A woman whose existence was made possible by the “flappers of Fitzgerald’s jazz age,” the bold movie actresses of the 30s, and the reality of The Great Depression which forced a great deal of women to leave their homes and find work. Scarlett’s self-assurance and headstrong ways had less to do with defying the notion of the gentle Southern belle and more to do with celebrating the sex-symbols of the time that inspired the author of the source novel: Margaret Mitchell. Actresses such as Mae West, Jean Harlow, and Clara Bow. Ebert continues his interesting analysis of Scarlett by explaining her importance to audiences. By being a woman determined to control her own sexuality and economic destiny, Scarlett became a “symbol the nation needed as it headed into World War II; the spiritual sister of Rosie the Riveter.” She was a defiant woman in a male chauvinistic world, in 1939 no less, and this captivated moviegoers. Where things get grounded is at the finale, where Rhett puts Scarlett in her place definitively. For all her brash, a comeuppance was inevitable. According to Ebert, this was essential to the film’s success. “Its original audiences (women, I suspect, even more than men) wanted to see her swatted down.” This take on Scarlett was something new to me. It makes sense and offers a fresh insight into why the character acts the way she does and why her creator wrote her that way. Leave it to Ebert to shed some new light on the film for me.

4) For its place in cinematic history, Gone With the Wind stands tall as the quintessential sweeping American epic with a production value that wows just as much now as it did in 1939. Considered the Steven Spielberg of his day by Roger Ebert, David O. Selznick understood that the key to a mass appeal film was the combination of “melodrama with state-of-the-art production values.” This quote made me think of another blockbuster: James Cameron’s Titanic. Ebert goes on to describe such shots as the burning of Atlanta as examples of visuals that still have the power to take an audience’s breath away. The film employs a “joyous flamboyance” (Ebert, 1998) in its visuals that allows it to stand out from the dark and bland color schemes of so many modern-day productions. A piece of information that has strongly stood out for me after research has been the praise of Selznick. Credited far more than Fleming, who left the film before shooting was completed due to nervous exhaustion, Selznick is hailed as the “real auteur” (Ebert, 1998) of Gone With the Wind. It makes sense considering the amount of money he spent securing the book rights, a staggering $50,000 in 1939, but I cannot think of a similar example of a producer’s vision completely dominating a film. Gone With the Wind’s leads are great examples of Hollywood stars for their day and age. Actors guarded by their studios against the publication of their real-life problems. “Gable, the hard-drinking playboy” and “Leigh, the neurotic, drug-abusing beauty” (Ebert, 1998) brought their personalities and accompanying egos to the roles of Scarlett and Rhett and made the film more dynamic for it. Crafting their world required a frustrating amount of effort in adapting the grand scope of Mitchell’s novel. The payoff of the rewrites is in the film’s plot itself. A long, winding journey from idyllic serenity to war-torn horrors. The love stories within anchor what is without a doubt one of the all-time great films. From all aspects of presentation, Gone With the Wind shines as a “superb example of Hollywood's art” (Ebert, 1998).