My first experience of this movie was probably on television, probably in fragments. It made an impression but the movie ranged into my memory as scenes disembodied from the whole work. For example, I remember watching the burning of Atlanta and certain, distinctive scenes and not much else. So, my first impressions were perfect for today’s conceptual-deprivation culture. That’s the poverty of being from the TV generation.
It took a long time to appreciate this film as a work of art, which now I know it is. At some point, as I began to take a serious interest in movies, I rediscovered it on home video. Then, again, on disc and possibly again in a revival house on one of those scratchy prints with popping sounds. That a civilization could be gone with the wind came through and I was an admirer. Later, I read about the novel upon which the movie’s based, which, with its romance novel jacket design in the mass market paperback edition, was off-putting.
But at some point it dawned on me that Gone With the Wind is an important epic motion picture so I sought its source and read the novel. I was astonished at its brilliant writing. I instantly saw crucial similarity to my favorite novel, also an epic of great American literature and also written by an author who happens to be a woman. Gone With the Wind (1936) by Margaret Mitchell conveys the scope and grandeur of Atlas Shrugged (1957) by Ayn Rand and it’s worth noting that Rand’s first novel, too, involved a love triangle swept against the end of an era in her own 1936 publication of We the Living.
After reading the novel, I saw the movie again and again. Each time, I was more impressed. And, each time, I was more impressed that I was able to be additionally impressed. This is because, as you probably know, the more you know and study a motion picture, the more easily the film can lose its appeal, its ability to sustain your interest or focus, suspense, tension or sense of plot progression and, as a result, the less likely it can be to stir one’s original passion.
Then, a few weeks ago, I saw Gone With the Wind, which, this year, marks its 80th anniversary in a culture in which it is far more likely to be impugned or maligned, for the first time at one of the grandest movie theaters on earth: Sid Grauman’s Chinese theater on Hollywood Boulevard.
For the first time, I was moved…to tears.
The nearly four-hour motion picture begins with three characters in Georgia talking about war. This is an essential starting point. The novel more or less begins with this starting point, too. Gone With the Wind for all intents and purposes frames its story within an argument over the fact of an oncoming war. It’s not that they’re debating the merits of war. They’re discussing the prospect of war as it impacts their own lives as men and women. So, this, the fundamental choice to align with the facts of reality, is the starting point. Not the war itself. Not what is the issue in dispute.
Gone With the Wind is not a war movie. Gone With the Wind is not a slavery movie. Any dismissal of it as either misses the movie’s central point entirely. It is also not a romance, strictly speaking, though war, slavery and romance factor into its drama to various degrees. Gone With the Wind dramatizes an entire civilization as it impacts the lone individual.
Her name is Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh at her best).
Shallow, scheming and self-centered, she’s enraged when she learns during this discussion, in which she’s attempting to ignore the reality of a civil war, that the object of her desire Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard) is planning to marry his cousin, Melanie Hamilton (Olivia de Havilland). In subsequent scenes, the men who will become pivotal to the young, impetuous Scarlett’s life, including her father, Gerald O’Hara, but also Frank Kennedy, Ashley Wilkes, Charles Hamilton and a cad named Rhett Butler, argue war on the merits, whistle “Dixie” and, with the thrill, abandon and recklessness which characterizes the pre-Civil War American South, crow about going to war.
In this sense, there is real substance to this movie in terms of its grasp of facts and history. Everything that’s wrong with the South is depicted here. The staggeringly affected manners, the pompous preposterousness, the asinine traditions but also the proportionately and wildly irrational inflation of the people’s sense of themselves with regard to their actual merit and worth, let alone the source of their wealth, which is not the main focus and therefore largely unseen. The fact of slave labor is there, even if it’s not clearly drawn, though it is clear for the 1930s. House, field and overseer are each crucial elements of Twelve Oaks and Tara, the plantations where Gone With the Wind takes place.
What’s unique to the South, too, is depicted here. The stunning visuals, the land, the heat, the manner of dress, socializing and courtship and the way of life. Pretty and feisty Scarlett, who’s earned a reputation as being sexually bolder than her demure female Southern peers, holds court and gets talked about by the others and looked upon by the men. The outbreak of civil war strictly occurs within her own context.
The plot revolves around Scarlett O’Hara; she is what will be Gone With the Wind.
The early proof of this thesis is Scarlett standing at the window, looking down upon newlyweds Melanie and Ashley. Here’s the heroine on the inside looking out. Yet think about the meaning of her dilemma; she’s really trapped within the Old South, as the opening titles refer to this shrine of a slave civilization. Her only real saviors, friends and comrades, as far as Scarlett knows, are slaves and an Irishman. Everyone else is happily, stupidly off to war. In a flash, again like the title, they’re gone. Scarlett is wanting, lonely and alone.
The rest is character building, with an outbreak of measles, a trip to Atlanta and an appearance of the ridiculous Aunt Pittypat, who’s far more cartoonish than the slaves, with Scarlett’s Mammy (Hattie McDaniel in one of the screen’s greatest performances) knowing all along what exploits the ambitious young missy has in mind. Amid a dance, a bid and the donation of a ring, Scarlett learns the first of many lessons from her new companion, Melanie, wife of the man she thinks she loves.
Here are women in service at war and this, too, is to the film’s credit. Gone With the Wind remains one of the most intelligent, insightful portrayals of women at war ever made, much better and more knowing than the hordes of depictions of today’s mindless Me, Too women on screen who rarely if ever think about anything having to do with serious issues, let alone war or the men sent to fight in their defense,
With intermittent titles, David O. Selznick’s Gone With the Wind, directed by Victor Fleming (The Wizard of Oz) famously, with others also filling in, the news comes from Gettysburg. Then, come the faces of those in Atlanta cast down in bonnets amid news of mass death. Fleming lingers on a list of those killed in action and it’s the words, not the pictures, that tell the horrid tale. The camera scrolls down, down, down and down on those same three words.
Cue the theme song “Dixie” as a reprise to the earlier tune’s sense of false jubilation and enter a man of reason, Doctor Meade, whose role in the picture is a crucial representation of what will become Scarlett’s education. In a shift to black-and-white color schemes from the rest of the film’s vibrant colors, Gone With the Wind goes from the sad and mournful “Dixie” to the musically infused feeling of a funeral procession in which Johnny comes marching home.
As Pittypat, Meade, Mammy, Melanie and a young slave named Prissy (Butterfly McQueen) besides Scarlett get dragged, plunged and schooled amid the South’s mass death and destruction, in comes Rhett Butler (Clark Gable, brilliantly cast and stellar in the role) with vitality, passion and rage — at the Old South for being the Old South. Butler’s the man of the New South, post-slavery, post-Civil War, though it’s never fashioned or made explicit this way. What a waste of human life — this is the meaning of every form of his outrage and he makes no attempt to conceal his emotions or suppress himself in expressing what he feels.
There’s music, humor and, during a dance which captures and underscores the surrealism of life during wartime, a total breach from traditionalism. Life remains drab as Scarlett and Atlanta face severe deprivation. Butler has a prostitute, Belle Watling, on the side to help him ease the anxiety, guilt and chronic agony of war and she’s more than a cliche. The pictures show rain, shadows and the hotly feared Union General William Sherman’s shelling of Atlanta, with churches coming on like a holy calling from God to cease and desist with the Old South rebellion. Pictures of Jesus Christ accompany the sound of moans, the sights of a church and, in one of the movies’ most iconic scenes, the camera pulls back for a scene of mass death and dying.
“Peace be within thy walls“ incongruously graces the screen after Scarlett O’Hara encounters a patient with gangrene. Perhaps you don’t know or remember the grit of Gone With the Wind but it’s there. Between marriages, the making of Scarlett from romantic Southern belle to seasoned war bride comes with the siege and silence of Atlanta. And it isn’t yet Intermission.
Before that comes, as Rhett Butler finally kisses Scarlett and enlists in the war for a kind of misguided valiance, slave Prissy hinges the plot. Prissy’s trauma triggers a key reaction that results in the story’s classic and quite penetrating tale within a tale of three women and a baby. Though this famous scene is generally regarded as humorous, I now think after seeing Gone With the Wind in the Chinese theater that simple-minded Prissy’s meltdown underscores the folly of slavery even as it echoes as a call and response to Scarlett’s own earlier cluelessness.
A foreshadowing scene on a bridge marking the end of slavery precedes a scene in which women take refuge in reading (in the novel, it’s a story by Victor Hugo; here, it’s fiction by Charles Dickens). The self-made theme continues with a rainbow followed by blackness, fog and a strange yet familiar place.
The shock and violence of post-war Tara soon becomes clear. Scarlett strikes her sister, Prissy and pretty much everyone else except her mother figure, Mammy, and forges a secret bond with Melanie over the death of a soldier. By the time war widow Scarlett, who’s remade herself as a businesswoman in post-war Southern society, meets again with her true love Ashley Wilkes, who tells her that he admires her for “facing reality“, the heroine grips the earth, her property rights, legacy and life lessons and vows … to herself and her own ego.
Gone With the Wind essentially carries Scarlett in conversation with herself throughout the epic movie. From that first conversation at Tara with her suitors the Tarleton twins to becoming a Confederate captain’s wife in New Orleans, hiring the man to whom she’d once pledged worship as her subordinate and motherhood, Scarlett O’Hara is both intransigent and indomitable. She will not be struck down.
Like her Mammy, the former slave woman whose respect everyone respectable seeks to earn and keep, Scarlett keeps company with herself as a worldly woman alone. She makes mistakes, she makes a terrible parent and she makes money and love. Scarlett liberates herself from tradition for capitalism, egoism and her own way of life. Gone With the Wind traces her journey in this sense from selflessness to selfishness, in time for the man whose love she finally earns to come full circle with his own mistakes, i.e., drinking alone and feeling sorry for himself, to reject her with the movie’s most famous line.
It’s telling that, while that line endures in audience memories, it is uttered only after the man and woman stand as equals on the landing of the staircase from which she has literally taken a tumble in a penultimate descent — only to rise again — and, also tellingly, it frankly comes before the movie’s last and final line.
“I’ll figure out a way to get him back … tomorrow is another day.”
This is the triumph, the meaning and the glory of Gone With the Wind. It is not about the slavery and it is not even about the war, or what it does to a slave, a woman and a man, and also a family, a home and way of life, though it rarely gets credit for its insights into each of those dramatizations. There is so much depth to this movie about Prissy, the overseer, Pittypat, India, Charles, Sue Ellen and more, not just Ashley, Melanie, Mammy, Dr. Meade and the others.
Like We the Living, Atlas Shrugged and other epic novels by Hugo, Rand and other great works of literature and movies, it is an expression of the ability of the individual to rise against the times, the trials and ruins of the day and never let one’s ego be destroyed. It is the story of a man, or, in this case, a woman — or, in any case, a girl who becomes one — and it is certainly not a romance for that sake. Gone With the Wind delivers on its promise not to yield, cast down and be plundered. It is in this sense about forging the “I” one must learn how to say before one can learn to say “I love you” and this is why it ends where it vows to once again begin.
Gone With the Wind screened during the 10th anniversary Turner Classic Movies festival on April 14, 2019 for its historic 80th anniversary at the Chinese movie palace designed and built by Sid Grauman. This was the 25th anniversary date of the film’s initial airing — the first motion picture showcased without interruption or editing — on Ted Turner’s Turner Classic Movies (TCM) on the cable channel’s first day of launch. The movie was introduced by TCM’s festival director, Genevieve McGuillicuddy, before a previously taped interview with TCM founder was show and the original Robert Osborne introduction from April 14, 1994 was also shown just before the movie,