#61: Gone With The Wind

Gone With The Wind (Fleming, 1939)

Gone With The Wind is one of those movies that a lot of people consider the best ever made. The reason is obvious. It probably had the best production value of any movie when it came out, by a wide margin, partly because it was so near the beginning of color films. Also, it's nostalgic for people who lived in the south while the Civil War was recent enough to still be in our cultural memory, and it has a lot of populist melodrama. What the movie is trying to be, it succeeds. It all depends on whether you like what the movie is trying to be.

To appreciate the movie for what it is there are a lot of aspects a modern American has to overlook. First and foremost that the movie seems to be nostalgic for slavery. The movie takes place in that idyllic southern gentile fantasy where it's shameful for a woman to make her own money but okay for a husband to commit marital rape.

You might be inclined to excuse this as a sign of the period. But the plain fact is, such an idealistic presentation of southern gentility is not the way things were. It was only how the rich plantation owners saw themselves. The powers that be created a set of standards for piety that put themselves in a position of cultural authority and allowed them to say "If you don't play by our rules, we kick you out of our civilization and away from all this money". So after the war when Scarlet started behaving more like a man and trying to control her own money and her own life, I thought it was great. But according to the movie, it was a disgrace. I don't think this vision of the world was true to life even by 1939 standards. This vision of the 1860's is just as false as the idyllic vision of the 1950's a lot of people hold now.

Then there's some slight hackiness with the plot. Characters die off the moment they become inconvenient, and happen to show up at convenient times. In a way Gone With The Wind is the Avatar of 1939. Great production values, shallow plot, and blatant political distortions of reality. The production values are good enough to get it three stars from me, but beyond that I can't forgive the glaring flaws.

Rating: *** / 5

32/101

Others:

The Secret of Kells: *** 1/2 / 5

A beautiful little fairy tale with excellent animation. It's kind of like an anime except not Japanese. The only problem I had with it was it was more kid-oriented than I expected.

Next: The Third Man, Rules of the Game