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Gone with the Wind, 1939
Spoiled rich girl Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) is madly in love with Ashley (Leslie Howard), who ends up engaged to the saintly Melanie (Olivia de Havilland). Unable to let her infatuation go, Scarlett carries her wounded pride through the trials and tribulations of the Civil War, and falls into a volatile affair with the mercurial Rhett (Clark Gable).
Epic visuals are the gorgeous frosting on a rotten cake of a story.
There is something to be said for scope and scale and the power of staging. I think that a sequence of Scarlett walking out into a street where thousands of men, wounded and dying, lay in the dirt. Likewise, I was very taken with a few scenes where there were overt stylistic choices, like a conversation between Melanie and Scarlett in a military hospital, filmed entirely with the women’s shadows projected large on the wall behind them.
But . . . that’s about all I can say for this film. I did watch it in one go (and I guess can give a slightly backhanded compliment that the four hours didn’t feel as long as I thought they would?), and not in one single moment did I feel myself click with anyone on screen.
The story of a self-centered promiscuous racist horse-murderer wooing a . . . . self-centered promiscuous racist horse-murderer is a hard sell for me, and every subplot centering on keeping a whole race of people in captivity left virtually nothing to gel with emotionally. Characters don’t have to be likable to be compelling, but they do have to grow or change. And yet every character in this movie stays fundamentally exactly the same, with only external forces causing them brief deviations from their norm.
It’s one thing for the characters to be tone-deaf about slavery and the subjugation of the Black people around them. That’s, you know, probably historically accurate. But the movie itself is equally tone-deaf and I found that more and more grating as it tried to frame character moments from that perspective. When Rhett declares that he’ll join and fight for the Confederacy because he can’t help but side with the underdog . . . while standing mere feet from enslaved people. Yikes. And while the movie seems to want us to be appalled at Prissy (Butterfly McQueen) lying about her midwife credentials and taking her sweet time while Melanie struggles with childbirth, I was utterly delighted. Meanwhile, there is only one thing that Black characters do to merit any kind of respect: take care of white people. Hattie McDaniel has a larger than life personality and I adored McQueen’s Prissy, but like all the other characters, they do not grow. (And the movie seems to imply that once freed Mammy and others just . . . stick around because they prefer the status quo because every enslaved person in this film absolutely loves their lives!).
Ultimately, I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to get out of this film. It felt like big set pieces dancing around a fundamentally dull story about two people whose egos and rich-kid self-centeredness kept them from happiness. And when one of those people says things like “I’ll sell you South, I will!” and the other says to a grown woman “Blow your nose like a good little girl”, I’m not aboard that train.
I suppose from a cinematic completionist point of view, I’m glad to have checked this off my list.
Gone with the Wind, 1939
Spoiled rich girl Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) is madly in love with Ashley (Leslie Howard), who ends up engaged to the saintly Melanie (Olivia de Havilland). Unable to let her infatuation go, Scarlett carries her wounded pride through the trials and tribulations of the Civil War, and falls into a volatile affair with the mercurial Rhett (Clark Gable).
Epic visuals are the gorgeous frosting on a rotten cake of a story.
There is something to be said for scope and scale and the power of staging. I think that a sequence of Scarlett walking out into a street where thousands of men, wounded and dying, lay in the dirt. Likewise, I was very taken with a few scenes where there were overt stylistic choices, like a conversation between Melanie and Scarlett in a military hospital, filmed entirely with the women’s shadows projected large on the wall behind them.
But . . . that’s about all I can say for this film. I did watch it in one go (and I guess can give a slightly backhanded compliment that the four hours didn’t feel as long as I thought they would?), and not in one single moment did I feel myself click with anyone on screen.
The story of a self-centered promiscuous racist horse-murderer wooing a . . . . self-centered promiscuous racist horse-murderer is a hard sell for me, and every subplot centering on keeping a whole race of people in captivity left virtually nothing to gel with emotionally. Characters don’t have to be likable to be compelling, but they do have to grow or change. And yet every character in this movie stays fundamentally exactly the same, with only external forces causing them brief deviations from their norm.
It’s one thing for the characters to be tone-deaf about slavery and the subjugation of the Black people around them. That’s, you know, probably historically accurate. But the movie itself is equally tone-deaf and I found that more and more grating as it tried to frame character moments from that perspective. When Rhett declares that he’ll join and fight for the Confederacy because he can’t help but side with the underdog . . . while standing mere feet from enslaved people. Yikes. And while the movie seems to want us to be appalled at Prissy (Butterfly McQueen) lying about her midwife credentials and taking her sweet time while Melanie struggles with childbirth, I was utterly delighted. Meanwhile, there is only one thing that Black characters do to merit any kind of respect: take care of white people. Hattie McDaniel has a larger than life personality and I adored McQueen’s Prissy, but like all the other characters, they do not grow. (And the movie seems to imply that once freed Mammy and others just . . . stick around because they prefer the status quo because every enslaved person in this film absolutely loves their lives!).
Ultimately, I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to get out of this film. It felt like big set pieces dancing around a fundamentally dull story about two people whose egos and rich-kid self-centeredness kept them from happiness. And when one of those people says things like “I’ll sell you South, I will!” and the other says to a grown woman “Blow your nose like a good little girl”, I’m not aboard that train.
I suppose from a cinematic completionist point of view, I’m glad to have checked this off my list.