December 5, 2005
review of Gone With the Wind
Found Gone With the Wind on the floor of the living room. Thought I would watch it. Hadn't seen it in a long time, not since, I think, I saw it on a double-date at Woodstock (Illinois) Opera House in, hmmm, 1978.
I don't remember noticing how bad, or how racist, or how fascist, it was. Some people really think this is the greatest film ever? In its heft, its "pageantry," perhaps. But I see little else to celebrate.
The acting is terrible. Leslie Howard, as Ashley, is particularly wooden (still petrified from The Petrified Forest), though he had enough weird tics to make it half worth watching. Same with Clark Gable, as Rhett Butler: weird, and pretty, enough to watch, though I liked him better when he wasn't smiling (about 10% of the time). Olivia de Haviland was a saintly cipher; Hattie McDaniel, the ultimate mammy, though somehow retaining her dignity, despite a script, and a book, that demeans all of her race. Vivien Leigh, I admit, is magnificent. She was the one who kept me from turning it off. Her perfomance here makes a good book-end with A Streetcar Named Desire.
There are enough holes in the plot to drive Sherman's legions through.
A few interesting shots, some mimicking Southern paper cutting (I thought), but for the most part ho-hum.
So how is it racist? Because it extols and venerates the old slave-holding South and depicts all Northerners as crude, disgusting, exploitative monsters (some of them, of course, were, but not all). It's fascist in that all the women (and most of the men) pine after the blond Aryan ("Oh Ashley!") who is depicted as conflicted and sensitive--but unapologetic about the brutality of the old regime. Tara, of course, epitomizes the "blood and soil" fascist ethos of the story.
At the center of the story is a strong-willed heroine (Scarlett), but she can only go so far. If she gets out of hand, she gets raped by the alpha male (Rhett Butler), and wakes up the next morning all aglow, happy that she has finally found a man to tame her.
Why didn't I notice all this in 1978? Because I was only 15. And I was on my first date, a double date with my friend David. I watched the film mortified, sitting there silently with my blind date, while my friend David made out with his date. If I had my choice, I would have been making out with David.
But I'll leave all that for now. I want to do a story about it with still-shots from the film, once I find a software program that will let me do it on my computer.
Posted by jeb at December 5, 2005 3:32 PM | TrackBack