115) Gone with the Wind

Gone with the Wind (1939)

Director: Victor Fleming

Starring: Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable, Olivia de Havilland, Leslie Howard, Hattie McDaniel

To start with an obvious statement, there are lots of movies out there. Far more than anyone, even the most dedicated movie nerd, could realistically expect to see in their lifetime. So there are always going to be holes in your film experience. That being said, some holes are more embarrassing than others. There are films that you are supposed to have seen, that you've been meaning to see, but you've just never got around to. Every movie lover has them. They're the films which draw the response "I can't believe you haven't seen..." While over the last couple of years I've done a good job of filling some of those gaps, the big embarrassing one remained. I had never seen Gone with the Wind. It's one of the true monuments of the cinema. If you adjust for inflation it is still the highest grossing film of all time. An absolute classic, and I hadn't seen it. I've had it on DVD for years, but a film with a running time of just under four hours is not the sort of thing you can just whack on any old time, but tonight was the night.

Gone with the Wind is the epic story of the tumultuous love between Scarlett O'Hara (Leigh) and Rhett Butler (Gable), set against the backdrop of the American Civil War. Scarlett can have any man, except the one she wants, Ashley (Howard). Ashley is engaged to marry his cousin Melanie (de Havilland) when civil war breaks out and he joins the Confederate Army. He asks Scarlett to look after Melanie for him while he's away. Scarlett and Melanie relocate to Atlanta to work as nurses. The roguish Rhett is in and out of their lives periodically, and is quite taken with Scarlett. While a romance blossoms between the two of them Scarlett is always looking for Ashley out of the corner of her eye.

The first thing that struck me about this film is how strange it felt to watch a film which glorified the old south, the Confederate States, in relation to the unified America after the war. In particular it felt a bit off seeing a film which longed for the good old days of slavery. The opening text says that we are about to witness a tale about the last days of "knights and their maiden's fair, masters and their slaves". I can understand seeing a romantic element in knights and fair maidens, but to suggest there was something romantic about masters and slaves seemed a bit odd. But once you get passed that, the sheer scope of the film is amazing. For a film that was shot in a studio, which gives it a kind of surreal element, the size of some of the shots is simply incredible. The famous shot of the war wounded around Scarlett where it starts as mid shot of her and then zooms out and just keeps going out and out and out is fantastic, and really hits you with the reality of war in a film which up to that point had seemed quite excited about the concept. In terms of its size and scope Gone with the Wind is a very grand film. That's the best word I can think of to describe it.

With this film I found something that I often find occurs in excessively long movies, the narrative focus changes. In Gone with the Wind, for the first 2-2.5 hours the film is effectively about Scarlett's experience of the American Civil War and the recovery. We follow her to Atlanta, and then back to her beloved Tara, where she is forced to take charge of the estate in order to survive. In this first part of the film the war is front and centre and her relationship with Rhett is more secondary. It is obviously still a key feature but it is not the focus, he comes in and out of her life periodically through those years. In the second half of the movie however, the war is in the past, the south has recovered and the film becomes about Scarlett's life with Rhett. The tone of the film completely changes. I was completely engrossed by the first half of the film, I thought it was fantastic. Watching Scarlett with the greater context of her being on the losing side of a civil war was very interesting viewing. The second half lacked a bit of the magic for me. In a way it almost felt like a sequel to the first half of the film, what happened next to Scarlett and Rhett, but lacking the context which made the first half so enthralling.

What is also quite amazing about this film is the fact that it is centred around a character who is so unlikeable. Right from the very start Scarlett is a self-absorbed, arrogant, stuck up bitch. Towards the middle of the film, around the time of "As God is my witness, I'll never go hungry again", you actually start to feel for her. She seems to have become a self-sacrificial person. She is working in the fields and marshaling the troops to do likewise. But then as the war finishes and the film goes on she slips back into her old habits. She is obviously intentionally unlikeable, which is why everyone cheers when Rhett delivers his famous line "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn", but that makes it a bold move to devote so much of this film to a character audiences won't like. Rhett Butler, on the other hand, is a fantastic character. The classic lovable rogue. Very cool, suave and charismatic. Undoubtedly one of the cinema's great characters, although I must say that I couldn't help but think Gomez Addams when I was looking at him. The character I don't understand is Ashley. He is the centre of the film's love triangle and the cause of all the problems, but he is an unbelievable bore of a character, a complete sop with not a tenth of the charm or charisma of Rhett.

In 1939 Victor Fleming made two movies; The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind. Not a bad double really. Two of America's greatest and best loved films in the one year. Both films made the top ten in the American Film Institute's list of the greatest American films of all time (Gone with the Wind at #6 and The Wizard of Oz at #10). I don't know that anyone can beat that for a double.

Gone with the Wind is a truly grand film, amazing in terms of its size and scope. It is up there with Casablanca in terms of being a compendium of classic quotes. It's extreme length is always going to be a turn off for people, but it is definitely worth the investment of time at least once in your life. It took me too long to get around to it, but I've seen it now and it didn't disappoint. That means the title for my biggest "I can't believe you haven't seen..." film now passes on to Lawrence of Arabia.