GONE WITH THE WIND

SWEEPING MASTERPIECE INFLUENCING FILMMAKERS FOR GENERATIONS

BY PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Hollywood had begun to master the feature length film during the sound era only to be put back again with Technicolor until one of the greatest movies ever produced ran in theatres nationwide.

Gone with the Wind (1939) still holds the top in terms of cinematic achievement as a sweeping breathtaking masterpiece about the beginning of the end of the culture in the Deep South as civil war breaks out between the Yankee steel producers to the North and the Confederate slave owners to the South.

Producer David O’Selnick took a bit to get the right cast – spending the wait revising the script based on the Margaret Mitchell novel that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1937).

Clark Gable was under contract by another studio. And Vivien Leigh had to still be discovered among the casting calls for the female lead. The star studded cast also included Hattie McDaniel as Mammy, as well as Leslie Howard and Olivia De Haviland.

Director Victor Fleming had been wrapping up The Wizard of Oz (1939) when Selnick fired his director and hired Fleming to direct a second blockbuster in the same golden year for Hollywood.

Gone with the Wind would earn eight Oscars, including best actress in a leading role for Vivien Leigh and best actress in a supporting role for Hattie McDaniel, as well as best directing, best screenplay, cinematography, art, editing and best picture.

Clark Gable was nominated but lost to Robert Donat for his portrayal of a boarding school master in Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939). Gable had already won an Oscar for It Happened One Night (1934) and received a second of three nominations for the first of a number of remakes of Mutiny on the Bounty (1935). Gable died at the relatively young age of 59, but he had already had a long career with 82 acting credits including opposite Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift in his last film, The Misfits (1961).

Leigh gave what is still considered one of the greatest performances in cinema only to follow with another greatest performance opposite a young Marlon Brando in a Streetcar Named Desire (1951). A Streetcar Named Desire is based on the Tennessee Williams play of the same name. Tennessee Williams also earned credits for the movie’s screenplay.

Leigh died young as well at the age of 53, but unlike Gable, she had just 21 acting credits, although two of which are possibly two of the greatest performances in cinema.

In A Streetcar Named Desire, Leigh plays the eccentric sister-in-law, Blanche DuBois. DuBois loses the family property in Mississippi to creditors and must stay with her sister and Brando’s character, Stanley Kowalski, in the French Quarter of New Orleans. 

DuBois exhibits emotional and psychological distress as well as financial distress, but she takes the new beginning as an opportunity to resurrect her personality.

Leigh’s performance shows how the psychological make-up of a fragile soul can quickly deteriorate from just a few directed personal insults.

Gone with the Wind describes the loss of a way of life in the American south reliant primarily on the plantation economy before and after the American Civil War. 

While film critics claim the film is racist and whitewashed the injustice of slavery practice in the plantation economy of the South, the historical film depicts a period of time in which slavery existed and the racial prejudices defining society from a white perspective.

Fleming weaves the complex narrative forward through a number of sub-plots about relationships, love and marriage, the foolishness of war and the momentary, although frequent, fall from grace of mankind.

The sophisticated narrative flows seamlessly from scene to scene and topic to topic, aided by the sectioning off of segments of the film with the art filled scenes of dark silhouettes against the beautiful Georgian landscape shot in Technicolour.

Fleming paints with the camera as much as he tells a story, with scenes such as the two boys making the bell ring to announce the end of the working day, and several scenes of trees in silhouette against a Georgian sunset.

Such imagery reappears forty years later in director Francis Ford Coppola’s war epic Apocalypse Now (1979), which narrates the end of post-World War II heroic America with the military loss and great moral injustice of the Vietnam War. 

Coppola also uses a novel, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), as an outline for the collapse of humanity in the film. Conrad’s compelling descriptions of anti-hero characters would influence literature and film for the next century.

Fleming’s telling of the love interest that compels audiences to jump to scene to scene through a love triangle to find out who ends up with whom and how that affects the other love interests is flawless story telling made all the more remarkable because of the inclusion of anti-hero characteristics.

People end up married to other people often for all the wrong reasons, and quite often somewhat unrelated to love.

Fleming shows audiences that different relationships are the product of different personalities with often secret motivations that mature as people experience life.

Gable plays Rhett Butler, a millionaire bachelor spending more time in a brothel than courting young women to be married.

Rhett spars with Scarlett O’Hara, played by Leigh, throughout the film from the early beginnings when all the pretty young women from rich plantation families court young men to be married.

Howard plays, Ashley Wilkes, a more mature man who marries Melanie Hamilton, played by Da Havilland. Fleming shows that the loyalty between married people and to the family carries them through the rough times when other people of less character would be torn apart.

Fleming does not provide an answer for the love dynamic, the director simply states the love dilemma is life in all it’s complexities.

Gone with the Wind is a David O. Selznick production during a time when the studio executives controlled the film industry as well as the individual film projects.

Selznick had produced commercially successful movies for MGM, Paramount Pictures and RKO Pictures. And then Selznick formed Selznick International Pictures to produce his ow film projects beginning in 1935, while distributed his films through United Artists.

Selznick produced the earlier version of A Star is Born in 1937. And Selznick would win a second best picture Oscar the year after Gone with the Wind for the production of Rebecca (1940). 

Selznick is also known for bringing British film director Alfred Hitchcock to Hollywood under contract. Hitchcock became one of the greatest film directors with his mastery of the narrative and suspense.

The film has been so endearing and rereleased more than once every generation that the ideas behind the film and the complex sweeping images that created the overall vision for the film made indelible marks on the collective consciousness, especially with such classic lines as “Frankly dear, I don’t give a damn,” performed by Clark Gable.

The film carries audiences for almost four hours with the unravelling of a number of complex characters such as Scarlett. Leigh first portrays her character as a narcistic fool, but as Scarlett suffers and survives during the film’s various parts, Scarlett changes, not entirely, but enough so as to eventually win the audience’s favour.

Then by the end, Scarlett becomes the personification of the South during the American Civil War and the Reconstruction Era.

“I’ll never be hungry again” and “Tomorrow is another day” are Scarlett’s closing lines of this epic masterpiece.

The intent to document the history of the American Civil War from the perspective of the wealthy Southern plantation owners results in the use of Southern racial stereotypes prevalant during a time when the cotton plantation economy relied heavily on the subjugation of inexpensive slave labour. 

Scarlett’s character has respect and compassion for the black slaves wearing out their hands and bodies working the cotton fields and also for the black domestic workers taking care of the household and the personnel details of dress and diet.

But ultimately Scarlett is motivated by self interest, not just towards the Southern white gentlemen but towards the black slaves that generate wealth and prestige for the O’Hara family. 

The idea of Tara, the family plantation, is what keeps Scarlett alive through the worst of the Civil War and the Reconstruction.

Fleming shows how the world of the South gradually disintegrates to the point where those Southerners that did survive the deconstruction caused by the armies of the Yankee North and the Confederate South must start over from less than humble beginnings, while other people, like the war profiteer, Rhett Butler, simply carry on almost unscathed and undeterred.

Vivien Leigh creates a character that continually shifts and shapes with the particular circumstances in which she finds herself.

Scarlett is at first surrounded by young handsome wealthy and eager-to-marry men, but they are just as eager to join the Confederate army.

Scarlett and the men are filled with hubris and, that rare quality of youth, the delusion of invincibility.

Soon enough civil war is declared and the mood gradually shifts over several scenes to one of remorse and sorrow as the war dead are counted involving members of almost every Georgian family.

Leigh shows the stronger side of the duality of Scarlett as the young Georgian heroine volunteers as a nurse in the Atlanta war hospital during the most important battle of the American Civil War at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in July of 1863. 

Scarlett feels the horror of war but then eventually she finds where her self-interest lies and heads back to the plantation even though the hospital is dearly short of staff.

At the same time, Fleming uses the camera to paint a picture of panic as the Yankees are near victory on the outskirts of Atlanta and the Southerners fear their arrival and dominance in the South.

The narrative becomes a metaphor for the Reconstruction Era as Fleming has the war casualties lined up in the street outside the hospital clearly far too many for the hospital staff to manage.

Scarlett then falls to the weaker aspects of her character by calling on Rhett Butler to help her escape to her family’s planation. The audience remains sceptical of Scarlett but through the perilous journey and further personal tragedy she gradually becomes more and more endearing until Tara becomes the symbol and Scarlett the personification of Reconstruction.

Gone with the Wind documents the distinct regionalism of the American South at a time when that culture and social-economic dynamic is under pressure to change.

The film has influenced generations because of the lasting portraits of human nature and the timeless story of war and peace told by actors at the pinnacle of their art.