The Oscar Project #12: Gone With The Wind (1939)

by Chris Marshall:

“It has arrived at last, and we cannot get over the shock of not being disappointed; we had almost been looking forward to that.”

Frank S. Nugent wrote those words in his 1939 New York Times review of Gone with the Wind, and 73 years later, I felt exactly the same way. It’s the first of the Oscar winners with a serious reputation, and it’s one of the most famous movies ever made. But it is also a period piece and clocks in just shy of four hours long. I thought there was no way it could live up to the hype.

But it did. I was captivated the whole way through. It had the scope and feel of a true epic, and at no point did I feel like it was dragging along. That’s quite a feat for the longest Best Picture winner in the history of the award.

The problem that I face while writing this post is that there is nothing left to say about this movie that hasn’t been said a thousand times before. It’s a masterpiece, of course, and the performances are outstanding. Perhaps I can only say this in retrospect, but it’s impossible to imagine anybody else being Scarlett O’Hara or Rhett Butler or any of the others.

Gone with the Wind is sometimes criticized for painting an idyllic portrait of the antebellum South. There is some validity to this idea; the “good times” took place during a time when slavery was still legal, after all. I disagree with this line of argument, however. It assumes that the views of the film are the same as the views of the filmmaker, and I don’t at all think this is the case. The views of the film are those of the characters, Scarlett in particular. Just because she pines for the long-lost days of slavery doesn’t mean that the director, or the screenwriter, or Margaret Mitchell herself believes that’s the way it should be.

It's a surprisingly violent movie, too.

Scarlett is a deeply complex, deeply troubled character. One of the strengths of the movie is that she is never portrayed either as a hero or a villain. She’s just a person, and like everybody else, she has moments of triumph and defeat. Her ideas, thoughts, and beliefs belong to her and her alone. That’s the nice thing about having a four hour long movie. You have time to develop characters in great detail without relying on clichés or shortcuts.

GWTW is a tremendously well-made film in every respect. Plotting, pacing, characterization, acting, cinematography, you name it. It had a massive budget, and the studio spared no expense in its production. The crane shot around the halfway point of the film, after Atlanta has been taken by Union forces, is a thing of beauty, one of the most famous shots in the annals of cinema. Indeed, there were so many iconic moments to be seen. Before last week, I had seen maybe five minutes of the movie in my life, and yet everything seemed so familiar.

Fresh victims for the ever-growing army of the undead.

What else is there to say, really? Like me, you already know everything about the movie. If you’ve seen it, you know how great it is (anybody who says otherwise is just trolling). Anything else I write will just add to the chorus, and who has time for that?

And so ends the 1930s. It was fun while it lasted, but it’s time to move on. After all, tomorrow is another movie.