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.
