There is a concept in history called “presentism” where the past is judged on the standards of the present. While this is done all the time, it shouldn’t be. The standards and mores of the past were different than those of today, so what was acceptable or even “normal” for ages bygone are perhaps beyond the pale today. Utilizing the concept of “presentism” many things have been criticized or even canceled when in fact they should be appreciated and enjoyed – always keeping in mind the time, place and era that they originated.
One such thing is the classic film “Gone With The Wind”. The movie was adapted from Margaret Mitchell’s best-selling novel of the same name. First published in 1936, weighing in at three and a half pounds and at a length of 1037 pages, it is rather a tome and quite an enjoyable read. I have seen the film several times (including at the Cooper Theater in St. Louis Park, Minnesota in 1971 during one of its many theatrical rereleases) but had never read the book. I had purchased the book, but it sat on my shelf for a decade or more because even for an avid reader like me 1037 pages was a bit daunting. In 2010 I was in the midst of getting my second Master’s degree on a bus trip headed to historic sites on the east coast and for a class at Columbia University. I had a lot of dead time on my hands riding that bus cross country, so I passed the time by reading the novel Gone With The Wind. I sailed through the book quickly because it was such an engaging and marvelous read. Like all literary works it differed some from the movie but not radically.
The film rights to the book were purchased for $50,000 in 1936 (that’s just over $1 million in today’s dollars) days before the book was even first published. It took producer David O. Selznick three years to bring it to the silver screen. He spent two full years searching for the perfect cast while working on the script. Paulette Goddard was the favorite to play Scarlet until 25-year-old British actress Vivian Leigh dazzled all with her audition. Clark Gable and Olivia de Haviland were loaned out, for a fee, from other studios in order to appear in Selznick’s independent production of GWTW. Several people worked on the script and three directors undertook the production with Victor Fleming doing the lion’s share of the work (and for which he won the Oscar for Best Director in 1940). The movie took 125 days to film with several camera crews shooting different portions of the movie at the same time. The backlot of David O. Selznick Productions had numerous sets from prior productions that had to be dismantled to make room for those for Gone With The Wind and so the old ones were burned, both to save time and also to provide footage of the “burning of Atlanta” portion of the movie.
The Gone With The Wind sets had no roofs. When you watch the movie the ornate ceilings of 12 Oaks, Tara and other structures are all painted in. The plantation building Tara is a set on the back lot and behind it, fully visible to the camera, was a suburban Hollywood neighborhood. Those homes were blacked out in post-production and replaced by paintings of pastoral scenes superimposed instead. Hundreds of extras were used in the filming and even then, they were not enough. The scene that especially took my breath away at the Cooper Theater in 1971 was the crane shot rising to overlook the thousands of Confederate casualties lying in the public square in Atlanta vying for medical attention. One live extra lay there working in costume the arms of dummies either side of them to make the scene larger, more animated and movingly powerful. On the large screen, at an impressionable age, that scene specifically and the movie in general took my breath away.
Gone With The Wind is a masterpiece of film making. The acting is superb, the scenes majestic, the scope massive, the musical score magnificent and the overall movie is marvelous. People thought so at the time too. Gone With The Wind cost $3.5 million dollars to make and market in 1939 (roughly $70 million in today’s dollars). The movie played its first run continuously in theaters from 1939-1943 and made $221 million in that span (again, roughly $2.4 billion in today’s dollars). In its initial three-year run, the movie sold more than 200 million domestic box office tickets at a time when the entire population of the United States numbered just 131 million. The film was rereleased to theaters in 1947, 1954, 1961, 1967, 1971, 1974, 1989 and 1998 generating another $2.8 billion in income from theater ticket sales. Of course, in addition to those dollars add in the revenues from VHS, DVD sales and television rebroadcasting deals. Gone With The Wind is still among the top box office successes of all time, adjusted for inflation. It was one of the twenty-five inaugural movies chosen for preservation by the National Film Registry in 1989.
While the Oscar record of Gone With The Wind has since been broken (by Ben Hur, The Titanic and The Lord of the Rings films) back in 1940 the movie made Oscar history both in terms of the sheer number of nominations and the amount of Oscars it won. It was nominated for Best Sound Mixing, Musical Score, Best Actor (Clark Gable), Visual Effects while two of its cast were nominated for Best Supporting Actress (Olivia de Haviland didn’t win, another GWTW actress did – more anon). The categories for which the movie won the Oscar includes Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screen Play, Cinematography, Design, Film Editing, Best Actress (Vivian Leigh) and Best Supporting Actress (Hattie McDaniel).
Hattie McDaniel made Oscar history by becoming the first African American ever to win an Oscar. She played “Mamie” the slave who acted as governess to Scarlet growing up and who stayed with her to perform the same function for Bonnie Blue, Scarlett and Rhett’s daughter in the film. Ms. McDaniel was allowed to attend the Oscars, to receive her award and to make an acceptance speech but she had to sit at a segregated table all by herself during the awards ceremony.
Gone With The Wind has been criticized and attempts have been made to cancel it because of its subject matter. As a guy who taught American History for thirty-six years at the high school and some at the college level, as well as someone with a Master’s degree both in Social Studies Education and another one in American History, I can tell you that GWTW gets much right about the Civil War.
The depiction of plantation life, while an upper-class thing for the one percent in the South, is represented properly. The glee that Southern men greeted the war, the hubris with which they assumed a quick victory over those damn Yankees and the romanticism of the war both before and after the conflict are spot on. The portrayal of the post-Civil War South with the shanty towns, sharecroppers, carpet baggers and former slaves returning to work on their previous owners’ plantations is all historically truthful. The opportunism and profiteering of those like Rhett Butler, before he decided on taking the “honorable” course, is accurate as well. The butchery of battle, the, savagery of the fighting and the medical barbarity in treating wounds as well as the ultimate crushing defeat of the South is also correct. The film’s point of view of the war as the “Lost Cause” mirrored the South’s own mystical (although incorrect) view of the Civil War. The film is a masterpiece.
The one area open to criticism is the depiction of slavery. I don’t think this is entirely fair. People live out their experience. For example, we don’t know what it is to be Jeff Bezos rich or Kim Kardashian famous etc. and so can’t even imagine what that lifestyle would be like as a reality. The same can be said for those serving in slavery in Antebellum times. Today’s woke crowd would like slaves to be depicted as aware, articulate, organized albeit frustrated freedom fighters ala Frederick Douglass or Harriet Tubman. Those born into slavery would have known nothing else. That doesn’t mean they didn’t pine away for freedom or try to run away but subjugated enslaved people kept deliberately illiterate, without rights, with no money and who were easily visually identifiable with no ability to travel freely just didn’t have that many viable options in the Antebellum South. House slaves were “superior” to field hands in the hierarchy of slaves in the South. The idea that Prissy, the young house slave, would put on airs and revel in her position vis-à-vis other Blacks is not inconceivable. The idea that Mamie, after a lifetime of caring for Scarlett physically as her defacto governess would have some feelings for her on a human level is also not out of the realm of believability. The only area that really does stretch credulity is the enthusiasm, joy and loyalty that the field hands seem to express as they go about their work on Tara.
Gone With The Wind is an adaptation of a best-selling novel not a Ken Burns documentary. The cast is all gone now except for Mickey Kuhn who just turned 89. He is the last surviving cast member of GWTW. He played little Beau Wilkes the son of Ashley (Scarlett’s first and enduring love) and Melanie Wilkes. The movie is a saga of a story and of epic length in terms of running time too. However, it is a classic, well worth watching, preserving and enjoying as long as the viewer understands the context of the time and the main purpose of the film, as an evening’s entertainment rather than as actual representation of historical fact.