Movie Review: Gone with the Wind

Gone with the Wind is kind of like Casablanca with me. I know it's considered one of the biggest classic movies in the history of movies, but other than the fact that it has something to do with the Civil War and includes the line, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn," I really knew nothing about it. Unlike Casablanca, I was less than thrilled.

For other modern-day movie morons, I'll give you as brief a rundown as possible with a 4-hour-plus movie. (Seriously. Four hours. Plus. Especially if you actually sit through the 75 musical interludes.) When we first meet Scarlett O'Hara, she's the prettiest and most sought-after young thing in her Georgia town. The oldest daughter in her rich, plantation-owning family, she has pretty much every guy she meets wrapped around her finger. Well, every guy except the guy she loves: Ashley Wilkes, the son of another rich plantation owner in town. She dolls herself up for a party at the Wilkes' place, hoping to lure Ashley  into her clutches, until she realizes that the whole point of the party is to announce Ashley's engagement to his cousin, Melanie Hamilton. (Apparently, marrying cousins is big in the Wilkes family. Ashley's sister wants to marry Melanie's brother, too. It's possible this whole thing takes place in Shelbyville.)

Scarlett declares her love to Ashley but he really does love Melanie. So she does the next best thing: marries Melanie's brother Charles out of spite, to make Ashley jealous while also keeping the whole Wilkes family close by. About five seconds later, the Civil War begins, Melanie & Ashley and Scarlett & Charles marry within a couple days and a couple days after THAT, the boys are off to fight.

It doesn't take long for Charles to become a non-violent war casualty, dying of pneumonia and leaving Scarlett a very young and not very mournful widow. She decides to move to Atlanta to stay with Melanie to "help with the war efforts," which really means "know as soon as possible what's going on with Ashley and then try to steal him from her." The two women devote their time to helping care for injured soldiers, etc. When Ashley gets a few days' leave around Christmas to visit, he spends his time doting on Melanie, trying to ignore Scarlett and also getting Melanie pregnant. Before he leaves, he asks Scarlett to take care of Melanie.

It's a bigger promise than Scarlett realizes when Melanie has a difficult pregnancy and gives birth right around the same time as Sherman's invasion of Atlanta. Scarlett and her simple-minded servant (slave?) are stuck delivering the baby and then trying to get to the O'Hara plantation - named Tara - in order to keep them safe and also to check on Scarlett's own sick mother. She calls the only person she can think of: Rhett Butler.

Until this point, Rhett has been kind of like that annoying fly that keeps showing up. We meet him at the Wilkes' party, where he annoys everyone by saying the North would win any war with the South. He overhears Scarlett's declarations of love to Ashley and then teases her about it. But he's an able-bodied man with lots of connections and he gets her a horse and carriage to take Melanie and her baby away. Along the trip, both Scarlett and Rhett grow up a little bit when they see their wounded soldiers march by, and Rhett is motivated to jump out of the carriage right then and sign up to fight. Why? I have no earthly idea. Scarlett continues the journey, learning along the way that the Wilkes plantation has been burned to the ground by those evil Yankees.

Tara is still standing, but barely. The barn is gone, the livestock is gone, all but two of the "servants" are gone, her mother is dead of typhoid, her two sisters are both sick with the same disease (although recovering) and the stress has driven her father to mental instability (something the actor - Thomas Mitchell - is pretty adept at, since he also played Uncle Billy in It's a Wonderful Life). Scarlett becomes the de facto head of the household, trying to keep everyone fed and afloat.

Then the war ends and the South lost. And the government puts a heavy tax on Tara that Scarlett can't afford. Her father is so overcome with rage that he starts chasing after a prospective buyer and dies falling off his horse. Scarlett finds Rhett in Atlanta and tries to flirt the money out of him, but he sees through her and refuses. She runs into Frank Kennedy, her sister's fiance, who is trying to run an antiques store and lumber mill in order to raise enough money for the wedding. Seeing how high his prospects are, Scarlett tells him her sister is marrying someone else and goads him into marrying her instead.

Scarlett's business acumen (she and Frank join forces with Ashley Wilkes) leads to a thriving lumber mill, but that doesn't stop her from almost being raped in the middle of the woods. Frank, Ashley and a gang of vigilantes goes out to get revenge - Rhett tries to save them but is too late as Frank dies and Ashley gets shot in the arm. So now Scarlett's a widow twice removed.

Rhett takes the opportunity of her husband dying, oh, 12 minutes before, to propose and convince her to marry him. She agrees and they travel around in the lap of luxury. But when they return home, Scarlett goes back into her Ashley-obsessed ways. She gives birth to her and Rhett's daughter, who Rhett adores, but the couple is distant and aiming for divorce. Also, there's a lot of drinking and marital rape, so that's fun.

I'm almost to the end so I'll stop there. I've spared you about 12 more character deaths. Moral of the story? Stay away from Scarlett O'Hara. Nothing good can come from this.

I had a problem getting into and enjoying this movie, which probably makes me a bad movie fan, but oh well. First of all, with the exception of the good-hearted Melanie, every character was despicable. Scarlett and Rhett were both selfish and conniving and manipulative and cold-blooded. Ashley (and Scarlett's parade of dead husbands) were clueless. I wasn't rooting for Scarlett to get Ashley or Rhett to get Scarlett; I wanted Melanie to win and Mamie to raise up the other servants and say, "Hey, you guys enslaved us for years and you can't buy me back with a red petticoat. I'm going north, suckas!" I had a hard time sympathizing with these Southern rich slave owners during the Civil War, too, their English acting accents be damned. Yes, it's sad that people died and their lives were difficult, but then...they were slave owners. They'd been making their slaves' lives pretty difficult for a few decades.

Anyway, Gone with the Wind was ranked No. 2 on my arguable Greatest Movie of All Time List. Here's why:

• Oscar winner for Best Picture in 1939 (also won for Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and a slew of cinematography awards that I didn't count but are worth mentioning).
• No. 4 ranking in the American Film Institute's 100 Years, 100 Greatest Movies list in 1998.
• Held on for a No. 6 ranking 10 years later.
• No. 43 in AFI's 100 Years, 100 Cheers.
• Had three of AFI's most memorable quotes, including No. 1:
• "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." (1)
• "After all, tomorrow is another day!" (31)
• "As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again!" (59)
• Oscar win for Best Actress for Vivian Leigh. (Hattie McDaniel became the first African-American to win Best Supporting Actress for playing Mamie, while Clark Gable (Rhett) and Olivia de Havilland (Melanie) were nominated for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress, respectively.)