Now playing in glorious Blu-ray!

Rating: 9/10 (1 January 2010)

I first saw "Gone with the Wind" in its initial commercial TV broadcast in 1976. I have since seen the film numerous times via a succession of home video media: videotape, laserdisc, and DVD. Yet seeing the film once more on blu-ray and a large widescreen high def monitor is like seeing it completely anew. The sweeping cinematography of this classic epic film has never before been delivered to home audiences in such stunning power and detail. The achingly romantic score has never sounded better, whether heard in original mono or reconstructed stereo. Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) has never looked more rakishly handsome nor Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh) more alluringly sensual. In short, for anyone not having seen "Gone with the Wind" in glorious big-screen Technicolor (almost all film viewers under the age of 70), the recent blu-ray release is a must-see revelation.
Beyond the compelling audio-visual experience, "Gone with the Wind" thankfully retains its fascination as a central piece of American popular culture - a work of art complex and rich enough not only to bear up under multiple viewings but to reveal, like great literature, different aspects of its meaning depending on the cultural and personal variables that a viewer brings to the experience. There were certainly a great number of impressions in my recent viewing that I don't remember having in quite the same way 30, 20, or even 10 years ago.
For one thing, characters and character relationships impacted me much differently than in the past. Scarlett's multiple marriages and affairs – even the protracted love/hate odyssey with Rhett – seemed less interesting now than the strength of character that enables her physical survival and success as a business woman. In many ways, Scarlett is clearly not an ante- and post-bellum Southern belle, but a woman of the 1930s, newly emerging from a patriarchal culture and acquiring a social role and status equivalent to a male's.
As with other '30s films that touch upon the redefinition of female roles, Scarlett's acquisition of masculine power is greeted with ambivalence or downright hostility. Even Rhett, who is generally bemused by and attracted to Scarlett's unbridled "self-interested" power grabs, eventually tries to "tame" and dominate Scarlett via marriage. On one occasion he tries to persuade her to give up the lumber mill and become a more devoted mother to Bonnie Blue. On another, he compares the "heartless" Scarlett unfavorably to Belle Watling, another hardheaded businesswoman but one whose ancient profession is considerably less threatening. Ultimately, Rhett attempts to assert his masculine power by an act of sexual aggression for which he would today be subject to domestic rape charges. Amazingly, given the era in which the film was made, nothing works for long. Scarlett is indomitable and irrepressible. Unlike other '30s heroines, Scarlett is NEVER reduced to a subordinate role. In the end, Tara and the screen are hers and hers alone.
Another thing that struck me in my latest viewing of "Gone with the Wind" was how much its creators (particularly David O. Selznick) strove to temper the racist content of the story materials. Of course, they were unsuccessful from today's perspective, but when the film is compared to "Birth of a Nation," the original film epic of the South's secession and destruction, one can clearly see its progressive designs. First of all, glorification of the South's rebellion is tempered from the outset by the dissenting voices of such otherwise dissimilar characters as Rhett and Ashley, both of whom foresee that the South has written its own ticket to destruction by entering into a war it cannot possibly win and for an historically dubious cause. Notably, the two central male characters view slavery askance. Rhett is never a slave-holding "gentleman." And Ashley, who is the scion of slaveholders, reveals plans to free the Wilkes slaves upon the death of his father. Moreover, the slaves on the Tara plantation, while still subject to stereotypical treatment, are far more prominent and rounded as characters than in any previous American film intended principally for white audiences. This is particularly true of sage-like Mammy, of course, but not only of her.
The stark differences between the Mitchell/Selznick version of Civil War history and D.W. Griffith's can be seen most clearly in the post-war Reconstruction period. In "Gone with the Wind" the really ugly stereotypes of empowered blacks are absent, with the negative focus centering instead on white carpetbaggers. Even the threats to Scarlett's Southern Womanhood come not from renegade blacks, but first from a white Northern deserter and later from white scalawags in Shantytown, a locale that Scarlett intrepidly, if foolishly, ventures through. From this latter threat she is pointedly rescued not by chivalrous whites, but by her former slave, Sam, who beats off the would-be rapists and drives Scarlett safely home. What a far cry this is from "Birth of a Nation," where Little Sister throws herself from a cliff rather than be raped by a former slave who has stalked her through perilous woods.
Above all, "Gone with the Wind" deliberately avoids all mention of the Ku Klux Klan, the terminally embarrassing heroes of "Birth of a Nation." The only scene that comes close to a Klan allusion occurs following the attempted assault on Scarlett when Ashley, Dr. Meade, and then-husband Mr. Kennedy, set about clandestinely to "clean out" the scalawags. Yet even then their targets are not primarily black, nor do the avengers don robes. The audience is not even permitted to witness the attack – only Ashley's wounds from it.
If Americans in the 21st century can still respond to "Gone With the Wind" - and clearly they can - it is not only because of its grand pictorial displays and epic action but because in terms of gender and race, this classic of Hollywood's 1939 peak year looks forward to a modern "tomorrow" as much as, if not more than, it laments a tragically flawed American past.