Detestable Depiction of Romance and of "Genteel" Civilization

Rating: 3/10 (20 August 2017)

As I write this review (in 2017) we have violence in Charlottesville, Virginia by white supremacists, a church group killed in Charleston, South Carolina by a gunman enamored of the Confederate flag (2015.) And over the last eighty years, we have "Gone With The Wind" as a kind of statement of a nostalgia for the "good old days" when slaves catered to the whim of white people, where white cousins married each other, where mistresses slapped their servants around, where people didn't marry for love, but for power, money, social standing and lust. Talk about depressing!
As if the institution of slavery weren't vile enough, we actually see the effect of slavery on the slave owners themselves who aren't able to have an honest romance with each other because they can't respect humanity enough to treat all people equally as "endowed by their Creator" with "inalienable rights of life, liberty and happiness." If the basis of Southern society were based on the denial of these rights, is it any wonder that the pursuit of happiness was forever out of reach for these people? If people can't love or respect those who labor honestly and serve them well, how can they possibly love themselves or each other?
Scarlett is a spoiled young woman, always scheming in the ways of love, who never grows up. Rhett sees the futility of war with the North, but yet he enlists with the Confederates after Atlanta falls because he can't keep himself from supporting a losing cause and because of his warped sense of "honor." The movie-goer is subjected to many rounds of deviousness, deception and tragedy, just as the Southerners deceived themselves about their own supposed virtue even while subjugating and enslaving of a whole class of people.
Men are always depicted as "genteel," women as "belles," slaves as "simple and accommodating," the North as "oppressive and ruthless." The North and South are depicted as two separate countries, two separate civilizations. It's an affront to Lincoln's vision that the United States was one country which should remain united and held together as such.
The only character who shows any depth is Melanie, Ashley's wife, who is long-suffering and sacrificing, but her frailty and meekness overshadow her goodness.
It is unsettling that in 1939 and even today that this movie is considered one of the greatest ever made. To me, it's detestable! It's a national tragedy that slavery should ever have existed, but this movie is also a tragic in that it invokes a nostalgia for a civilization that should forever be relegated to the dust-bin of history. Just three years before this movie was released, Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, and yet in his home country he was a second-class citizen. It would be another eight years that Jackie Robinson would become Rookie of the Year in Major League Baseball. The black actress, Hattie McDaniel, who won the Academy Award for "Best Supporting Actress" in this movie was forbidden by Georgia authorities to attend her own movie's premiere in Atlanta! Let us not forget that 1939 was also the year that Hitler sought to create his own racist society by killing millions of innocent Jews, Slavs and other undesirables in WW2. When you have people praising this movie so glibly and glossing over the prevailing ideas of racism even today, one wonders to where our sense of moral outrage has disappeared.
Greatest film ever made? I just don't see it. It made me angry, nauseous and offended. I couldn't find any redemption for the film from a purely romantic point of view either. Everyone deceives each other, nobody is honest and for this reason, tragedy abounds. I think the film says more about American racism than it does about theatrical art. And this racism is not a theoretical racism incidental to the story line, but it's about the prevalent racism that had allowed the original institution to exist, this particular movie to be made and our present racial strife to perpetuate.