If you ever (thought you) wanted something you couldn't have, you need to watch this film

Rating: 10/10 (10 August 2013)

Gone with the Wind is a great visual spectacle, but that wouldn't keep people watching after 75 years if it wasn't for the timeless tales of three kinds of love - obsession mistaken for love (Scarlett for Ashley), sexual obsession turned to love for someone who doesn't reciprocate (Rhett for Scarlett), and true love with a barrier thrown in the way to prevent that love from being physically expressed (Melanie and Ashley) - the barrier being that Melanie cannot have another child without losing her life, and in the 19th century that means only one thing - no sex.
Scarlett has it all - beauty, brains, and eventually, a husband who can keep up with her - the dashing Rhett Butler, whom she doesn't appreciate because - well - she has him. She wants what she can't have and has never had - the love of the rather drab and double-minded Ashley Wilkes who loves the not so beautiful not so clever and not so healthy Melanie. One thing that Melanie does have - great heart, and a belief in the honor of the people in her life, regardless of whether that belief is earned or not.
The story is also one of transformation as Scarlett goes from pre-War southern Belle to hardened businesswoman post-War, in an effort to keep her family together and to keep the family plantation, Tara, out of Yankee and carpetbagger hands. Unlike her more genteel family and friends, who either lose everything or in one tragic case - her father - lose their sanity, she holds it together against forces she doesn't really understand and does whatever she has to do to beat the Yankees at their own game. But through it all she just can't get that unrequited obsession with Ashley out of her head, and that is more her personal undoing than anything the War did or ever could have done.
This film is a demonstration of the best the studio system could do in that fabled year of 1939, and it showed that the studios had finally "got" putting together a costume drama that conveys true raw human emotions and reactions and even eroticism without crossing that pesky production code line. For anybody who has ever made a wrong decision in love that you wish you could do over, for anyone who has ever had their world suddenly change for the worse and had to adapt, I highly recommend this film.