O' Lordy, I do declare

Rating: Null/10 (23 February 2002)

Ok, so that is not a direct quote from Gone with the Wind, I allowed myself a little creative free reign. Now, first things first, I'm not the kind of person who believes that, just because some one says a film is a classic, necessarily mean that it is a classic. I don't know, maybe to everyone else in the world, Gone with the Wind is the greatest motion picture ever made, it may just be something someone my age doesn't understand, or as Prince put it, a Sign O' the times. To me, Gone with the Wind looked like nothing more than a four-hour version of Dallas, spliced with Day of our Lives, directed by Ed Wood's older brother (if you could imagine such a thing). Meaning that the plot was so threadbare and self-important that it really did bring to mind actual scenes from Dallas, and the colours of the film were so bright and sludgy (probably down to the primitive colour printing of the time) that it was hard to make out objects clearly. The acting was hardly exemplary either, Vivien Leigh tried her best, but the character of Scarlett is one of the most obnoxious, self-obsessed, empty headed character to ever grace the screen, to get an idea of just how bad she is, let's just say she wouldn't be to far out of place in an episode of Beverly Hills 90210. As for Rhett Butler, well he's a brutish man's man, who has no other characterisation other that the fact that he is Clark Gable and no one else, there is no other shimmer of a character lurking beneath the surface. There are a couple of key memorable moments in the film, but besides the famous scenes that everyone knows fluently without ever having seen the film, nothing much happens, especially towards the end. There is also a crass racism to the film, notably in the character Mammy, probably the mentality of the times, but it is surprising producer Selznick didn't just cast a white actor and black the up with boot polish. Now I am not the kind of person who attacks classic (or so-called classic) films just to get attention, I really do enjoy most classic films, but Gone with the Wind is just to badly dated to even register as anything above average.