Worth a Peek

Rating: 10/10 (14 May 2002)

A long romantic-historical extravaganza, and the crowning glory of 1930's movie-making, the David Selznick Gone With the Wind is worth watching if only for the color and production design. The story is on the soapy side and concerns a Southern belle named Scarlett O'Hara, her obsessions, tribulations, her flaws and her (few) good points. I've never much cared for her character and have never been able to understand why anyone would. She starts out bitchy and ambitious and ends up the same way, only she's been through the Civil War and Reconstruction. Unlike most characters in serious fiction there's no real growth in Scarlett, no understanding, no self-knowledge. Everything's external with her. She learns about life mostly by watching other people fail.
Her lover and then husband, Rhett Butler, is a dashing adventurer who understands Scarlett intuitively, and for all his erring ways really cares for her. Why is anyone's guess. They're soul-mates, in a manner of speaking, something he "gets" and rather enjoys, and which she never gets, and suffers for. The man she really wants is the one she can't have, the sensitive planter (plant?) aristocrat Ashley Wilkes, who represents the "best" of the South. But Ashley is taken with another. I find Scarlett's infatuation with Ashley the most interesting aspect of the film emotionally. It's so complete, so absolute, so crazy and so human, it's wholly believable, and is the one facet of Scarlett's personality that makes her at times touching. Were it not for her passion for Ashley Scarlett would be no more than a garden variety bitch, but on account of him she is an heroic bitch, a larger than life figure, almost awesome in her ferocious appetite for what is basically a fantasy.
Gone With the Wind is definitely worth watching. Its Technicolor is remarkable even by today's standards, or maybe I should say especially by today's standards. Color is the one technical aspect of film that hasn't improved over the years. If anything, it's declined. Another glory of this movie is its production values, and for this a tip of the hat to Mr. William Cameron Menzies is in order. Menzies was many things, but is best remembered as a pioneer of motion picture art direction and set design, and Gone With the Wind is a superb example of this, and his crowning achievement. One has to pay close attention to fully appreciate the Menzies touch. Though he did not formally direct the film he essentially storyboarded it, which is half the battle, and one can see his work in the way characters are framed by, among other things, windows, doorways and fences. There's a completeness to this production, down to the smallest detail, that is astonishing. Menzies was also fond of forced perspective, which is the art of making things look longer or larger than they really are.
The film is by no means perfect. It's too long, for one thing, and the second half drags. Much of the book and film's success had to do with its appeal to women. This is after all a woman's story, and it's largely told from a woman's perspective. But they might have thrown in something for the boys. There are no real battle scenes. Aside from the burning of Atlanta there's not a lot of action. While there's a good deal of movement in the film,--people do get around from place to place, usually on horseback or by carriage--it would have been nice to have seen them, once they arrive at their destination, do more than talk, argue, scheme and throw themselves down on sofas or across beds. At least the interiors are lush and pleasing to the eye. Another problem with the film is Max Steiner's overused, emphatic theme music. The more modest incidental music Steiner wrote, including some jolly little mood pieces, are quite nice and used far more judiciously. Still and all, there are some striking images in the film: the first glimpse of Tara, the entire barbecue sequence, the burning of Atlanta, the ball where Rhett "buys" Scarlett for a dance. Producer Selznick was very careful to stick as close to the novel as possible as much as he could, as he was afraid of alienating the book's millions of readers. Yet this fidelity gives the film an at times episodic quality, and one yearns for it to break free from its shackles and take on more of a life of its own. Even with these shortcomings, there's more than enough life in this movie to go around.