Old glory

Rating: Null/10 (16 April 2000)

For contemporary moviegoers "Gone with the wind" offers a veritable shock of pleasure - more than a gorgeous monument, "Gone with the wind" along with "Citizen Kane" is probably the darkest movie ever produced within the studio system. A riveting tragedy of neurotic self destruction, it fixes its gaze on Scarlett O'Hara, the firebrand Dixie princess, as she ricochets with blind abandon between her Southern belle fantasies and her ruthless heart, between her abstract crush on Ashley Wilkes and her hunka burnin' lust for Rhett Butler (the man she hates herself for loving becomes he's as big a scoundrel as she is). The film begins as a bedazzled historical romance, but in the haunting final hour morphs into a Technicolor-gothic "Scenes from a marriage" with Vivien Leigh - now flirting, now raging, now smiling at heaven through tears - etching an indelible vision of feminine strength and self delusion. To see "Gone with the wind" is to weep for the fearlessness with which Hollywood once believed the sublime was possible.