Too Late to Stop It Now!

Rating: Null/10 (7 October 2004)

It is obviously too late to stop this film from being considered a masterpiece, but it isn't. It is entirely too overblown and full of its own importance to be taken seriously, and not funny enough to be a comedy or a camp classic. Clark is in fine macho fettle, and Vivien is spectacular, and captures well the ambiguity of her character, which - although an obvious and self-centered bitch - is also the "force of nature" which gets many of the other (more anemic) characters through the war and - more importantly - through the film.
Of the two female lead characters - Melanie and Scarlett - Melanie is the more overtly "good" yet - as is revealed in the post-war scenes - she is really not up to the task of holding everyone's world together. For that, an iron will is needed, and Scarlett has nothing but. Leslie Howard's character is massively useless, almost a psychic cripple, and he seems to know it. The only real complexity in the film is provided by Vivien's magnificent portrayal of what could otherwise have been a one-dimensional harridan.
Selznick later showed what horrors he could accomplish with his epic "vision" and an inferior cast and idea when (in his final production) he gave us "Duel In The Sun," a horrid lump of a film with almost no redeeming elements, save Walter Huston's all-too-brief rendition of the bunko traveling preacher. Gone With The Wind is only a few nice performances shy of being just as irrelevant.
Truth be told, these sprawling "historical" dramas, which paste a love story over the almost beside-the-point backdrop of this event or another are usually irredeemable. A modern equivalent is something like "The English Patient" (which is, not coincidentally - another producer-driven concoction), which has its share of beautiful vistas, beautiful people, and a general lack of aesthetic value.
No one can fault the players; DeHavilland and Leslie do the best as they can with terminally-pallid human ghosts, and Clark and Vivien are never less than enjoyable. But the story is pure blarney, and - as has been noted before - basically racist in its depictions of blacks, and apparently rather irked by the fact it has to pay attention to the war at all. If one removes the Civil War background and just imagines this as a love story, it has little interest: a thousand better romances have been presented. So the entire thing strikes me as vastly pretentious.
Still, my wife loves it, so I have to watch it from time to time, and - honestly - it is better than most of what we get as film entertainment now. So - go ahead - enjoy it! It won't kill you.