Golden Age Hollywood at its zenith

Rating: 10/10 (23 November 2010)

What may be the most famous movie of all time is also one of the more purely entertaining epics ever made, although part of its astonishing longevity is because the film is much more than just another antebellum potboiler. Perhaps the secret to its success can be found in the central quartet of characters: petulant, headstrong Scarlett O'Hara; charming rogue Rhett Butler; and the less colorful but equally complex Ashley Wilkes and Melanie, completing a tangled romantic foursome thrown together and cast apart by chance, destiny, and the fortunes of war. But in the end the film belongs to Scarlett, and her rocky path to maturity, from her old plantation home through the siege of Atlanta to rags and later riches after the Civil War, makes the mammoth four-hour long production pass all too quickly. It's easy to see what made Margaret Mitchell's best-selling novel such a hot property at the time: Hollywood in the 1930s shared with the Old South similar ideals of wealth and privilege (and, in the studios, a similar plan of institutionalized slavery), and the film matches the grandeur of its subject by oozing pomp and prestige from every lavish Technicolor frame.