Lawdy, Mizz Scarlett, where's yo britches?

Rating: 7/10 (14 September 2010)

Whatever you may think about the products of the traditional Hollywood studio system, this is one of those products in excelsis. This is not a movie. It is A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE! It's become part of the data base of our shared vernacular culture. If you don't watch it, you won't be able to understand some of the allusions on The Tonight Show and David Letterman. It's got more tag lines than Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar."
"As Gawd is my witness, I'll never be hungry again."
"I'll think about that tomorrow."
"I love you, Scarlett. I've always loved you."
"Oh, Miss Scarlet, I don't know nothing' bout birthin' babies."
"Tomorrow is another day."
And the immortal, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."
Selznik, the producer, outdid himself here, the benzedrine being a big help, as did the half dozen or so directors whom he fired seriatim. The location shooting is magnificent -- all those silhouettes against all those vermilion skies -- even though the location shooting was confined to the RKO studios and back lot. The photography with its amber side lighting is stunning. The musical score is thrilling, arresting, exalted, majestic, commanding, opulent, colossal, bombastic.
Vivien Leigh sparkles. Clark Gable is masculine. Hattie McDaniel is impertinent. Olivia De Havilland is sweet. Leslie Howard is noble.
And every one of the performers, leads included, is a stereotype. Leigh is the bratty self-centered woman survivor who realizes too late, sigh, that real love was hers to be had all the time. I remember seeing it on one of its releases in a theater full of proletarians and the guy sitting next to me watched the camera close in on Vivien Leight in her low-cut maroon dress in the birthday party scene mumbled: "Dat's a good lookin' woman." Gable, with his irony and pursed lips, is the heroic guy who shows up from time to time to rescue the heroine who is in crisis. McDaniel is the devoted darky who has no life of her own and lives only for her masters. De Havilland is "pure in thought, word, and deed" -- a phrase I quote either from Catechism or the Boy Scout Manual, I forget. No man would dream of dreaming of De Havilland's knees. Howard is the high-minded weakling, elegant and honest, that women pine for but are soon bored with. He's the guy who reminds women of their first husband.
I admired the way the film cleaned up the novel. The book, written by a 1920s Southern flapper like Zelda Fitzgerald, was loaded with N words -- and not just the words but the attitudes that they embody. I mean, in the entire movie, which is one hundred and forty-two hours long, the word "slaves" is mentioned only once, a bellwether, the Klan never mentioned at all. If you visit Beau Rivage or some other Southern plantation the bungalows that housed the slaves are called "servants' quarters."
You'll laugh, you'll applaud, you'll shiver with fear and excitement, and most of all you'll sob. This is a romance. There is about the same ratio of love story to adventure as there is in "Pearl Harbor", except that here there is no combat whatever and very little violence. And of course no CGIs. The Atlanta that burns down behind the escaping wagon driven by Gable is actually King Kong's gate.
In its lack of battle scenes it differs from "Birth of a Nation" but the heavies are the same. Carpetbaggers and chicken-eating black legislators and Yankees generally. Not to mention General Sherman, who marched through Georgia destroying artifacts, housing, railroads, and produce as he went. Sherman is still cursed as a butcher by some but it sometimes seems to me that his march from Corinth to Savannah wasn't a bad strategy if you want to win a war. You destroy the adversary's ability to wage war with a minimum of casualties. That was the intent of the USAAF's precision daylight bombing campaign in Europe in World War II.
Anyway, whatever its cost or quality, it can't be ignored. It's simply there, like the moon is there, or the Grand Canyon, or Stonehenge, or the Great Barrier Reef, or the African Rift, or human folly.