It's fun to see once ...

Rating: 8/10 (10 July 1999)

... but that's the most I'll allow. -OK, maybe it's possible to get some pleasure out of it a second time, or even a third. It must be possible to do so: people have. Many bad movies are like that. We can debate how enjoyable this one was - it's always hard to tell, bleary-eyed, after four hours' viewing - but one fact beyond dispute, is that this is a bad movie.
When it was first released the American Civil War was - just - within living memory of some of the audience. It obviously spoke to United States audiences of the day. (What exactly it said, I have no idea.) The universe is arranged so that whenever a movie does well in North America it does well everywhere else, and the same capricious forces of history that lifted "Jaws" from the level success to the level of freakish statistical anomaly did much the same thing to "Gone with the Wind". No other film in history can touch it. No-one knows why.
The truth is it was cranked out in a hurry. The artists responsible were skilled and a few of them achieved great things, so it's not as ineptly put together as many other bloated successes; but there was little time for reflection; and no-one had the time to stand back and ask themselves just what the movie was meant to be about, anyway. The best way of describing the plot is this: a lot of stuff happens to Scarlet O'Hara. The illusion can be maintained in the first two hours or so that it's all going somewhere. It isn't. More and still more stuff happens until we drown in it. The concluding scene, I feel, is only contingently the concluding scene; half a dozen or so earlier scenes would have done just as well. A point was reached where no real ending was possible. Any conclusion would look like a conclusion only by implicitly dismissing most of the previous footage as irrelevant.
Apart from length and colours that make my eyes hurt there's no intrinsic quality that could have stunned the audiences of 1939 into submission. (It MUST have been the memory of the Civil War.) The acting is surprisingly bad in places - the early barbecue scene, and indeed most scenes lacking Clark Gable, are neither stylish nor convincing; and, in most moods, hard to sit through. Set design and art direction - all that type of thing - is good in places but inconsistent. The music soars but it too shows signs of being cranked out here and there. (And was it ever: Max Steiner had to dope himself in order to stay awake for the weeks it took to compose.) All in all the memorable moments are exactly as many as the workings of chance would lead you to expect - no more.