racist and overrated

Rating: 1/10 (22 April 2007)

I've never been that interested in seeing this movie, but I finally decided to watch it, to see what the deal was. In the opening scroll, as it described the glories of the Old South, it spoke of 'Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave...' My mouth hung open. I couldn't believe it was so overt about slavery. I expected it to circumvent the issue, much like The Patriot and Cold Mountain today. Instead Gone with the Wind glorified slavery, right in the opening act a character decries the North for telling them they can't have slaves.
We see Black children fanning napping White women, an abhorrent image. Blacks working in the cotton fields seem to be having the time of their lives. In the post-Civil War years, the character of Ashley talks of how well-treated he treated slaves, never mind that they were human beings treated as property. Ashley saying he would have freed them is a nice way to evade what he was.
As days went by and I couldn't get Scarlett always saying 'fiddle-dee-dee' out of my head, I realized I also hated this movie as a movie. As so many old movies, it was completely overacted. The colors were too good for their own good, bright to the point of being fake. The more realistic colors of today are a vast improvement over the gaudy colors of old.
I will admit Scarlett's escape with woman and child as Atlanta burns was well done. There is room for moral complexity in this movie. People fighting on the wrong side still have romantic entanglements, and still are devastated by the effects of war. Rhett and Scarlett could be seen as flawed characters not just because of personality but because of racism. But there is not much room for moral complexity in Gone with the Wind, it takes a clear stand.
Unlike DW Griffith's Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind does not have the KKK riding in as heroes in the last act, instead its last act was tedious and overly weepy. However its portrayal of Reconstruction South was not much different than Birth of a Nation, with Blacks as either newly wealthy bullies or animalistic rapists of White women.
Gone with the Wind does have important technical and artistic innovations, but so did Birth of a Nation. The difference is that with Birth of a Nation there is no separation. You cannot talk about Griffith's innovations without talking about his abhorrent politics. Gone with the Wind seems to get a free pass. The majority of IMDb reviews do not talk much about the racism. I found the usual digs at CGI in today's movies to carry an irony. The CGI alien character of Jar-Jar Binks is reviled as a racial stereotype, where as the flesh-and-blood racial stereotypes of Gone with the Wind are mostly ignored.
What is most shocking is that to this day liberal Hollywood, and liberal critics, celebrate Gone with the Wind as a masterpiece, while ignoring and apologizing for its overt racism, which went beyond the usual stereotypes of the time, but in fact idealized the slave-owning South. How can this be?