Cast

Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable, Leslie Howard, Olivia de Havilland, Hattie McDaniel, Thomas Mitchell

awards

Oscar 1940 – best film, best director, best actress, best supporting actress, best screenplay, best cinematography, best editing

Film description

In this film, old Hollywood bids farewell to the Old South. Gone with the Wind, ‘the screen's most exciting love story’, is a record-breaking adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s best-seller, the lifetime achievement of producer David O. Selznick, and homage to the losers of the American Civil War. The first part of the film shows the grandiosity of Southern landowners, the second their downfall, and the third, the changes the North’s triumph wrought in Georgia.

The film’s success was dictated by its magnificence: in Gone with the Wind Hollywood outdid itself in duration, flamboyance, epic nature, etc., etc., but also in the personas of the two main characters, deprived as they are of fiery idealism and other noble qualities usually shared by on-screen lovers. Scarlett O’Hara (a bold role by the gorgeous Vivien Leigh) and Rhett Buttler (Clark Gable) are stubborn, arrogant, and ‘selfish and cruel’. Though they are seemingly unlikable, they are the ones that put emotion in this film, making it more than just a monumental reconstruction of the past.

In watching this mega-production, keep in mind that Southern culture, so lionized on-screen, was conservative, patriarchal, xenophobic, based on racial segregation and slavery. In fact, its ideals differed little from Hollywood cinema of the 1930s. From the perspective of history, I enjoy examining it with a certain fascination, while also basking in the fact that it has gone with the wind.

Bartosz Żurawiecki