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DISCLAIMER:
This posting is not a review of Gone with the Wind, but rather an overview of the controversies surrounding it, along with some historical context, and why I believe the movie still has value. My review of the film as a work of art and entertainment can be found here.
INTRODUCTION:
"Birth of a Nation was such a barefaced lie that a moron could see through it. Gone with the Wind is such a subtle lie that it will be swallowed as truth by millions of whites and blacks alike."
-Melvin B. Tolson
Gone with the Wind was released in 1939 to practically unanimous critical acclaim and an audience response that was no less than rapturous. Made on a then-incredible budget of almost $4 million, it made an even more incredible profit, racking up approximately $189 million in its first year of release. That's in 1939 money. When you factor in re-releases and adjust for inflation and changing ticket prices, its estimated total would be a staggering $3.4 billion. With that inflation adjustment, it remains the all-time box office champ. Star Wars? E. T.? Titanic? They don't even come close.
It is also a film surrounded by controversy, particularly over its depictions of slavery in the Old South. In 2020, the movie was temporarily removed from streaming service HBO Max; when it was restored, it was with a disclaimer about how the movie "denies the horrors of slavery." It is far from the first time the movie has attracted this controversy, with intermittent protests dating back to its release. Malcolm X would later recall that when he first saw the movie, he was the only black person in the theater and that he felt "like crawling under the rug."
As my overall very positive review should make clear, I regard Gone with the Wind as a fine overall motion picture. Performances are mostly excellent, many of the visual moments remain spellbinding, and for three of its four hours it actually lives up to its reputation as a masterpiece. Its history of controversy doesn't exist for no reason, however; and while I thought HBO Max's much-mocked but short-lived removal of it was an overreaction, the film is part of a larger history that is well worth at least a brief overview.
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| Birth of a Nation (1915) - The first motion picture epic is literally a Ku Klux Klan recruitment film. |
EARLY AMERICAN CINEMA AND THE NADIR OF AMERICAN RACE RELATIONS:
"Every film is the result of the society that produced it."
-Jean-Luc Godard
As the above quote indicates, movies reflect the culture that makes them. Watch the movies made at a given time and you will learn a lot about how people thought and what they valued during that time.
Unfortunately, cinema was born during a period that has been dubbed "the nadir of American race relations." During this period, from roughly 1877 to 1923, post Civil War reconstruction ended in the South and the history of the Civil War was gradually re-written. By the end of the 19th century, a pro-Southern view of the conflict was predominant, and it would only grow more so for much of the 20th century.
It was also during this period, in 1915, that D. W. Griffith directed Birth of a Nation. Though it was not the first feature-length motion picture, it was the first large-scale epic... and at $100,000, it had a budget to match its ambitions. Griffith's film pioneered film techniques, from showing the carnage of a battlefield through use of still images, to hand-colored tinting of frames, to parallel editing that cut back and forth between scenes occurring simultaneously. It is impossible to overstate the importance of this movie's contribution to the motion picture arts; film critic Roger Ebert observed of it that "Griffith assembled and perfected the early discoveries of film language, and his cinematic techniques that have influenced the visual strategies of virtually every film made since."
It was also a massively racist film by any reasonable standard. It not only depicts the Civil War and Reconstruction from a pro-Confederacy point of view; its story actively celebrates the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. The climax of the film? The hero leads a heroic charge by KKK members to rescue his family, who are fending off a siege of their home by animalistically-depicted black men (played by whites in blackface, of course).
The movie not only reflected the prevailing views of the time; it amplified them. The heroic depiction of the Klan ignited recruitment in an organization that had previously gone dormant. It continued to be used as a KKK recruitment tool into the 1980s. It also was the first motion picture screened at the White House, where it received the approval of the U. S. President at that time: Woodrow Wilson, to whom the novel it was based on was dedicated.
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FROM BIRTH OF A NATION TO GONE WITH THE WIND:
"Our touchstones of slavery are Song of the South, Gone With the Wind and The Birth of a Nation. It's hard to separate the cinematic quality from the underlying themes. I appreciate the films, but the message was repugnant."
-John Ridley
The parallels between Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind are striking. Both are epic movies, far longer than the average motion picture. Birth of a Nation ran more than three hours at at a time when it was rare for a movie to exceed 60 minutes; Gone with the Wind unfolds across almost four hours. Both center around the Civil War and Reconstruction, both are told from a pro-Southern point-of-view, and both celebrate the Old South as an almost mythical land of gallantry - Gone with the Wind even more than Birth of a Nation.
Gone with the Wind was not made during the "nadir," and producer David Selznick actively insisted on adapting the novel to make its non-white characters come out "decidedly on the right side of the ledger." He insisted on the removal of the novel's references to the Ku Klux Klan, along with all usages of the "N" word. A scene from the book in which Scarlett is attacked by a runaway slave was altered to make the primary assailant a white man. Selznick was adamant that he would not make "an anti-Negro picture."
His efforts made the film seem unobjectionable to white audiences at the time, but they also downplayed the idea of racial conflict even existing in the Old South. Essentially, it's the same offense that would plague Disney's Song of the South. In both films, the effort to avoid active offense created an alternate reality, one in which blacks were happy in servitude, as if such was the natural order of things.
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| Hattie McDaniel's Mammy: Almost certainly the smartest character in the film... and a fully-realized human being. |
IN DEFENSE OF A PROBLEMATIC CLASSIC:
"I'd rather make $700 a week playing a maid than earn $7 a day being a maid."
-Hattie McDaniel
All of the above is meant to describe and give context to the controversy that has grown around Gone with the Wind. Please do not mistake it as any kind of support of censorship of a classic motion picture. I don't object to disclaimers, as long as the film itself remains intact... and to be clear, in Gone with the Wind's case, it's not only intact; it probably looks and sounds better than it did on release. I agree that the film is problematic, and that the filmmakers' efforts to "fix" this ended up creating new and different problems. Nevertheless, having acknowledged all this, I will now proceed to defend it anyway.
Gone with the Wind celebrates the mythology of the Noble Lost Cause of the Confederacy, complete with an opening crawl decrying the loss of "a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields... the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and Slave..." This can be uncomfortable viewing, particularly from a modern standpoint. However, the championing of that mythology in a movie so spectacularly popular tells us more about the prevailing views of 1939 than a million scholarly essays could hope to do. Even if the movie was bad or ill-intentioned (which it isn't), that insight into the popular mindset of 1939 would be valuable in itself.
Nor is the film as one-dimensional in its views as The Birth of a Nation was. Just before the announcement of war, a significant scene shows Rhett Butler pointing out how tactically hopeless the South's position is and dismissing the rallying cries of the other Southerners as "arrogance." He is proved right on every count. Scarlett later decries the boasting of the Southern men, blaming her situation on those men's eagerness for conflict. The story's sympathies may lie with the South... but while it may turn a blind eye to issues of race, it's not blind to all of the South's blind spots.
It should also be pointed out that, at the time this was made, very few major movies featured significant roles for black actors. Of the previous Best Picture winners, the only truly substantial African American role was Cimarron's Isaiah (Eugene Jackson), the child servant who stowed away with the central couple when they settled in Oklahoma. Isaiah was a poor character, stereotypical and dimwitted. He represented an improvement over the portrayal of blacks in The Birth of a Nation only in that he was actually played an African American child actor, and that he was at least meant to be seen sympathetically. In all other respects, he was portrayed as less than a full human being.
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| Isaiah (Eugene Jackson) in Cimarron: Less than fully human. |
Gone with the Wind was released a mere eight years later, and yet its black characters are substantially more three-dimensional. While the word "Mammy" has since taken on the connotation of a racial stereotype, the actual character played by Hattie McDaniel is arguably the smartest character in the movie. She recognizes both Scarlett and Rhett for who they are, and she recognizes the full reality of the characters' changing situation at every point in the story. She is also a fully realized human being: sometimes funny, sometimes compassionate, other times grumbling or taking people to task even as she does what's necessary to help. McDaniel's performance remains outstanding, and she justifiably won a Supporting Actress Oscar for it - the first African American performer to win an Academy Award (though at the ceremony, she was consigned to segregated seating).
Finally, the sheer craft that went into the making of this movie cannot be dismissed. Ebert's words about Birth of a Nation also extend to Gone with the Wind. This film may not have invented the techniques it utilized - but it certainly perfected them, and with a result that while problematic, is far less directly offensive than the earlier film had been.
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| Gone with the Wind's Tara: A gorgeous view of a romantic past that never actually existed. |
OVERALL:
"Is Gone with the Wind objectionable? Certainly. Is it some kind of masterpiece of Hollywood storytelling? Yes."
-John Beifuss
Films are cultural artifacts. This lends value to even the most mediocre throwaway, because even that gives insight into the prevailing values of the times. The alien invasion films so popular in the 1950s reflect paranoia about Communism and foreign influence; the conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s showcase mistrust of authority in the wake of the Watergate Scandal and the Vietnam War; the jingoistic action flicks of the 1980s mirror the right-wing attitudes that dominated the US and the UK during that decade, while the borderline (and in some cases, openly) misogynistic sex comedies of the same decade tell us something about 1980s sexual politics.
If there is value even in junk, then it stands to reason that there's more value in looking at art. Certainly, we can acknowledge the ways in which Gone with the Wind promotes views that no longer align with ours. But doing so should not preclude acknowledging its status as a finely-crafted, often spellbinding motion picture. You don't have to be blind to its failings to enjoy it for its fine performances, for its exquisite music score, for its stunning production values, and even - and perhaps, especially - for its overblown melodrama.
In conclusion: In my review, I stated that I felt the final hour of Gone with the Wind was misjudged and drawn out, breaking the spell cast by the previous three hours. Similarly, I agree that this story presents a distorted view of history and, largely unconsciously, advances views that are at odds with many of today's prevailing views. Just as the artistic failings of the film's final stretch don't stop it from being a film worth watching, neither do its sociological issues. It remains an important film, of value as a historical and cultural artifact - and also as an accomplished work of art in its own right.
Review: Gone with the Wind
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