Old Yorker

Victor Fleming (1939)

Gone with the Wind has very many box-office receipts and legendary status to advance its claim as ‘The Greatest Screen Entertainment of All Time’.  I first saw it at the ABC in York in 1976, when I was twenty and the film was thirty-seven, and remember being impressed by its sheer scale.  On its original release, this was the longest picture ever seen in cinemas – so long (220 minutes) it needed an interval.  Everything seems designed to impress as big:  even the four short words of the title are in such huge letters they appear and move across the screen one at a time.  Fast forward another thirty-seven years, to BFI and a 4K digital restoration, with lustrous colouring, of Victor Fleming’s picture.  The audience isn’t going to share the film’s professed nostalgia for ‘the Old South’ and a vanished age of slave-owning ‘cavaliers’ or the kind of excitement the first audiences must have felt.  Yet it’s still possible to watch Gone with the Wind and feel nostalgic, for Technicolor in its infancy and Hollywood productions at the peak of their self-confidence.

The set pieces range from antebellum balls to the burning of Atlanta in the final stages of the American Civil War but the film, in spite of its size-matters grandiosity, turns out to combine epic and character study.  The narrative begins with people on the screen anticipating the Civil War, mostly in high spirits.  The conflict supplies some of Gone with the Wind‘s most famous sequences but nearly the whole second half concerns events after the War is over.  The Confederacy’s defeat brings about social and economic change but does little to resolve the relationships of Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh), Rhett Butler (Clark Gable), Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard) and Melanie Hamilton (Olivia de Havilland), whose interactions are never less than engaging.  Even so, an abundance of fast-moving action makes the pre-intermission part of the story more gripping.  What follows doesn’t have the same momentum or counterpoint the characters’ personal concerns and the vast Civil War canvas.  The succession of melodramatic twists and turns begins to feel more conventional.

The principals, Rhett and Scarlett are, as he says to her at one point, ‘the same … selfish … bad lots’.  Although both are sadder and wiser by the end of the story, neither is a reformed character.  As the Georgia cotton plantation heiress Scarlett, Vivien Leigh is brilliant – alert, funny, appalling.  Leigh creates a complete character.  Scarlett remains true to her nature:  even when her wants find expression in acts of courage, she’s always selfish.  She acquires depth without achieving transformation.  There’s an elating correspondence between Scarlett’s ability to think on her feet and the actress’s resourcefulness – Leigh is always Scarlett but always fresh and inventive in her facial expressions and line readings.  Clark Gable’s star magnetism gives Rhett Butler a kind of splendour but Gable’s (still amazing) relaxedness on screen and inherent sense of fun make him a perfect foil to Vivien Leigh.  The pair are a crucial antidote to the self-important aspects of the Margaret Mitchell material.   Gable makes Rhett Butler’s full, deep laugh completely natural.  The character’s amused incredulity at what Scarlett is capable of easily slides into feelings of contempt for himself.

Leslie Howard and Olivia de Havilland complement Gable and Leigh splendidly.  That Scarlett has her heart set on the etiolated, harassed Ashley Wilkes is intriguing – it’s as if her desire for him persists simply because getting her own way is a moral imperative for Scarlett.  Olivia de Havilland realises the ‘goody-goody’ Melanie (Scarlett’s description of her) with such conviction that she’s infuriating.  You understand how it must drive Scarlett mad each time Melanie smiles benignly or utters a kind word – especially since Scarlett has to keep her real feelings forever in check.  The presentation of ‘Yankees’ and ‘darkies’ is more seriously infuriating.  The only decent blacks are those who stay loyal to their white masters but Hattie McDaniel’s performance as Mammy is deservedly famous:  she plays the role straight, with real laconic wit.  Butterfly McQueen, as the infantile, feckless Prissy, is harder to take.  There’s busy but enjoyable character work from many of the white players in smaller roles, notably Thomas Mitchell (as Gerald O’Hara), Victor Jory (a nasty-piece-of-work field overseer), Carroll Nye (Suellen O’Hara’s devoted admirer whom Scarlett purloins to be her second husband) and Laura Hope Crews (the neurasthenic Aunt Pittypat).   Jane Darwell plays the comic dragon Mrs Merriwether, the most strident purveyor of local gossip in Atlanta, with foghorn aplomb.

The clarity of Victor Fleming’s storytelling is reinforced by numerous explanatory legends, including, at the start, a helpful summary of the dramatis personae.  The text is sometimes surplus to requirements, though:  shots of weary, disillusioned Confederate soldiers trooping home are accompanied by ‘And so the weary, disillusioned Confederate soldiers …’   Fleming is particularly fond of showing Scarlett in silhouette against a flaming evening sky on Tara, the O’Hara family plantation, but he uses the sky’s light in less grandiose details too.  When Gerald O’Hara tells his eldest daughter about the land she’ll inherit, the lighting of his face seems to capture entirely Margaret Mitchell’s sun-setting-on-the-Old-South theme.  The screenplay was finalised, at great speed, by Ben Hecht, who hadn’t read Mitchell’s best-selling novel (published in 1936).  Sidney Howard, who wrote the first draft of the screenplay, died before completing it.

Max Steiner’s score and those burning sunsets are now mythic to the extent that it’s hard to believe they were heard and seen for the first time when the film was released.  And, while there are no tears to be shed for the Georgia way of life ‘gone with the wind’, the mention of ‘Tara’ can still cause pricking behind the eyes.  The most famous one-liners may be ‘Frankly, my dear, I couldn’t give a damn’ and ‘Tomorrow is another day!’ but, like its close contemporary The Wizard of Oz, a principal message of the film is, ‘There’s no place like home’ – even if, in Gone with the Wind, home is property as well as where the heart is.  (Her father tells Scarlett that ‘land is the only thing in the world worth working for, worth fighting for, worth dying for, because it’s the only thing that lasts’.)  How many people think of these two pictures, which arrived in cinemas less than six months apart and feature the two most famous female roles of Hollywood’s golden age, as the work of Victor Fleming, who directed them both?  For most of us, The Wizard of Oz is a Judy Garland picture and David O Selznick made Gone with the Wind.

23 November 2013