For a cinephile such as myself, few film experiences match that of watching a classic film that still holds up today. In fact, many of Hollywood’s golden era films maintain a timeless appeal fostered not by technology, but from innovative storytelling.
A crucial element of any film, great storytelling was rarely scarce in Classic Hollywood. For example, Hitchcock could methodically intertwine his stories with suspense, using just a few well-placed images and music notes to shock audiences.
Other films embodied deep themes with visual mastery, such as how Casablanca’s starkly contrasting tones reflect its call for a greater morality. We still have wonderful storytellers today, but classic films can astound and surprise unlike any others.
But what about when that story doesn’t quite work anymore? Of course, it happens. Whether it be dated dialogue, thin characters, or bloated runtimes, certain films that previous generations loved are rejected by contemporary audiences. It's a harsh truth, but not all classics remain classics forever.
Personally, I’ve accepted this as just being part of the circle of art. I’m sure that many of my favorite films that have affected me dearly will be scorned by future audiences. As tastes change over time, so will the “pantheon” of great films.
Still, I couldn’t help but feel the shock of watching an all-time classic the other night that fell far away from my expectations. It did not just disappoint, but it disappointed after proving itself to be an incredible slice of cinema worthy of the merits it has so often received. It was not only technically beautiful, but also gripped me from start to finish with heavy doses of drama, romance, and action unfurling around complex characters.
At the same time, I was disturbed by what the film seemed to value, as well as the revisionist world it seemed to fully tout as history. Of course, that film was none other than Victor Fleming’s Gone with the Wind.
Widely regarded as the peak of Hollywood’s Golden Age, and perhaps all of cinema itself, Gone with the Wind remains a widely quoted American classic. For anyone unfamiliar with the story, Fleming’s film follows Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) as she navigates her family’s struggles before, during, and after the Civil War. Part of a prominent Southern family, Scarlett enjoys a life of luxury at Tara, her family’s manor in Georgia. Unconcerned with the politics around her, Scarlett focuses on winning the affections of Ashley Wilkes (Lelsie Howard), a man set to marry someone else. But once war breaks out, her perfect Southern life is overturned completely, and she must keep her beloved Tara afloat. Doing so involves moving to Atlanta to gain money and even begging for help from Rhett Butler (Clark Gable), a wealthy suitor that Scarlett can’t stand. She manages to fend for her family, but eventually the South falls and so does Scarlett’s way of life. As Atlanta burns, Scarlett and her friends escape to find that Tara has been greatly damaged. With her father turned insane and her mother dead, Scarlett becomes the head of the family and tries to ensure they have a future. But carpetbaggers from the North only complicate matters, as they readily take advantage of the poor Southerners. Scarlett tries her best to save the family, even stooping to betraying her sisters and fellow Southerners, but she eventually realizes that marrying Rhett is her only choice. She does, but their marriage consists of bickering, infidelity, and rage as Scarlett continues to love Ashley. After their daughter dies, Rhett decides to leave Scarlett, uttering one of cinema’s finest lines before abandoning her as the film ends.
For the most part, Fleming’s movie does a tremendous job of telling the story that it wants to. The luxurious Southern life of the O’Hara family seems like an idyllic Utopia lost to the decades after the war. With sweeping visuals and beautiful uses of color, Tara and the rest of Georgia amaze as an escape to a better past.
Further, the danger presented to this Southern paradise seems just as palpable. Images of furling fire, dark tones, and moments of brilliant acting all create tangible terror in the form of the barbaric Union soldiers.
After building the wonder and fancy of Georgia, Fleming destines it to be destroyed. With struggles to follow, the Civil War absolutely devastates the Southern way of life, and Scarlett O’Hara never recovers the serenity she had before.
While it accomplishes its goals in many ways, Gone with the Wind’s story certainly spells problems for modern audiences. Anyone possessing an acquaintance with American history will know that Fleming’s film takes large and irresponsible liberties with historical accuracy.
For starters, the Southerners are the clear-cut heroes, and the Northerners are vile heathens hellbent on destroying the South. The film even makes sure to liken the Confederate soldiers to noble knights, a characterization that either evokes an unearned comparison to mythologized heroes or of the hatemongering Ku Klux Klan that arose in the decades following the war (neither are good).
Meanwhile, the Union soldiers are demonized relentlessly, as they attempt to rob and rape Scarlett, overly police the Southerners, and raze the Southern landscape with copious amounts of flames. Although Union soldiers likely committed horrible and unjustified actions during the war, Gone with the Wind wants them to be barbaric invaders that they weren’t.
Similarly, the Confederates were not as noble or heroic as Fleming paints them. Gone with the Wind opts for a black and white struggle of good vs evil that not only reinterprets history, but also forgoes many of the complexities that divided our country so greatly.
Speaking of such complexities, Gone with the Wind’s biggest failure is undoubtedly how little it explores the role of slavery in the Civil War. Just as many modern-day detractors understate slavery’s importance in the war (state’s rights were important too, but not nearly as much as some would have you think), Gone with the Wind rarely mentions slavery’s role in Southern life at all.
Given how idealistically Fleming portrays the South, his decision makes sense. Still, the overall depiction of black workers in the film is so poor that you might question whether they’re even portraying slavery at all.
The O’Hara’s slaves, Mammy (Hattie McDonald), Prissy (Butterfly McQueen), and Pork (Oscar Polk), are integral to the family business, as well as the family itself. They’re not only friends with the O’Hara’s, gladly joking around with their superiors, but they’re also eager to help out and run most of Tara.
While Mammy takes care of Scarlett and works hard, she’s more of a mother figure to her than a servant. They’re definitely on a rung below the O’Hara’s, but the slaves seem far more like an extension of the family than human beings lacking autonomous freedom.
In fact, once the war has been lost, the slaves care more about their family being damaged than they do about their own freedom. Throughout its entirety, Gone with the Wind suggests that the slaves were merry workers, excited to help the O’Hara family of their own free will.
Now, I should preface the rest of this article by saying that I am no historian. I passed all my history classes but have never taken any legitimate steps that would qualify myself as an expert. Perhaps some slaves were like family to their Southern owners. With roughly 3.2 million slaves in America in 1850, it’s likely that some slaves were treated excellently.
However, it’s more likely that many weren’t. What I know for certain is that many slaves risked their lives to escape the chains that bound them. I also know that abolitionists, black and white alike, felt that eliminating slavery was a cause worth fighting and dying for.
As such, Gone with the Wind utterly fails to present an accurate representation of the brutality of slavery. It doesn’t even touch the cruelty and hypocrisy of the South’s biggest institution, nor does it ever attempt to. In Fleming’s film, slavery is at best a secondary thought and at worst a humorous facet of the O’Hara family that had no real bearing on the South’s defeat.
At this point, Gone with the Wind might just seem like revisionist propaganda dressed up with beautiful production values and phenomenal performances. However, it’s still a more complex film than that. Although Fleming’s film controversially makes heroes out of Southern families, in doing so it raises many often-forgotten complexities of the Civil War.
For starters, Gone with the Wind fixates the Union soldiers as the villains of the story against the heroic South. While the South was nothing short of immoral, the North were not clearcut heroes either. The primary reason that many Northerners supported abolition before the war was because their economy had become industrialized and no longer required slave labor.
Although the Union wanted to abolish slavery, they waited until it wouldn’t destroy their economy like it did to the South. Union soldiers fought and died for a just cause, but it was far later than it should ever have been fought, especially for the land of the free.
Also, Gone with the Wind captures the utter ruin the South remained in for decades following the war. In fact, one of the film’s most memorable sequences is dedicated to showing that destruction creeping towards Scarlett O’Hara.
Before the intermission, Scarlett realizes that Sherman’s march is about to take Atlanta and she must leave. Slowly, the wooden buildings around her are replaced with swirling towers of flames and smoke. As the fire encroaches, Scarlett’s wagon leaves, just missing the destruction of the South’s biggest city. Leigh’s terrified expressions not only give credence to the frantic scene but provides an authentic reaction that many Southerners likely had when carnage erupted at their doorstep.
While men died on the frontlines, women and civilians back home could only flee and hope to survive. The entire second half of the film explores this survival, as O’Hara returns to her devastated Tara. Now in destitute conditions, the Southern landscape has become irrevocably changed, as it did in real life.
Even today, many of the poorest states are former Confederate ones that were devastated by the war. One of its most accurate aspects, Gone with the Wind tremendously captures the ruinous state of the South, as well as the effects it had on Southern families.
However, modern audiences might struggle to sympathize with these Southerners given that they fought to keep the enslavement of other people. Some might even suggest that the entire South earned this comeuppance and deserved to burn.
Yet, this sentiment overestimates how many Southern families actually owned slaves. Although the exact numbers vary, it’s generally considered that around twenty to thirty percent of Southern families owned slaves with the majority being owned by the richest one percent. In other words, at least half of the South did not own slaves.
While the O’Hara family is not part of that half, many Southerners saw their homes invaded and loved ones killed for reasons that didn’t directly tie to them. Many really weren’t defending slavery, just their homes.
Gone with the Wind still tries to apply this to the O’Hara family even though they owned slaves and never showed any guilt for doing so. The film should be faulted for attempting such, but not for raising these points altogether. With so many wanting to look back and condemn the South, many of the Civil War’s complexities are forgotten completely.
Now, these complexities don’t mean that the Civil War shouldn’t have happened. The war was not only inevitable, but an absolute necessity that would eventually strengthen the United States and fulfill the promise of freedom our country stands for. Whether the North was perfect or not, many of them sacrificed themselves for the betterment of this nation and Americans should be grateful for that.
It also doesn’t mean that the South should be absolved of their crimes. The South’s allowance of slaves for so long was beyond immoral. While their economy relied on slave labor and not every Southern family owned slaves, the permittance of slaves anywhere in the South marred its entire name. By every objective moral standard, the South was wrong.
Gone with the Wind fails to ever account for these faults. It never apologizes for the irreversible damage they did to millions. Even worse, it idealizes the slaves’ situations to the point that the South has nothing to apologize for.
In Fleming’s film, the South are righteous, cultured folk whose ways of life are being attacked and annihilated for no real reason. It’s revisionist to the point that any modern audience would not only be disgusted by its flagrant misuse of history but would also feel flabbergasted as to how anyone would ever believe such nonsense. It ignores the complex situation of slavery in lieu of painting heroic portraits of Southerners that make them look like distinguished gentlemen.
Yet at the same time, Gone with the Wind explores the complex issues of the Civil War that are often neglected. By sympathizing with the O’Hara’s, Fleming’s film uncovers the true devastation that the war brought upon Southern families. Many of them owned slaves, but more of them didn’t and still suffered the same wrath.
Once again, I am not arguing that the war shouldn’t have happened or that the devastation wasn’t deserved. Rather, I don’t think it should ever be forgotten that many real people suffered real loss during the Civil War.
With such destruction, Gone with the Wind misguidedly tries to villainize the North and characterize the entire ordeal as a Southern tragedy. I don’t see it that way.
Instead, the Civil War was a complex event with many complex intricacies. It was never a black and white fight between heroes and villains or knights and invaders. There were multiple causes for sure, but slavery was the biggest.
In addition, there were also many losers. The South was devastated, but many Northerners never returned home because of racist Southern policies. Overall, the Civil War is in its entirety what many wars are: hell, but necessary hell.
Fleming’s film both captures and neglects some of the Civil War’s biggest complexities. Many will never be able to get over the fact that Gone with the Wind chooses to tell the story of rich white Southerners instead of the tragedy of slavery existing. I don’t blame anyone for that line of thought, as the film is often sickening by how carelessly it handles the subject matter.
But there is great storytelling in Gone with the Wind, despite its misguided direction. Scarlett O’Hara is one of cinema’s finest characters even if she exists in an alternate reality. Also, the production around her, from set to costume to her fellow cast, is nothing short of marvelous. It's no real shock that this epic story is still the highest grossing of all time when adjusted for inflation.
All in all, Gone with the Wind is as complex as the event that inspired it. From today’s viewpoint, it is both archaic and groundbreaking. Do its poor values and faint grasp of history completely diminish its grand merit? Not entirely, but I still couldn’t help feeling that the excellent production and brilliant performances were wasted on such a shallow retelling of American history.
Many will hold on to this film tightly as it represents the definitive golden age of the South. Others will continue to hate it for the white centric story that neglects the real struggles of enslaved blacks.
I personally quite enjoyed the film, but I realize that, despite a deserved spot in cinema history, it’s time to let it go a bit. The South has a rich culture unlike any other region in the United States, one rife with strong spirituality and distinguished artforms. The Confederate South is important to many, as evidenced by Gone with the Wind’s enduring legacy, but there is a better South to develop if we let some of the past go.
The Civil War should never be forgotten, but it’s long past time to move forward. While I know it’s an idealistic desire, I believe that the South can do better. Our similarities are far greater than our differences, and we have an extensive culture to bond over. We just need to forgive and move on.
Perhaps I’m naïve, but I’ll strive my best to maintain a forward outlook on my home. And who knows, maybe after 84 years of Gone with the Wind the South is ready to move on as well. After all, tomorrow is another day.
