A Classic That's as Changeable as the Wind
By Vincent Canby
Published: June 28, 1998 on New York Times

''GONE WITH THE WIND'' is still generally accepted as the most widely seen motion picture ever to come out of Hollywood. When its estimated income is adjusted to reflect the increase in ticket prices over 59 years, it is still one of the biggest-grossing movies in history, topped only by a handful of others, including the newest champion of champions, ''Titanic.''

Recently, ''Gone With the Wind'' placed fourth (after ''Citizen Kane,'' ''Casablanca'' and ''The Godfather'') in the American Film Institute's poll of the 100 best American films of all time.

Since its world premiere in Atlanta in December 1939, David O. Selznick's movie adaptation of the Margaret Mitchell novel has never been long off a screen somewhere in the world. I ran into it once in the early 1960's in Cairo, where Arabic audiences sat enrapt by its tale of the Old South, dreamily described in the introductory title as ''a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields . . . [a] pretty world [where] Gallantry took its last bow.''

''Gone With the Wind'' has always had an alarming ability to enchant millions of people who know better, as well as millions of people who don't.

Its politics -- to the extent it has any -- are at a decent remove from the blatant racism of ''The Birth of a Nation,'' the D. W. Griffith silent-film masterpiece. But with the exception of a couple of sarcastic remarks made early on by the renegade aristocrat Rhett Butler, there is nothing in ''Gone With the Wind'' to indicate that the pretty world being destroyed is anything but perfect. With the passage of time, the movie has been taking on the airs of the imperious Lady Bracknell, who simply ignores everything that exists beyond Belgravia.

These observations, prompted by the film's latest re-release, are made by someone who has been regularly visiting ''Gone With the Wind,'' as if it were a fond friend, ever since it first came out. Each time I see it, I'm surprised by how much it continues to change, in the manner of a memory adjusting to the world in which it is being remembered.

Among the few things about the film that have remained constant are the still-ravishing performances of three actors: Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable and Hattie McDaniel -- their roles defined in Sidney Howard's screenplay in scenes and dialogue often taken directly from the book.

Leigh's changeable beauty, her ferocity of spirit, give Scarlett O'Hara something of the dimension of a pop version of Mother Courage. As Rhett Butler, who is essentially the bodice-ripping hero of every romance novel ever written, Gable saunters through the film with such laid-back self-assurance that he seems to be sending it up while never sabotaging it. He is the film's contemporary, life-saving sensibility. Hattie McDaniel? No stereotypical Mammy she. Bossy, wise, argumentative, as skeptical as she is loving, she's very much her own woman. Mammy is the moral center of the picture.

The ''Gone With the Wind'' that opened on Friday is not being shown in wide screen, the format most often favored in recent decades, but in its original aspect ratio of 1.33 to 1. This means that audiences are seeing the images as they were photographed for optimum effect in the boxier film frame of pre-''scope'' movies. No tops of heads are being chopped off now, as they were in the 1950's, thus to allow the print to be projected on the wider screens that came into favor then with Cinemascope, Vistavision and other such processes.

The distributors are also publicizing the fact that ''approximately 12 1/2 minutes of the film'' have been digitally repaired and that for the first time since 1961, the prints were processed by Technicolor (in which it was photographed). They say further that the original soundtrack has been restored to ''CD quality.'' You might expect from all this that the ''Gone With the Wind'' now being exhibited looks and sounds as pristine as the restored version of David Lean's ''Lawrence of Arabia'' did several years ago.

That it doesn't might reflect the difference in the ages of the two films. ''Lawrence of Arabia'' came out in 1962, its original negatives and soundtrack being just that much more modern and less damaged by time. Remember, ''Gone With the Wind'' is almost 60 years old. It was made just 12 years after Al Jolson's ''Jazz Singer,'' usually cited as the first talking picture.

It was also only the 13th feature to be shot in Technicolor's three-strip process, which involved the simultaneous, carefully synchronized exposure of three strips of film. Though cumbersome, the process for the first time made it feasible to reproduce the full-color spectrum in movies.

Whatever the reasons, the restored ''Gone With the Wind'' is far from a complete technical success. The color quality is uneven: sometimes gorgeous, usually for interior scenes; at other times it has a pinkish cast, or the color appears to bleed from one object onto another.

The day after I saw the film in a screening room, I rented a ''Gone With the Wind'' videocassette that actually looked better. The color was not as intense as it might have been originally, but neither was it washed out to any degree. The colors were true and full, without pink patches or any unsightly seepage. In fact, the quality was superior to the tapes of a lot of color films that were made no more than 10 years ago.

WATCHING the new print of ''Gone With the Wind'' in the screening room, I was surprised by the color quality but more interested in the other ways in which the film either defies its age or announces it.

Margaret Mitchell's ''Gone With the Wind'' is not Leo Tolstoy's ''War and Peace.'' It doesn't examine history to understand it. Mitchell wasn't interested in sociology or politics or the institution of slavery. She wrote a vivid historical romance whose extraordinary popularity prompted Edmund Wilson, in his collection of essays titled ''Patriotic Gore,'' to call it ''a curious counterbalance to 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.' ''

Wilson noted that in the 1880's, as industrialization and ''energetic enterprise'' changed the face of American cities, making them uglier and harsher, Northerners became aware of losing their own amenities. Feeling a bit guilty for ''their wartime vituperation,'' he wrote, Northerners ''took over the Southern myth and themselves began to revel in it.'' In this way, he explained the huge popularity in the North of the nostalgic stories and novels of the Virginia-born Thomas Nelson Page (1853-1922), an obsession that culminated in the publishing phenomenon of ''Gone With the Wind.''

There was never to be another such Southern romance to match the way ''Gone With the Wind'' conquered this country, selling a record of 50,000 copies in one day and, in its first year of publication (1936), approximately 1.5 million copies. Yet one can't explain its popularity entirely in the parochial terms of the North and the South. The book, like the film, has been equally popular around the world and stays in print.

One of the astonishing things about the film is how much of the 1,000-plus-page novel Selznick and Sidney Howard managed to cram into the movie, even one with a running time of 3 hours and 40 minutes. Because the novel's events are so graphic, and because the characters are so quickly recognized (they don't have much in the way of interior lives), the movie's images can seamlessly replicate the sense and appeal of the book. And, at the breathless pace at which the film moves, there isn't the opportunity to miss what isn't there.

The true auteur of this movie is none of the directors who worked on it, not Victor Fleming, who received the directorial credit, or George Cukor, who was fired after the first 14 days of shooting, or any others who pinch-hit from time to time. It was Selznick who, as the producer, was all over every aspect of the production, including the intertitles that explain the jumps in time and set up the scenes to come.

In ''The Road to Tara,'' her book on the making of ''Gone With the Wind,'' Aljean Harmetz quotes Selznick as saying that he wanted to make a movie that would look modern 25 years after it came out. He did that, but he also decorated it with florid intertitles that have a way of linking ''Gone With the Wind'' to the tradition of silent movies like ''The Birth of a Nation.'' Consider: ''Hushed and grim, Atlanta turned painful eyes toward the far-away little town of Gettysburg . . . And a page of history waited three days while two nations came to death grips on the farmlands of Pennsylvania . . .''

Yet this is the same movie in which Scarlett, thoroughly bored the afternoon following the death of her second husband of convenience, is getting drunk on brandy when Mammy bursts into her bedroom. ''Miz Scarlett, Captain Butler's here to see you,'' says Mammy, adding deadpan, ''I told him you was prostrate with grief.''

AT its best, ''Gone With the Wind'' has not only great, timeless comic edge but also grandeur, as in the sequences in which the Confederate wounded come pouring into Atlanta, and those set during the city's siege by the Union Army. Or, as an inter title insists on telling us: ''Panic hit the city with the first of Sherman's shells . . .''

Olivia de Havilland's performance as Melanie, the rather impossible but steadfast paragon of Southern womanhood, has grown more mellow with time. Butterfly McQueen is no longer a joke as Prissy; instead, she's a bewildered, frightened girl, which adds emotional substance to the siege sequences. Movies do change.

Leslie Howard's performance as the wimpish Ashley Wilkes has all but disappeared from view. He is on the screen, but there is no performance. According to Ms. Harmetz, Howard accepted the role only for the money. He didn't want to be in the film and, if I ever have to see it again in a few years, he may not be.

Distributors are asking that ''Gone With the Wind'' now be shown with an intermission, as it was originally. That may not be a wise thing to do. If you walked out after Part I, you would have seen almost everything that remains memorable about the picture. The second half has some amusing moments as Rhett indulges Scarlett's taste for nouveau riche finery and housing, but the plot, which, after all, is paramount, creaks and falls apart.

''Gone With the Wind'' is not a great film, but it is a satisfying one. As Mitchell's book mourned the end of an era, it was itself an era's end. Now the success of ''Titanic,'' a special-effects-driven, pre-teen romantic fantasy, would seem to indicate that the Selznick era of mass-market humanism is ending. We'll see.