Originally published Thursday, September 25, 2014 at 12:20 PM
‘Gone With the Wind’ at 75: a megafan explores iconic film
Published on Seattle Times

The 1939 film has to be acknowledged as a phenomenon, a high-water mark of Hollywood’s golden age, a triumph of craftsmanship and perfect casting.

By Mackenzie Carpenter
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
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‘Gone With the Wind’ - Movie Screenings and DVD Release

“Turner Classic Movies Presents: Gone With the Wind: The 75h Anniversary Celebration”: Sept. 28 and Oct. 1 (www.fathomevents.com).

The new 75th anniversary DVD of “Gone With the Wind” will be released Sept. 30. It’s essentially a tarted up version of the beautifully restored 70th anniversary edition, with plenty of extras, including a wonderful 1988 documentary on the making of the film narrated by Christopher Plummer, leading man in that other all-time blockbuster, “The Sound of Music.”

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It’s one of the sweeter moments in “Gone With the Wind,” which is briefly returning to the big screen Sept. 28 and Oct. 1 to mark its 75th anniversary Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler on their honeymoon are locked in a passionate kiss, an image captured forever in movie posters and memorabilia.

Trouble is, that kiss was never actually in the movie (it would never have passed muster with the Hays Office censors). Instead, Scarlett wakes from a nightmare, Rhett comforts her and the screen fades to black with them cheek to cheek.

How do I know this?

Fanatics come in all shapes and sizes.

Someone who has seen this 226-minute movie so many times that I can spot a trumped-up publicity shot from the real thing at 50 yards? Sitting in the darkened Garden Theater in Princeton, N.J., I was swept away by the drama about a selfish, beautiful Southern belle who loses everything in the Civil War but claws her way back after vowing — backed by composer Max Steiner’s trumpets — “As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.”

In the annals of useless knowledge, “Gone With the Wind” trivia deserves a National Archives all by itself, but the 1939 film still has to be acknowledged as a phenomenon, a high-water mark of Hollywood’s golden age, a triumph of craftsmanship and perfect casting.

Film critic Molly Haskell identified three reasons for the film’s enduring power in her 2009 reappraisal, “Frankly, My Dear, I Don’t Give a Damn”: David O. Selznick, Vivien Leigh and Margaret Mitchell, all driven, neurotic, deeply divided personalities.

Selznick, the megalomaniacal, pill-popping producer known for his cinematic adaptations of Dickens and Tolstoy, drove this film to completion — and numerous directors, cinematographers, consultants, screenwriters and rewriters, including F. Scott Fitzgerald — nearly crazy.

Leigh was a British actress cast as the Southern Scarlett — feverishly beautiful, gripped with a kind of mania, at “both ... the glorious peak and the beginning of the end of her movie career,” Haskell writes, noting that toward the end of filming, symptoms of a lifelong mental illness began to show, investing her performance with a demonic energy.

Then there was Mitchell, the book’s tiny, ostensibly timorous but tough-as-nails author, daughter of a suffragette, scandal-provoking debutante, flapper, ace reporter for the Atlanta Constitution and finally wife-homemaker, assuming a mask of decorum as she secretly, obsessively wrote her novel over nearly a decade.

“It’s fascinating,” writes Haskell, “to figure out how a film that should never have worked (too many cooks) did — in my opinion, largely because of the fire and desperation of three people with strangely overlapping tastes and eccentricities.”

Serious critics never considered the novel great literature despite its Pulitzer Prize. “An encyclopedia of the plantation legend,” wrote Malcolm Cowley, then the pre-eminent literary critic of the 1930s. The book’s racism is pervasive and disturbing, but Mitchell was a product of her time, steeped in Lost Cause mythology courtesy of impoverished Civil War veterans who dangled her on their knees while refighting the Battle of Jonesborough for the 20th time.

The narrative and the characters still enthrall — a Harris Poll in April found that, after the Bible, Americans say “Gone With the Wind” is their favorite book and the movie is, adjusted for inflation, the highest-grossing motion picture of all time. It was the first to win 10 Academy Awards, including the first Oscar for an African-American actress, Hattie McDaniel.

“The feeling persists that (‘Gone With the Wind’) is destined for more than just a fleeting fame,” wrote Pittsburgh Post-Gazette film critic Harold W. Cohen in his rave review after the movie premiered in the city on Jan. 26, 1940. It was reissued in theaters in 1947, 1954, 1961 and 1967. When it was shown on television for the first time in 1976, it attracted the largest audience ever for a theatrical feature, with 33.9 million homes watching.

This reporter first saw the movie during the Vietnam War years (“now in 70mm Widescreen — Metrocolor — Stereophonic Sound”) made from composite negatives, with the top lopped off. The print looked terrible, scratchy, faded, inaudible in parts. MGM, which owned the film, at least had the foresight to preserve the negatives — even as some other studios dumped theirs into the ocean before realizing that celluloid didn’t last forever.

The late 1960s reissue made $30 million in the two to three years it circled the country and roped in a whole new generation of baby-boomer fans. In later years, Ted Turner, who bought the MGM film library, readily paid for its restoration. When Warner Bros. bought Turner’s MGM library in 1995, they forked out even more millions for state-of-the art restoration. Today, according Warner Bros. executives, the result is even better than the original print in 1939. On the TCM website (which Warner owns despite the “T” standing for Turner), the video clip where a drunken Rhett suggests he could squeeze Scarlett’s head like a walnut nonetheless has the richness and depth of an Old Master painting.

It would be fun to see the outtakes: there were five reshoots of the opening scene at Tara with Scarlett and the Tarleton twins, with different costumes and different directors, but it would also ruin the magic. The first rough cut of the film ran 4½ hours and they had to cut 48 minutes of footage — perhaps including that honeymoon kiss? — but they’re nowhere to be found. The black and white screen tests for Scarlett are in the new 75th anniversary Blu-ray, though, and they’re a hoot, especially one with Tallulah Bankhead in her screen test as Scarlett slowly turning for the camera in antebellum finery, taking a drag on a cigarette.

Enjoy.