Gone With the Wind 1939
Despite having lived in Atlanta most of my life, I somehow never saw Gone With the Wind. Ranked in the top ten of the greatest movies of all time, it was always on my list of movies to see. Then I was able to get the Blu-ray on sale last year, but still procrastinated sitting down to watch a 4-hour movie. It still took a lot of sittings to actually watch it all the way through, but now it is done.
It is certainly an epic movie with some amazing scenes and very good performances by Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable. Based on a book, there is a lot of ground to cover, and while the movie is very long, it still moves quickly from one event to another, sometimes a little too mechanically. I was struck right from the beginning how the movie portrays the Confederates as gallant knights and the Yankees as marauders to be feared, but this is probably in keeping with the book. The movie lacks a lot of substance, basically the portrayal of Scarlett O’Hara as conniving and selfish pretty much for the entire movie, though she has a few moments of humanity. If she wasn’t so awful, her strength and determination might be inspiring. A melodrama like this isn’t something I really like, but because the movie is so famous, I still enjoyed seeing it play out and was mostly unspoiled about all of the major plot points. In terms of how much I enjoyed the film, it is maybe a B-, but it still has some great production values and it is great to watch the leads at work, so maybe that bumps it up to a B+. The Blu-ray has a restoration of the movie that looks great, but has only one extra: a commentary track that I will never sit through. I would have liked to have seen some features. I was stunned to see that the actress who played Melanie, Olivia de Havilland, born in 1916, is still living in France. Frail Melanie outlived all of them.
Written: 15 Dec 2018
Owned on: Blu-ray, Digital