To be sure, Gone With The Wind has its own massive fanbase in the modern day world, to the point that a recent theatrical re-release at my local movie theater just last year sold out entirely and they had to add additional screenings to meet demand! That's an incredible feat for a nearly 80-year-old piece of art, but for me, Gone With The Wind failed to truly work or resonate beyond some impressive facets of its cinematography and sets. Gone With The Wind, despite its artistic pedigree, comes up as something akin to a number of modern-day summer blockbusters, a super pretty movie with very little in the way of substance or well-realized characters in its path.
The premise of this grand epic of early 20th century filmmaking concentrates on the plight of Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh), who serves as the audience point-of-view character for the numerous major historical events that transpire around her. Scarlett is the daughter of a wealthy land-owner in Georgia just before the American Civil War is about to break out. Her life is idyllic and joyful, save for her inability to land a husband. While she attempts to garner the affections of a number of men, including one Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard), the Civil War breaks out, sending Scarlett into a world of turmoil and pain she previously could have never imagined.
As the war drags on for an eternity and her families estate is ransacked by Yankee soldiers, Scarlett manages to constantly run into Rhett Butler (Clarke Gable), a scoundrel of sorts who pledges his allegiance to bank accounts rather than actual ideals. Rhett and Scarlett have an On-again/Off-again affair that drags on for the entire duration of the war and continues well into the post-Civil War era as Scarlett tries to rebuild her families plantation with very little money. Struggles abound, Scarlett's romantic affections are torn between Ashley and Rhett and hopes for a more idealistic future akin to the past she once knew begins to fade away.
One can never say that director Victor Fleming doesn't know how to put on a grand production. The same year Gone With The Wind was released, his landmark in fantasy cinema The Wizard Of Oz was also gracing silver screens, with both movies showing off a grand sense of scale and pomp and circumstance that had never been seen in a motion picture before. Just as George Melies had transformed what films were capable of with his stylized costumes, sets and storylines that were utilized in his 1902 short film A Voyage To The Moon, so too does Fleming redefine what movies can accomplish with various extravagant sequences in Gone With The Wind that allow the scope of the brutality experienced in the Civil War to be conveyed in an instantly iconic visual manner.
With a nearly four-hour running time at its side, Gone With The Wind is able to have plenty of time to explore the way a war as gargantuan as the Civil War affected people, with extended shots showing the suffering and anguish of Confederate soldiers being executed with a sense of evocative grandeur. In terms of cinematography, Gone With The Wind is a feat for the eyes, a sharp contrast to how Sidney Howard's screenplay is more than a bit lifeless and devoid of dramatic momentum. If Gone With The Wind's visuals convey a sense of haunting survivalism, then its story is a repetitive snore with a lead character that doesn't work under any circumstances.
While talking about my more mixed reaction to Gone With The Wind, a friend of me told me to consider Scarlett O'Hara as less of a conventional protagonist we're supposed to root for and more of a flawed individual who just so happens to be the lead character of the story, ala Al Pacino in The Godfather, Charlize Theron in both Monster and Young Adult and Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler. That's a smart idea and a good way to frame Scarlett O'Hara, but even considering her through this prism, the character just doesn't work. She doesn't have the tragic underpinnings nor the thoughtful subtext nor the kind of riveting performance that the best unlikable protagonists do, she's just a repetitive individual who keeps briefly interacting with potentially way more interesting characters (namely some African-American individuals headed off to fight for the Confederacy). Between her overly stylized one-note personality and random acts of cruelty like slapping her servant, she seems like she'd fit better as a villain in a Django Unchained sequel rather than the lead of this movie.
None of the other characters register as all that interesting aside from the slave characters though they represent uncomfortable racial stereotypes. Clark Gable pulls out his usual charm and swagger but he's also got zero depth to him while I couldn't even tell you the barest details about the personalities of Scarlett's various sisters. Man, looking back on it as a whole, Gone With The Wind is such an oddly constructed movie, a grand epic designed to tell the tale of an idyllic portrait of how the pre-Civil War South (yes, the films inaccurate depiction of the South in this era as some heavenly paradise is also uncomfortable) whose extravagant running time and production value suggest it's a contemplative drama while its script just goes whole-hog on middling melodrama to pass the time that doesn't even make its one-note characters interesting one-note characters. The costumes and cinematography of Gone With The Wind are excellent but the rest is forgettable and dull, a movie that comes and goes in your mind like a soft gust of wind.
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