Okay, so GWTW is considered to be the greatest film of all time with the largest audience of any film ever made, blah, blah, blah. But let's get real folks and look at GWTW in modern terms and face a few facts. First of all, and most important, is the story and what a story it is. It's like a civil war version of any soap on television. The story is simply not original. Scarlett O'Hara, the heroine - if she can be called that - is utterly loathsome. I mean she does not have one single redeeming trait. She's the classic woman you love to hate - the kind of woman Joan Crawford cut her eye teeth on and Joan Collins elevated to a high state of hysteria. Please! But there is so much that is absolutely annoying about the film aside from the fact all you want to do with Scarlett is put her over your knee and give her a well-deserved spanking. Of course these days you can't possibly do such a thing - you would be charged with felony assault and locked up in the local slammer for a year! But I digress. The music about drove me up the wall. If I had to listen to the GWTW theme one would time I would be running into the sunset never to look back. Clark Gable of course is superb - but then he's always superb. But look at what he went through to give the performance he did? The original director, George Cukor, bothered Gable so much that the actor had the director fired. By the time Victor Fleming came aboard he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown having just completed The Wizard of Oz - in fact Fleming did have a nervous breakdown when GWTW was completed. But the real problems with the film lay squarely in David Selznick's lap. His obsessive dedication to the novel show in every scene which are over blown and over the top every time. The story is not that big but Selznick has turned it into a story of Biblical proportions and in the process simply turned the film into something grotesque and horrible.
Review of Gone with the Wind
