“Gone With the Wind” screens at 1:30 p.m. Saturday, August 2, 2014 in the Durwood Film Vault of the Kansas City Central Library, 14W. 10th St. Admission is free. It’s part of the year-long film series Hollywood’s Greatest Year, featuring movies released in 1939.
In the wake of “12 Years a Slave,” is it still possible to enjoy “Gone With the Wind” with the same enthusiasm with which it traditionally has been received?
That’s the question I asked myself as I sat down to watch the film for the umpteenth time…but the first time since seeing “12 Years a Slave.”
Steve McQueen’s 2013 historic drama – based on the true story of a free black man from New York who in the years before the Civil War was shanghaied by slave traders and sold to a Southern plantation owner – was a grueling experience.
Making it particularly effective was the movie’s emphasis not only on the agonies slaves endured, but on the corrosive effect of the “peculiar institution” on the attitudes and personalities of wealthy whites who owned other human beings.
Overnight, “12 Years…” became the definitive cinematic statement about American slavery.
Not that “Gone With the Wind” – either in the form of Margaret Mitchell’s novel or the 1939 Oscar-winning film – was about slavery. In fact, to the extent to which it was possible, the issue of slavery was avoided, glossed over, and trivialized.
The film isn’t history or sociology. It’s a melodramatic page-turner about spoiled rich hellcat Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) and her love/hate affair with courtly scoundrel Rhett Butler (Clark Gable).
Watching the film with an eye to how slavery is handled, I’ve concluded that Mitchell and especially the makers of the film had it both ways.
Butler's Cinema Scene 