Skip to main content

Remembering Tara




It seems Gone with the Wind doesn't have the same hold on the American imagination it once did.  The film has been a perennial television favorite for decades, long after its premiere at the Loew's Grand Theater in Atlanta, 1939.   The epic classic has been dressed up in a 75th anniversary edition DVD box set and is enjoying another run at select movie theaters around the country.

GWTW was a good bad book made into a good bad movie that rekindled the American imagination for the Deep South, ravished during the Civil War.  It was kind of a War and Peace for Americans, a romance novel writ large set against the backdrop of war.  It lacked the philosophical insights of Tolstoy's great novel but made up for it with a whirlwind of emotions best captured in this signature scene.  Like the novel, the dialog was so far over the top that you can't help but laugh at many of the scenes, especially with the greatly inflated musical score.

The Washington Post interviewed Mickey Kuhn, who played 7-year old Beau Wilkes in the movie.  Olivia de Havilland offers more pithy insights in this interview in the Garden & Gun (now that's a magazine title you won't forget soon).  The grand dame seems to bristle at some of the questions.  I loved her response to "who got the best performance out of you?"  --  "They didn't get the performances out of me.  I gave the performances to them."  The interview actually dates from 2010, and was reprinted in the magazine.

Olivia played Melanie Hamilton, a distant cousin to Scarlett O'Hara.  She was nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the 1940 Oscars, but that award went to Hattie McDaniel, pictured above with Vivien, for her role as Mammy.

GWTW swept the Oscars, although Clark Gable lost out to Robert Donat in Goodbye, Mr. Chips.  Of course, "Windies" saw this as a brazen oversight but Clark already had an Oscar to his credit (the much better It Happened One Night), so it was no great loss.

Love it or hate it, this film still lingers in the imagination, and for many will continue to do so long into the future.  There is something about love among the ruins of a great war that grips us to the depths of our soul, no matter how well or how badly it is told.  Even Tara is being restored.

Comments

  1. Gone With the Wind is somewhat of an overblown soap opera. We’re less comfortable with it today, even as melodrama. The civil rights movement so altered American consciousness that a lamentation for the demise of the Old South now makes us fidget. But when the novel debuted in 1936, it was the book everyone was reading and Margaret Mitchell became an overnight celebrity. That Hollywood would make a lavish production of it was inevitable.

    But Scarlett O’Hara does make a memorable tragic figure, a self-absorbed woman trapped by her longing for the man she can’t have. As her house of cards collapses at the end and Rhett decides he has had enough of her, he instantly takes Ashley’s place in her obsessive compulsion. “I’ll find a way to get him back” she resolves in ever-deepening irrationality. She hasn’t learned a thing.

    Craig

    ReplyDelete
  2. In that sense it is a very good allegory of the South.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

O Pioneers!

It is hard not to think of Nebraska without thinking of its greatest writer.  Here is a marvelous piece by Capote, Remembering Willa Cather . I remember seeing a stage production of O Pioneers! and being deeply moved by its raw emotions.  I had read My Antonia before, and soon found myself hooked, like Capote was by the simple elegance of her prose and the way she was able to evoke so many feelings through her characters.  Much of it came from the fact that she had lived those experiences herself. Her father dragged the family from Virginia to Nebraska in 1883, when it was still a young state, settling in the town of Red Cloud. named after one of the great Oglala chiefs.  Red Cloud was still alive at the time, living on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, in the aftermath of the "Great Sioux Wars" of 1876-77.  I don't know whether Cather took any interest in the famous chief, although it is hard to imagine not.  Upon his death in 1909, he was eulogi

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro

Colonel

Now with Colonel Roosevelt , the magnum opus is complete. And it deserves to stand as the definitive study of its restless, mutable, ever-boyish, erudite and tirelessly energetic subject. Mr. Morris has addressed the toughest and most frustrating part of Roosevelt’s life with the same care and precision that he brought to the two earlier installments. And if this story of a lifetime is his own life’s work, he has reason to be immensely proud.  -- Janet Maslin -- NY Times . Let the discussion begin!