Seventy five years ago, Hollywood screened an epic film that was to become the most successful of all time. Based on the bestselling Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Margaret Mitchell, and produced by the canny David O Selznick Jr, Gone with the Wind boasted a star-studded cast, sublime music, great production design and glamorous costumes, and won eight Oscars – including the first awarded to an African American actor, Hattie McDaniel.
It was hailed as the most lavish and glorious achievement of Hollywood’s Golden Age. From 1939 onwards, audiences have adored, wept and laughed over it, and watched mesmerised as Scarlett O’Hara lives through America’s terrible Civil War to emerge battered and bruised, but determined to start again – since ‘tomorrow is another day.’
Even if you’ve never read the book or seen the film, almost everyone has heard of Gone with the Wind. GWTW, as it’s familiarly known, prompts many a superlative: legendary, classic, golden, ‘one of the most powerful anti-war novels and films ever produced.’ Whenever there’s a significant anniversary of GWTW, new publications, screenings, exhibitions, sequel novels, TV parodies and general brouhaha remind us of the huge impact of this work.
At last year’s Victoria & Albert Museum Hollywood Costume exhibition, featuring costumes from The Wizard of Oz, Harry Potter and Pirates of the Caribbean, the display arousing most excitement was Vivien Leigh’s green velvet dress and hat made by Mammy for Scarlett O’Hara out of Tara’s curtains.
The 1936 novel on which it is based, by Margaret Mitchell, has always been one of my favourites – and that of millions of other women, too. In the 1980s I wrote Scarlett’s Women: Gone with the Wind and its Female Fans [Virago, reprinted with new introduction, 2014], and found that almost every woman I knew, and many strangers I encountered, were obsessed by it and could quote those immortal lines: “Don’t know nuttin’ ’bout birthin’ babies,” “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” and “I’ll think about that tomorrow.”
I spoke to older women of my mother’s generation who recalled Gone with the Wind being published and then the film opening in the early years of the war.
For them, it was a series of firsts: the longest book they’d ever read, the grandest and most colourful Technicolor Hollywood film ever seen (with a theatrical “intermission”), full of glittering costumes and glorious sets in the grey years of Depression and the Second World War.
It was also one of the first books and films featuring a multi-dimensional heroine rather than a bit of love interest for a complex hero.
For that generation Melanie Wilkes was a saint, while Scarlett was a wicked and dangerous figure, her unrequited love for wimpish Ashley Wilkes a grave error once she’d conquered the devastatingly sexy Rhett Butler. Younger women shared that verdict on male characters, but for them Scarlett O’Hara was a feminist or me-generation role model, though they were often troubled by the unthinking racism and patronising attitude to black characters, slave and free.
Our 21st century world looks very different from that of 1939 when Gone with the Wind first appeared. I’m often asked whether we should celebrate or even watch the legendary movie at a time of multiculturalism, recognition of and reparation for slavery, and in the year when Steve McQueen’s great film about the brutality of the Old South, 12 Years a Slave, won its Oscars. In recent years, writers and film-makers have amply rebutted Gone with the Wind’s reactionary perspective on the history of the slave South.
Great epic film as Gone with the Wind is, its silence about the horrors of the slavery system speaks volumes, and it’s good that we now condemn its politics. But it’s also important that we understand how profoundly Gone with the Wind influenced and shaped popular views of slavery and race for many of the last 75 years, and why book and film have been so popular, especially with women readers and audiences.
At the heart of its success lies the figure of Scarlett O’Hara, who encapsulates recognisably female experiences, enduring physical and emotional deprivations, bereavements and rejections. She is a giddy and deviant daughter, flawed three times wife, negligent mother, careless friend, murderer, and courageous defender of hearth and home. All this against a sweep of major historical crisis and change focusing on the sufferings of white elite American Southerners during and after the Civil War.
The part of Scarlett O’Hara is played by the magnificent Vivien Leigh, who had family connections with the Westcountry and is commemorated at Devon’s Topsham Museum and The Bill Douglas Museum. Topsham proudly displays the white ruffled nightdress worn by Leigh as Scarlett.
Vivien Leigh was a rank outsider for the part, since Hollywood’s top actresses – Paulette Goddard, Bette Davis, Joan Bennett – assumed it was theirs for the taking, and Hollywood’s top gossip columnist Hedda Hopper was horrified at the thought of an unknown Brit being chosen. However, at the first screenings, everyone was won over and even Hopper herself concurred with author Margaret Mitchell’s view that she was MY Scarlett. It’s interesting to note that three of the four leading characters in the film were played by British actors – Leigh herself, Leslie Howard (Ashley Wilkes) and Olivia de Havilland (Melanie Wilkes), a further reason why many British audiences have a fondness for this film.
Vivien Leigh was matched for glamour, sex appeal and riveting performance by the king of Hollywood, Clark Gable, who played Rhett Butler to perfection. Each time I’ve watched the film in the cinema, women in the audience sigh ecstatically at Gable’s first appearance at the foot of the stairs. Scarlett whispers that he gazes at her as if he knows what she looks like without her shimmy, and we all shiver with delight. The sexual and emotional chemistry between the two gives the film that powerful seam of passion denied, restrained and then fully expressed on the night Rhett carries Scarlett drunkenly to bed and we see her awaken next morning looking happily fulfilled.
The women who wrote to me about their memories of Gone with the Wind shared unease about this scene of domestic violence, and all felt anguish over the conflicts and tragedies in that great love affair, especially Scarlett’s miscarriage after falling downstairs, then the death of their precious daughter Bonnie Blue, and finally Rhett’s walking out the door with the immortal words about not giving a damn. We recognise the battle of wills in a fractious, but intense, love match, and mourn the parting of the ways. When I asked young women whether Scarlett would get Rhett back, they remained optimistic, but older women said they knew when a man had had enough and Scarlett had surely tested him to the limit. Margaret Mitchell was asked repeatedly whether they got together again, and she refused to answer or write a sequel. She never wrote another novel. The two sequels published in recent years by popular American writers are feeble imitations, and (wisely) no-one’s ever tried to re-make the movie. The only (disastrous) attempt to rework GWTW to transform it into a progressive, post-Civil Rights story about the races working together in harmony was in 2008, when distinguished British theatre director Trevor Nunn opened in London his musical, Gone with the Wind. Worthy but dull, it closed within weeks.
More powerful and persuasive have been the many TV and film versions that counter GWTW by offering very different versions of Southern history, slavery and the Civil War. These include the hugely successful 1976 TV series Roots, which reinterpreted the plantation South through the eyes of slaves, and later films such as Amistad (1997), Beloved (1998), and 12 Years a Slave (2014). It’s hard to think of another book or film that carries a quirky and ambitious young woman character through such a huge sweep of history and through most of women’s toughest life trials – the loss of parents, husbands, a daughter, best friend, husband and home. At the emotional centre lies the importance of the land where you were born and the struggle to rebuild a home and a haven.
One woman had a very specific association that I believe resonates with many women who’ve had to adjust to major disruptions in their home and family lives. Writer Anne Karpf told me: “My parents are survivors of the Holocaust, and for me GWTW was a story about loss – the loss of the family, family home and land. The way in which her life was so sharply divided into two mirrors my parents’ lives, pre-war and post-war. The loss of Scarlett’s privileged life and home, the rupture of the family – these are the GWTW stories that really spoke to me.”
Gone with the Wind is a moving tale of courage, survival, love and loss. It’s also about a woman who gets most things wrong and realises what she needs far too late. Which of us doesn’t identify with that? No wonder so many women gather together to watch the DVD with a big box of tissues. As a ‘three-handkerchief’ film, this has no rival.