Great Last Scenes: Gone With The Wind

Year: 1939
Director: Victor Flemming
Great Because... This scene pretty much encapsulates everything I love about Scarlett O'Hara. She loses Rhett, feigns being helpless, cries for a moment and then pulls herself together, picks herself up and starts to formulate a plan. That's the scrappy heroine I love!

Scarlett goes through a lot in this story: she loses Ashley to Melanie, she's widowed twice, escapes Atlanta as it burns, kills a Union soldier, loses her daughter, and realizes that she loves Rhett only when it's too late. Rhett, fed up with Scarlett's mistreatment, walks out on her, refusing to hear her out as she declares that things will be different now. When asked what she's supposed to do without him, he utters those immortal words: "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn."

If the film had ended right there, it would be great, but it goes a step further to become classic. Rhett walks out the door and disappears into the mist, leaving a tearful Scarlett behind. She collapses on the stairs, lost - but only for a moment. She remembers her father's words about Tara, the family home: "Tara! Home. I'll go home. And I'll think of some way to get him back. After all... tomorrow is another day."

I love this scene because it demonstrates what I think is really admirable about Scarlett: for all her scheming and manipulation and general petulance and entitlement, she's never one to wallow in her misery. No matter how dire the circumstances, she always finds a way to pull herself through, possessing the kind of strength that female characters aren't often allowed. She might want a man, but she doesn't need one because she can take care of herself. It's the optimism, the unyielding belief in herself that is expressed in the last lines which makes Scarlett such a great character and makes this such a great ending.

100 Days, 100 Movies: The Wizard of Oz (1939)

Director: Victor Flemming
Starring: Judy Garland

Perhaps no film ever produced has a more secure place in the collective imagination than The Wizard of Oz. It is a staple of most childhoods and touchstone for many adults. It isn’t just a “kid’s movie,” although a lot of people seem to classify it as such. It’s a deeply resonant film that has as much to say to an adult as it does to a child; it’s a film about discovering who you are and finding your way home, about seeing things the way they are and discovering the truth about that which exists behind the curtain. It is also a terrifically entertaining movie.

It’s difficult to know where to begin talking about The Wizard of Oz, but I suppose the most natural starting point is Judy Garland, who of course plays Dorothy. It’s hard to imagine the film without her, although she wasn’t the first choice for the role (that would be Shirley Temple). The film version of Dorothy is a character who could easily become tiresome to adult audiences because she’s so saccharine, but something about Garland makes you forgive her unshakeable earnestness – especially when she sings. “Over the Rainbow” was voted by the AFI as the best of all film songs, which seems absolutely right to me; it’s one of the few songs that can bring a tear to my eyes.

Dorothy’s wide-eyed innocence plays into the political undertones of the story. Much has been written about the novel which is popularly read as political allegory about capitalism wherein Dorothy is the Everyman, the Tin Man represents industrial workers, the Scarecrow represents farmers, the Yellow Brick Road represents the gold standard, and emerald city represents paper currency. Since the novel was written nearly forty years before the film was made, the politics which informed the former don’t necessarily correspond to the latter. Certainly, Dorothy can still be read as representing the ordinary American people who are at the mercy of political machinations they can’t see (the goings on behind the curtain), in which case the Wizard can be representative of anyone who wields political power, rather than one specific person. The Scarecrow and Tin Man may not represent workers in the same way they did in 1900, but the realization that the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion all possessed the qualities they were seeking and could access them if they had faith in themselves would have worked a message of self-reliance to a nation that had not yet been pulled out of the Depression. Like Scarlett O’Hara’s assertion that “Tomorrow is another day,” when Dorothy says, “There’s no place like home,” the line has connotations that would have resonated with the original audiences. Both lines suggest that there’s dawn at the end of the long darkness and that though things may be bad at the moment, it’s worth sticking it out.

But, laying politic readings aside, the film is also very effective as escapist entertainment. It is a testament to the technical achievements of the film that even amongst other films released in 1939, a year widely considered to be one of the best in film history (and considered by many to be the best as titles released that year include Gone With The Wind, The Rules of the Game, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, Ninotchka, and Wuthering Heights amongst others), it still stands out from the crowd. This is a movie that is vibrant and alive, that commits completely to its creation of another world right down to the little details. To be sure, the land of Oz doesn’t look “real” in the way that more recent imaginary lands can be made to look realistic through CGI, but it works nonetheless. Perhaps because Oz is meant to be a place of a child’s imagination, the constructed nature of the sets with their exaggerations and bright colors just work. Whatever the reason, this movie still looks great, and Oz itself is a land that’s easy to slip into even after you’ve found yourself immersed in Middle Earth and Narnia.

The songs in the film are wonderful and memorable – even if you don’t know the words to “Lollipop Guild” or “If I Only Had A Brain,” I bet you can hum both – and so are the characters. Besides Dorothy and her three companions (four, counting Toto), there’s also Glinda the Good Witch and the Wicked Witch of the West, played by Billie Burke and Margaret Hamilton, respectively. The Wicked Witch is especially memorable – so ruthless that she’d take out your dog, too – and her evil is as indefatigable as Dorothy’s goodness.

Whether you experience this film as political allegory or as a masterful achievement of musical storytelling, whether it exists in your mind as a memory from childhood or as a film you return to as an adult, this is a film that will easily win a place in your heart. Of all the movies I’ve seen, this is the only one I’ve found to be a truly universal viewing experience, and the only one I’ve found that is so universally adored.

100 Days, 100 Movies: Gone With The Wind (1939)

Director: Victor Flemming
Starring: Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable, Olivia de Havilland, Hattie McDaniel

To say that Gone With The Wind is a problematic masterpiece is an understatement. It’s depiction of slavery is abhorrent, but it’s important to keep in mind that this isn’t meant to be a history lesson. This is an epic romance which takes place in a fairytale South that never existed, a fact which is apparent in its foreword, which states: “Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind…” With that as the set-up, you can’t expect to get anything other than a severely white-washed look at the era of American slavery. The world depicted in this film isn’t really worth exploring except for the way that it acts as a backdrop for one of the best characters of fiction, Scarlett O’Hara (played by the fabulous Vivien Leigh).

I find it strange whenever a woman describes herself as being “a traditional Southern woman, like Scarlett O’Hara,” because the entire point of Scarlett is that she’s not your typical woman - Southern or otherwise. Melanie (Olivia de Havilland) is the epitome of the nice, Southern woman while Scarlett is the iconoclast, a woman constantly going against the way things are properly done (such as when she insists on dancing when she’s meant to be in mourning). But it’s easy to understand why women would want to identify themselves with Scarlett, a woman who isn’t entirely likeable but who is cunning, who gets things done and who is, most importantly, a survivor. This isn’t a woman who shuts down and waits to be rescued; she pulls herself up and gets things done while the women around her (especially her sisters) whine and cry. Scarlett’s drive and self-sufficiency are admirable and no doubt a large part of why and how she entered into cultural mythology, especially when you take into account that both the novel and the film entered public consciousness during the Depression. When Scarlett says, “Tomorrow is another day,” she wasn’t just speaking for herself, she was speaking for everyone living a day-to-day existence.

Personally, I love Scarlett. Is she selfish? Yes. Is she a bitch? You bet. But every time she’s swatted down, she just gets back up again, more determined than ever. She’s also kind of hilarious. The relationship between Scarlett and Rhett (Clark Gable) is one of my favourites in film because despite the heavier scenes, there is a wonderful lightness and camaraderie between them. Rhett doesn’t just put up with her crap, he’s amused by it. He enjoys her little temper tantrums, her attempts at manipulation, and her need to be spoiled coincides nicely with his desire to spoil her (one of my favourite scenes between them takes place just after they’ve married and Scarlett is shovelling food into her mouth like it’s going out of style and Rhett jovially suggests that she might want to slow down).

However, as wonderful as the chemistry between Leigh and Gable is, it also presents something of a problem because it makes it all the more inconceivable that Scarlett could spend as much time as she does hung up on drippy Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard). It is believable to me that Scarlett would use the idea that she’s infatuated with Ashley to get under Rhett’s skin, but it takes a real suspension of disbelief to buy that Scarlett would sincerely want Ashley, who is such a non-entity that it’s surprising that even Melanie wants him. Howard apparently didn’t want the role, which perhaps explains the lack of “there” there, and his depiction of Ashley really does hurt the movie.

Of course, there are a lot of things that hurt this movie. It doesn’t particularly bother me that Scarlett is the heroine of the film and also a slave owner, because few things irritate me more than slavery/Civil War era films where a character is coded as “good” by being a Southern plantation owner whose slaves are free and work his or her land voluntarily – that’s an easy way out and not very realistic. I think it’s okay that Scarlett is a product of her time and place, a time and place where she would have been raised thinking that it was natural that she should be able to “own” other human beings, regardless of how wrong that concept actually is. Besides which, Scarlett is so self-centered that she probably assumes that everyone, black and white, male and female, is working for her in some capacity. That being said, however, the film’s depiction of slaves is deeply problematic, with the slave characters being either infantilized creatures with no hope of being able to take care of themselves (a character like Prissy), or cheerful people without any particular desire to be “freed,” who seem to want nothing more than to take care of the exasperating white people in their lives (a character like Mammy). If there is any depth to the slave characters, and in the case of Mammy, there certainly is, it is due entirely to the actors. Hattie McDaniel, who won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar, brings shades to Mammy that wouldn’t otherwise exist and makes it almost believable that she’d stick with Scarlett rather than trying to make her way as a freed woman.

There are other problems, too. At 238 minutes, this is a long movie that manages to feel even longer than it actually is. The pacing of the film is bad, perhaps because it went through three directors (Victor Flemming, the credited director and the one who was given the Oscar, as well as George Cukor and Sam Wood, both of whom are uncredited for their work), but also because I think this might be a case of too literal an adaptation. Admittedly, I’ve never read the book Gone With The Wind and I know that certain things were cut out (like the fact that Scarlett had children with all her husbands, not just Rhett), but whenever I watch this, it just seems like the screenwriters were determined to cram everything from the book into the movie, which results in a film that tends to drag in places. There are some great sequences (the burning of Atlanta, the scenes immediately following the end of the war, that great shot where the camera pans back to show the wounded soldiers) but in between there are long stretches that seem to take days to watch. I have no problem calling this film a masterpiece, but it is a qualified masterpiece if ever there was one.