About a week ago I finished reading one of the longest books I have ever read, Gone with the Wind. It was a daunting task at over 1000 pages but I was assured by others that you will not regret it. I did not regret it and consider it to be one of the best books that I have ever read.
While I knew the song and the famous "I don't give a damn" scene from the film, I have actually never seen it in my entire life. I was excited to see how one of my favorite books of all time was going to be represented on screen and I also recall that it was widely loved when it was originally released way back when. So yeah, I was pretty stoked about being able to finally watch this after spending 3 weeks on reading the book.
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I was curious how they were going to represent a lot of what I read about in the book because while the story mostly focuses on Scarlett O'Hara's coming of age and love story, there is a lot of war and explosions and fires that were probably pretty difficult to pull off back in 1939. Well after watching it I now know how they were able to pull a lot of that off, they did it by not showing it on screen but instead just having a bunch of words keep you up to date on what the hell was going on.
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The version I watched was the remastered original theater presentation and this included a rather long overture that I would imagine would have indicated that the people in the cinema who were i dunno, lurking around at concessions that it was time to get to their seats. There is also another rather long intermission. So I guess this added some period authenticity to the entire experience. The audio was also "crackly" in bits and I guess this was just the way things were back then.
They did skip a lot of the lead in story as far as introducing minor characters from the book is concerned and this was just fine with me. Many of the minor characters didn't really have much impact on the overall story anyway and instead they focused on the 4 main characters in Scarlet, Rhett, Melody, and Ashley. If you haven't read the book or seen the film then these names will be meaningless to you of course.
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Even with no knowledge of the film though you are probably at lease familiar with these two and that is what most of the story focuses on. That's Scarlet O'Hara and Rhett Butler.
This film won a total of 10 Academy Awards and that's quite the accomplishment. One of these awards for "Mammy", played by Hattie McDaniel was won in the Best Supporting Actress category and as it turns out she was almost not allowed to attend the ceremony because of segregation laws that existed at the time.
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The fact that she was going to win somehow leaked and her attendance was necessary. However, she was not allowed to sit with her white costars and instead was seated far off to the side at a table on her own with a minder and her white agent. Wow how things have changed since then huh?
The film won basically everything other than best editing and best visual effects and I can only imagine what the criteria was for visual effects in 1939 seeing as how almost nothing could be replicated accurately and CGI wasn't something that anyone could even fathom back then.
So now let's get into the nitty gritty of the review by me. This film is rather boring and yes, I realize that this has everything to do with the times that we now live in and the attention spans of most people including me. It took me 3 sittings to get through the entire thing and especially since I already knew the entire story, I was kind of happy with how some of it was represented but not so happy about others. They had to skip a ton of material because an epically long novel like this one was difficult to represent on screen even with a 4-hour runtime.
I can't really say that you absolutely must watch this movie because I don't think that most people would be able to endure the length or stay interested in it long enough to make it through. I think it might be a bit more entertaining to people who aren't already familiar with the story and that might be part of the reason why I got a bit bored seeing as how I knew everything about it since I had only recently finished the book.
So I would say that if you want to see a piece of history and have a lot of patience then go ahead and give this a watch. It shows a lot of things about the time period and how big the racial divide was in 1939 even though this film is representing events before, during, and after the American Civil War in the 1860's. The transition of blacks from being slaves to being free is represented pretty nicely in the film, although I don't think that this was an intentional aspect of it by the creators seeing as how the USA was still extremely segregated at the time of the film's release. If anything, the film (and the book) kind of attempts to show that blacks were better off as slaves than they were free, which seems a completely bizarre and taboo thing to even contemplate these days but may have been a widely held belief back in the late 19th and early 20th century.
The world being the nutso place that it is today, this film has actually been removed from most streaming services including HBO Max because it is "racist." The only way I know of to get a hold of it would be to get it from a torrent service, which I am certain most people are familiar with.
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Basically, I am glad that I watched it but if I was offered a free ticket to some grand event where they would re-screen the film for all of us, I would probably turn the invitation down because ideas of what is entertaining has changed so much since the time this film was released. I was bored, basically but a lot of this probably had to do with the fact that I already knew exactly what was going to happen.
Very interesting. I just recently watched Babylon with my wife and while it was quite over the top in a lot of areas, it was interesting to see the lifestyle of the time and how big of an impact the change from silent films to "talkies" was for the whole industry. I've never seen "Singing in the Rain" which Babylon gave a lot of shout outs to. All that to say, I understand what you are saying about how hard it would have been to film the war scenes and all of that. Thanks for the great review on this film. I always feel like I should go back and watch some of the classics sometime, but I just never had the time or ambition.
If you watch it and imagine yourself being alive when it came out you can appreciate how epic it might have been but this is a problem with many of the classics in that they are not terribly entertaining from a current perspective.
I have tried to watch Babylon but mostly I just found it annoying. 3 times I have switched it off before it was over already :)
I can understand that about Babylon. There was a point where I asked my wife if she wanted to just call it and she said "I ain't no quitter". It was not her favorite movie though. I think my two favorite parts were the snake fight scene and the scene where they were trying to shoot the college scene and she kept missing her mark. Other than that, it was just meh. Not sure how it was nominated for so many awards. I think back in the day people could handle more cerebral movies. Slower paced, more dialog. People aren't built that way anymore these days.
Because the academy loves pieces like this and even though I thought it was annoying the undertaking of so many actors in continuous shots had to have been very difficult to pull off.
That makes sense. The giant set out in the desert with all the different movies being filmed at once was interesting for sure!
I hate that this is a thing. Even the most tame of stories and characters will inevitably not fit in with whatever future agenda/ways of thought that become the norm. Such a dangerous thing to pretend to have the moral highground too while calling for the censorship of media and history.
I heard someone say in an interview that the people of that time were simply recounting history or in other cases they were doing what was the norm at the time and if any of the people that are screaming for censorship now had been alive at that time they would have behaved that way as well. Eliminating history doesn't make now more pure, it just makes people more ignorant.
Here's to hoping there's a bit of a swing in the pendulum and some of the insanity comes to an end.
At least you have read the book first and rom what you say you preferred the book over the film which I think will be 99% of all cases. Cyberflix is decent for watching television and films if you are ever looking for an all in one site.
thanks for the recommendation. I'm pretty sure that I will not have access to Netflix for much longer because I am just using someone else's and it is my understanding that they are putting a stop to people using others' accounts soon. I'm not going to pay for it.
Such a classic (and fantastic) movie!