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Gone with the Wind

Gone with the Wind

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Collector's Edition Rocks!
Review: I got this for my fiance's mother for Christmas and she LOVED IT! The movie is amazing, I think most people will agree to that. The extras that come with the DVD make it well worth the price! My fiance's mother LOVED the photos that came in the box. She looked at them over and over, and showed them off to the entire family.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Spectacular Entertainment
Review: I have probably seen all or part of this film on more than a dozen occasions but not for several years until I recently checked it out in DVD format. The production values have never looked more vivid. The scope of the story and the scale of telling it are truly epic. The performances by Clark Gable and Leslie Howard are as impressive as ever. A number of supporting actors are first-rate. A number of scenes have retained their visual impact. And yet....I now think this highly praised film (ranked #4 by the American Film Institute among "America's Greatest Movies") has lost much of its impact.

For whatever reasons, the acting by Vivian Leigh and Olivia de Havilland now seems to me contrived. Rhett Butler's devotion to Scarlett is inexplicable. De Havilland's portrayal suggests that Melanie Hamilton is too good to be true, and therefore isn't. Thomas ("Burning Ham") Mitchell portrays Gerald O'Hara as a cartoon character. When Sidney Howard's screenplay shifts its attention to social issues, I suspect that his muse was Harriet Beecher Stowe. To an extent I did not realize before, this film glorifies (almost deifies) a way of life which justified slavery as a state's right (i.e. the ruling class's right). Even benevolent despotism is still despotism.

On the subject of entitlement, producer David O'Selznick and director Victor Fleming obviously had every right to create a film based on Margaret Mitchell's bloated and sentimental novel. If they wish to suggest in this film that to many slaves, loyalty to their owners was more important freedom from bondage, so be it. Their movie. However, as Voltaire observed, great is the enemy of the good...and, I presume to add, an even more formidable enemy of the mediocre. Gone With the Wind offers great spectacle and a few brilliant performances as well as several credible performances and an occasional chuckle. But overall, it is emphatically not the great film I once thought it was. The film hasn't changed so obviously I have.

Some may think it unfair to be critical of a film released more than 60 years ago. I respectfully submit that many films released since then have raised the standards of measurement. They have redefined what greatness is. (Most of them are on the AFI's list.) Perhaps it's unrealistic to expect an historical film lasting almost four hours (222 minutes to be exact) to hold up. Audiences which first saw it in 1939 are obviously quite different from those which see it now. Nonetheless, our nation fought one war to obtain certain inalienable rights and another was fought to ensure that the same rights are extended to everyone in our nation. Any film which claims to portray American history must be subject to the same scrutiny which a book would be if making the same claim. As for matters of aesthetics, judgment is necessarily much more subjective. For reasons indicated, I think that Gone With the Wind offers neither circumspect history nor great art but will always be praised (and rightly) so as spectacular entertainment.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: An Epic Film of the Old South
Review: When I first saw how long 'Gone With the Wind' was, I was prepared for the worst and most boring movie I would ever see. However, once the movie started, I was hooked! 'Gone With the Wind' presents a wonderful portrait of the Old South and the things that occurred during the years of the Civil War. The story focuses on Scarlett, the daugther of a rich man who owns a large plantation- Tara. Throughout the story, Scarlett is madly in love with Ashley, a young man who lives near their plantation. However, when another woman steals Ashley's heart and marries him, Scarlett, in a fit of rage and disgust, marries another man to make him jealous. Both couples wed on the same day and are later on separated at the start of the Civil War. Throughout the movie, Scarlett tries to regain Ashely's heart while battling for her life, family, and position, which are being destroyed by the war. 'Gone With the Wind' is a must see for any movie lover. You won't be sorry that you journeyed back in time to Dixie.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: My Favorite movie of all time.
Review: I watched this movie for the first time when I was nine years old with my mom. I loved it all the great costumes and the huge houses. How one woman acted like a brat and wanted everything her way and soon found out that she had to work hard to make it through life. How she always that she was in love with one man and The one man who truely loved her she treated like dirt and then found out later that she truely did love Rhett. Tara was worth saving because it was her home and life.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Amazingly well done!
Review: This movie is absolutely amazing. Vivien Leigh is gorgeous and does a dynamic job with the role of Scarlett. Clark Gable plays the dashing Mr. Butler to perfection. The costumes are beautiful, the sets are perfect... it is everything I imagined as I read the book. Another plus is that it follows the book with precision and doesn't add anything that never happened. A stellar production of a timeless love story.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Awesome!
Review: This is an awesome DVD! I love the movie! Ever since I first saw it my eyes lit up. All the unique and wonderful characters, all with qualities I absolutely loved or absolutely hated! We have the beautiful, Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara. The handsome, Clark Gable as Rhett Butler. We also have Leslie Howard, as the timid Ashley Wilkes. And we have Olivia de Havilland, as the kind-hearted Melanie Hamilton. It is digitally remastered and in it's wonderful technicolor glory. I absolutely adore this movie of charm and grace!

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Romantic Racism
Review: You have to give credit to this film for its glossy, epic sweep and the fact that it breaks new ground in filmmaking techniques. Unfortunately, the film, like the novel, promotes a destructive, romantic myth of a south that never really existed.

In this Technicolor version of the Old South all the darkies are happy and smiling and dancing on the banks of the Mississippi, and obviously it's too bad the Civil War came along and ruined things. What a trashy message, and the terrible thing is that its wrapped in such a seductive and attractive package.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Five stars for the movie, 3 for the DVD
Review: I agree with others who were disappointed that the DVD didn't include more "extra" stuff in addition to the movie. Also, I would have preferred letterbox to full screen.
But the movie itself, of course, is absolutely outstanding. Like many people, I've seen it a dozen times or more. It never gets tiring. Some of the casting was so-so; Leslie Howard was too old for Ashley; Olivia de Havilland was good as Melanie, but I can also see Maureen O'Sullivan (Jane to Weismuller's Tarzan) in the role (she was considered for it). While Vivien Leigh was of course excellent as Scarlett, it's possible to imagine that other actresses might have done as well; but impossible to imagine anyone other than Gable as Rhett Butler.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: A True Classic
Review: Gone With the Wind is one of the greatest movies of all time and includes some of the finest performances from snappy Scarlett, charming, tough-guy Rhett, and the films most enjoyed character and actress, Olivia de Havilland as the charming, kind, generous and angelic wife. However, towards the end of the first half, we have the most obnoxious and unnerving performances from the slaves including Prissy, and the other black man. Mammy maintains her mother-like qualities however, but one feels like stopping the movie just because of the absolutely annoying and ear-shredding performance from Prissy. Other than that, expect nothing short of extraordinary.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A Triumph!
Review: It took many years, six, I believe, for Margaret Mitchell to complete the writing of her Pulitzer Prize winning book upon which the feature film is based. The novel shows it, and it was still being written with major changes, for example, in its title and the name of its leading protagonist from Pansy to Scarlett even while its publisher, Macmillan, was preparing it for print.

The film also took years in development, including the great struggle to locate exacting matches for its characters and then the application of some of the finest crafts men and women in what might have been the peak year of Hollywood's Golden Age. The film shows that as well. It should be included in all curricula on filmmaking and in long form writing. It is a finely etched, beautifully considered character study. As such it is a triumph in American literature in both novel and film forms. Like all finely accomplished works of the human heart it has become timeless.

Beyond all of that we are left with a depiction of artistry in both literature and movie making when as in other forms, such as architecture, love was part if the gestalt of creation and profit at bottom line accounting and the marketplace were not the major compelling issues. Here, we have an example of serendipity and timing of arts at a moment in our history when it was possible to create the enduring classic that this is. "Gone with the Wind" might also describe the possibility of such a moment.


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