Gone with the Wind – 1939 – English

Gone with the Wind – 1939 – English – Drama – Adventures

Gone with the Wind – 1939 – English

Film directed in 1939 by Victor Fleming and George Cukor, and starring Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh, Thomas Mitchell, Olivia de Havilland, Leslie Howard, Hattie McDaniel, Barbara O’Neil, Butterfly McQueen, Ona Munson, Ann Rutherford, Evelyn Keyes, Mickey Kuhn, Ward Bond…

Synopsis: Scarlett is a woman who can deal with a nation at war, Atlanta burning, the Union Army carrying off everything from her beloved Tara, the carpetbaggers who arrive after the war. Scarlett is beautiful. She has vitality. But Ashley, the man she has wanted for so long, is going to marry his placid cousin, Melanie. Mammy warns Scarlett to behave herself at the party at Twelve Oaks. There is a new man there that day, the day the Civil War begins. Rhett Butler. Scarlett does not know he is in the room when she pleads with Ashley to choose her instead of Melanie.

Review: At first you would think, the main theme of the film is the horrors of war and the idea that both sides suffer, but that is not the only case in Gone with the Wind, the war is just a background…

Scarlet lives almost her entire life in an illusion of love… She has a target she want to achieve and she thinks if she achieves it she will be happy, while missing the point on the way to that target… Something that I realised on a second viewing is that Scarlet is a pretty selfish person with sociopaths behaviour. She can easily manipulate men and sometimes women in order to achieve her goal. She can kill a person and not feel that bad about it,she can exploit prisoners rather than hire free men. The goal is what pushes her forward and sometimes makes her do good things, but these deeds are never done out of big heart, they are usually done in self interest.

You would think she ends up achieving everything she wanted, but she does not. Scarlet lives in a personal hell which partially she created herself and only when the last obstacle to her big love, the female friend that loves her is gone, she realises that all this time, she lived the illusion of love, she was hurting the people that loved her.

Is scarlet a horrible person? Probably… Does she pay for her sins? She does more than anyone… Does she understand what true love is? Yes in the end she does… What makes this film so great, it’s a tragedy like “War And Peace” with monumental character development …Any scenes of war and racism fade compared to the tragedy of Scarlet which lives in personal hell…