ALL ABOUT GWTW

I read the unabridged edition of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn when I was nine years old and  loved it (even as a child I was a voracious reader).
Around the same time, that classic American novel was being  banned in libraries and schools for presumably being "racist".

Huckleberry Finn is a fictional account of life in 1884. There's nothing offensive about it - except in the putrid imaginations of twisted spoilsports.

Lately everything - and I mean everything -  is suddenly being deemed "offensive".
If I ever had the power to ban things that offend me, three quarters of the world would be gone.

But I digress.

The latest insane assault is being hurled upon the 1939 iconic American film Gone With the Wind, along with Margaret Mitchell's 1936 best-selling novel.
GWTW is suddenly being banned everywhere (probably by people who never even saw it).

I first read the novel Gone With the Wind when I was fourteen and fell in love with it.
I first saw the movie when I was sixteen - - a newly-restored version presented at the Cinema Dome in Palm Springs, California (I don't know if that once-posh theater still exists). 

Gone With the Wind is a great film - a genuine American classic - and deserves all the laurels it has received.
Yet, it was never exactly one of my favorite films.

The endless tension and discord between Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler eventually becomes annoying and finally perplexing. I've concluded that it was a match made in hell.

The Hollywoodized dialogue in the film is occasionally embarrassingly hokey.

The bland and boring middle-aged British actor Leslie Howard  was sorely miscast as the young, blonde, handsome Ashley Wilkes of the novel.
Throughout the entire film I keep wondering what the heck Scarlett ever sees in him.

British actress Vivian Leigh was beyond perfect as Scarlett O'Hara - nobody else could ever compare with her (she desperately wanted the movie role when she first read the novel in England).

Olivia de Havilland was excellent as Melanie Hamilton, and as I write this - in June, 2020 - she is still alive at the age of 103!

Clark Gable was never the Rhett Butler that I envisioned in the novel, but he gave a first-rate performance nevertheless.

A careful viewing of the film (in my humble opinion, anyway) reveals that it gets better as it goes along - although numerous critics have thought otherwise.

The directors were changed after only three weeks of shooting. George Cukor, the first director, had done two years of pre-production work on Gone With the Wind. He was unceremoniously replaced by director Victor Fleming.

Clark Gable was reportedly influential in the firing of Cukor. George Cukor was gay and supposedly knew too much about Gable's sordid sexual past, when the young actor was an unknown Hollywood wannabe.

Despite the fact that Gone With the Wind is being vehemently condemned as a racist film, the accusation is grossly (I would say entirely) exaggerated.

The novel is reasonably historically accurate. The movie is a Hollywood rendition made in the 1930s, when blacks were most often portrayed as unrealistic stereotypes in film.

Critical outcry proclaims that the story glorifies slavery and portrays slaves as happy, content, and compliant.
One should remember that Gone With the Wind is fiction, conceived in an author's mind. A collection of miserable, abused, unhappy slaves would have put a colossal damper on Margaret Mitchell's story.

Hattie McDaniel gives a superb portrayal of the house servant Mammy, and she was the first black actress to win an Oscar (Supporting Actress) for her role in 1940.

Critics claim that the character of Mammy is nothing more than a stereotypical Aunt Jemima.
In truth, Mammy is probably the strongest character in the novel and the film. Throughout the entire story, her strength and wisdom are what holds the others together. 

Butterfly McQueen's enthusiastic portrayal of Prissy - - the half-witted servant girl - - is definitely over the top, but it provides a sense of semi-comic relief in dire situations.
The most disturbing aspect is probably when Scarlett slaps Prissy in the face - but this scene was faithful to the novel.

In retrospect, I think the most racist thing about Gone With the Wind is that Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen were banned from the September, 1939 premier in Atlanta, because the film was shown in an "all-white" theater.