I guess I was finally in the mood for this one again, it’s a perfect movie to start the year with. Last time I saw this I was fairly overwhelmed by the almost hilarious soap-ish melodrama and yes, it’s undeniable how soapy this movie is. But there are so many memorable scenes and set-pieces, the score is perfection, and though it loses a little interest past the intermission (which they didn’t include in this TV transmission, damn the BBC!!!), it ends quite boldly even by today’s standards. If you let it take you, this movie is just as much a ride as it was nearly 70 years ago.

Like the movie itself, the performances are sometimes a little over the top. My personal favourite is Olivia De Havilland’s Melanie. Her performance could almost stand up today, it’s so natural and gentle while Gable, Leigh and others – beautiful though they may be – tend towards the particularly stagey deliveries of the time.

What struck me more than ever on this viewing – and it’s a good indication of how long it is since I last saw it since I don’t recall really noticing it till now – is how kinda backwards this movie is in terms of the time it was made. Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara are not the most lovable characters, at least to begin with, and the world they live in, Confederate America still thriving on the slave trade, doesn’t really (or at least, I wouldn’t think it would) inspire immediate connection in a modern-thinking audience. But all this context pretty much vanishes around the individual characters. They’re not to blame for what is happening around them, and right though the outcome of this war may have been, it’s still overwhelmingly upsetting to see innocent lives torn apart … like I said, I don’t think it really registered with me on the umpteen previous viewings (that along with the whole cousins marrying thing, lol), I never had a great interest in history etc, and I barely do now (so sorry if I still said something dumb in this review). I have this impression of old Hollywood movies being kind of restrained and formulaic but there’s stuff here that wouldn’t make it to the screen today, stuff that people would maybe interpret as racist or something, when it’s really just a true representation, as the opening titles declare, of, “a civilization gone with the wind.” I’ll watch this again much more readily in future, but I’m quite glad I held off till this point in time when I could see it with new eyes.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 2nd, 2006 at 11:02 pm in 5 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.