A Film Canon

The most ambitious American film since Intolerance, Gone With The Wind commemorates the ante-bellum South with all the lurid spectacle of a stained-glass window. Like the novel, it affirms the fiercely symbiotic relationship between Southerners and their land - and, more specifically, between the "red earth of Tara" and its namesake, Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh). To this end, cinematographer Ernest Haller suffuses the film with those warm hues that are most conducive to Technicolour, most iconically in the burning of Atlanta, but also in the sunsets that punctuate the narrative, producing a pervasive twilight. From this perspective, racial differences are simply another colourist nuance, analogous to the two sets of widows' outfits that O'Hara is forced to don, or the vivid blackness of her hair. Similarly, the two quintessentially Southern gentlemen, Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard) and Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) are prepared to free their slaves, and invite negro messengers inside, while simultaneously fighting for their continued enslavement. These contradictions and elisions suggest that, unlike Jezebel, Gone With The Wind is primarily interested in the mythological, rather than prophetic, elements of the Southern Old Testament, presenting an Edenic fiction summarised by Wilkes: "You seem to belong here...as if it had all been imagined for you. It's a whole world that wants only to be graceful and beautiful, so unaware that it may not last for ever." It's this epic scope that redeems high melodrama from banality, and O'Hara from insanity, her dramatic oscillations simply partaking of the larger-than-life qualities exhibited by all mythological protagonists, as well as embodying the ceaseless, restless movement of her exile; Cain and Abel in one.