“Gone With The Wond”, both book and movie…

Great novel and great film!

Leave my wond out of this!

Godammit, *Wind.

Welcome to DL, Captain Obvious!

Wond is love.

I stayed up all night reading the book, even though I'd seen the movie many times and knew what was gonna happen

It's that kind of book

Hollywood/Selznick treatment is all I ever cared about.

And Miss Leigh-

I love it, but I understand the problematic nature of it going in.

The humiliation of Birth of a Nation received the balm of the Lost Cause, in GWTW.

It was a sweet Klan love letter to the Heritage Foundation. But people in the 40s, only saw wistful nostalgia. Pure propaganda.

They need a remake with "Wond"a Sykes as Mammy.

I Wond as I Wander.

The movie is not as racist as the book.

I wonda why OP is so mad.

Margaret Mitchell wasn't responsible for creating these myths - after the Civil War, the entire South started to create a mythology. And it was funded and perpetuated by the Daughters of the Confederacy.

They put up all of these statues to Confederacy officers in the early 20th century. They waited a generation or two to start painting everything over. Margaret was far far behind that.

Fellow Georgian Flannery O’Connor hated “Wind”. She writes about the movie premiere, but doesn’t name it, in the short story “A Late Encounter With The Enemy”. She viewed it as sentimental and manipulative and shallow.

R13 yes, in the book all of the major male characters join the KKK (except Rhett but he harbors them.) This happens in the movie too but the KKK goes unnamed and they aren't shown in robes or anything .

As awful as that may be, I'm able to compartmentalize it in context. I ADORE the movie. There are BETTER movies, but I'm hard presses to name one as ENTERTAINING.

R13, that opening title card was pretty gross. A land of “cotton fields and cavaliers “where “gallantry took its last bow.”

It was 1939. We know why the movie is the way it is. We are all intelligent enough to put everything in historical context. And if it's all too much for your delicate sensibilities, don't watch it.

In other words, GET OVER IT.

It’s a work of fiction, dear

OP and r16 have inspired me to watch it AGAIN and to make my Australian boyfriend watch it with me.

Wond is a pleasant smelling fart

1988- GWTW was screening at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge. I was a Freshman at Emerson, and I convinced my str8 roommate, who I had a crush on, to go with me. He was reluctant since he didn't like old movies.

At the intermission he said to me "this is great."

The movie let out after 1am and the T stopped running. We had to walk back to our dorm together as a light snow blanketed Harvard Square.

Now THAT'S a good memory.

[quote]Margaret Mitchell wasn't responsible for creating these myths - after the Civil War, the entire South started to create a mythology. And it was funded and perpetuated by the Daughters of the Confederacy.

I was 8 years old when I first met Kathy Lee on the playground. We became fast friends, just as thick as Louisiana blackstrap molasses on a stack of johnny cakes as high as an elephant's knee!

Anyway, it was at our Southern seafood fry that I proudly dragged Kathy Lee over to meet my folks. Well, my mother took one look at Kathy Lee and forbade ever to see her again, because her mother was not in the Daughters of the Confederacy.

Oh, how my heart went out to little Kathy Lee, standing there while our servants snickered at her servants. But mama insisted I break off the friendship or I wouldn't get my new riding boots for Christmas. So I did.

Years later to get back at me, Kathy Lee slept with my daddy. That was something I had to accept. Mama accepted it, too, along with a brand-new Cadillac Eldorado for her birthday.

"Gone With My Wind"

You're wrong OP. If she had lived to write more it would hackshit on the level of Robert Ludlum.

It's beautifully crafted but with a message that is horrible and full of lies. A deeply flawed piece of art, but there are merits to studying it and discussing its strengths and shortcomings. It's a piece of history and very much of it's time in 1939, showing how little we changed since the era the story is set in.

I also agree with R25. Mitchell was a shit writer who probably had just one good story in her. The film elevates the source material by prettying it up with jaw dropping costumes and cinematography and truly great performances, but it's still shit at its core.

That movie is 84 years old. In fact, we are further in time from it than it was from the Civil War.

The film was released in 1939, so that's 86 years ago.

In 1939, 86 years ago was 1853.

Of course it is, OP. It's from the 1930s. What are you expecting?

I prefer "Went with the Wind"

I also have two mammy dolls. I like big bosoms and sharp-tongued sisters.

GWTW is one of my favorite movies, I'm eager to see it again.

I've never seen it as anything other than a story about these particular people during this particular time. Hugely cinematic characters caught in a remarkable, historic moment. I'm always glad they show Tara in ruins. I thought that was the message.

I'm from New England and we have our own cultural sensibilities. I don't recall feeling any more favorably toward the South after repeated viewings.

OP is miffed, her mama stole her man & her food stamps!

Agreed. Terribly overrated

I just realized the end of WW2 (1945) was 80 years ago.

For people in 1945, 80 years ago was the end of the Civil War (1865).

Faye Dunaway (b. 1941), Barbra Streisand (b. 1942), and Cher (b. 1946) must seem ancient to young people today.

OP’s plight with GWTW is worse than Iranian women, according to Whoopi Goldberg.

How dare you, little homosexual boy!

As wonderful as Vivian Leigh is, it's Hattie McDaniel's film. She walks away with it.

I prefer "Gonorrhea With the Wind".

[quote] I stayed up all night reading the book, even though I'd seen the movie many times and knew what was gonna happen. It's that kind of book

Great narrative drive. In my reading experience, only The Godfather is similar, but it is by no means its equal in world-building and characterization.

OP - All historical novels whitewash their times. Do novels about Versailles mention the starving peasantry, the rats that swarmed about the Hall of Mirrors, the blood-curdling darkness at night, the horrifying squatters in the lower levels moving like ghosts? How about the trays of food just left around any corner uneaten and spoiled, the ragged peddlers selling trinkets in the stalls, the doors to the chateaux' fence rusted open, the dead bodies behind curtains or in an armoire? All those get left out of the romance of Julien and Amélie. In their magical world, it's all embroidered silk stockings, secret assignations, and gowns in pleasant disarray.

It was not like the painting below, but imagined itself to be --

i read the godfather too. the author slipped in a fantasy about a woman with a too large vagina who falls in love with a dr who fixes her clown car snatch.

this and gone w/ the wind, are examples of why people complain about novels being a waste of time.

I believe the original manuscript taken to McMillan Publishing was partially written in LONGHAND, packed up in a suitcase and a bunch of paper bags. Is that true?

Having worked as an editor and proofreader, the idea literally makes me want to vomit, with burning eyes.

[quote] the idea literally

You were an editor?

I 've always wondered if Mitchell was a bit of a subversive for her time. Mammy and Belle Watling are the moral centers of the book. Scarlett is a human manifestation of the South - captivating but ruthless, willing to destroy others for profit. Ashley and Melanie's characters lampoon the gentility, high minded and idealist but hypocritcal profiteers of slavery all the same. The rest of their class are painted as buffoons eager to rush to war and still unwaveringly proud even after being soundly defeated. Rhett is a more honest observer of them all and himself, but even so, remains unscrupulous and unprincipled.

I really don't see a reverence for the Old South but a mockery of its ideals and its people. With the exception of Mammy and Belle, none of these characters are written with love. Rather, they are written loathing.

I love this movie!! It draws you in in the first 5 minutes and keeps you locked for 4 hours

Who cares if some of it is ridiculous? I know I’m not watching a documentary

Wish I could watch it in a movie theatre

Some phrases become overused because they're good, r43.

[quote]Having worked as an editor and proofreader, the idea literally makes me want to vomit, with burning eyes

The idea worked as an editor? I'll believe it, as you certainly did not.

It’s hardly Juneteenth appropriate, but TCM will probably be showing a progressive lineup of blackcentricity.

r44 Exactly, I saw it as a child and interpreted the characters the same way. And nowadays college educated types scream that it's romanticizing slavery. They're just not paying attention to the film. Reminds me of my conservative father who complains every time Bonnie and Clyde is on tv "That movie romanticizes a life of crime!".

R22 That is one of the sweetest things I've read in a long time. Thanks for sharing that lovely memory with us. Maybe it resonated with me because I was in college during those years too, and harbored secret crushes like that as well.

R22. Did you two fuck?

New wars are usually scheduled for every 80 years-it’s convenient and just better for everyone.

I will give r43 and r48 the benefit of the doubt and imagine they’re actually interested in what I was trying to convey.

When you work as an editor and/or proofreader you have piles of manuscripts and screenplay all around you, waiting to be read, summarized, and commented on. The only thing almost all writers now know how to do well is format, because software exists for that.

So to have that basic clarity ripped away via an ENORMOUS manuscript that’s party typed, partly written out in longhand (and arrives unbound in paper bags and a suitcase) is horrifying.

I don’t even think vomiting and burning eyes are how I’d react. I’d either demand a raise, quit, or jump out the window.

Is “Gone with the Wond” JK Rawlings’ reimagining of the story?

I think the burning eyes image keeps coming to me because I know Mitchell stored the suitcase and paper bags in a closet for years and years, sometimes adding to the pages, sometimes not.

I imagine a lot of cats and mice peeing on them over time. Uggh.

The book is just a big, fat Historical Romance novel.

I think I saw this from Sesame Street before I ever saw the movie. Every single older person I knew let me know it had absolutely nothing to with the film.

When I finally saw it I was disappointed. Where's the fucking hurricane? Tornado?

R54, that didn’t happen. Mitchell typed the whole thing. When Harold Latham of Macmillan received it, it was neatly tied together with strings (the title was Tomorrow is Another Day at that point). The leading character’s name was Pansy O’Hara. After Macmillan agreed to publish it, Mitchell spent six months making corrections and revisions.

“I had every detail clear in my mind before I sat down to the typewriter.”

— Margaret Mitchell

Maggie in the street

Was there an episode of Bewitched named "Gone With the Wand"?

A rare case in which both are masterpieces.

You’re happy she was hit by a car and died, OP? Jesus, live and let live.

Gone with the Whim

[quote] “I had every detail clear in my mind before I sat down to the typewriter.”

[quote]— Margaret Mitchell

Not so much, however, when she was crossing the street.

Okay - correcting my memories:

The rough manuscript given to McMillan editor Harold Latham in Atlanta was not in numerous paper bags and a suitcase; the pages were in about 70 musty manilla envelopes, and he then bought a suitcase to hold them in as he continued his train trip.

“Physically, it was the sloppiest manuscript he had handled in thirty years of editorial work.” (SOUTHERN DAUGHTER: THE LIFE OF MARGARET MITCHELL, Darden Asbury Pyron, 1991)

I'm going to guess that book editors almost a hundred years ago probably had different minimum requirements for manuscripts than some copyqueen ranting on Datalounge in 2025.

Musty manila envelopes! EWWW!

The horror... the horror...

I think the cool thing is that even though it was “the sloppiest manuscript he had handled in thirty years of editorial work,” Latham was immediately gripped by the story.

There were duplicate versions of some chapters and others (including Chapter One) were missing entirely, and there were even envelopes from a completely different project mixed in, but he immediately wanted to schedule another meeting with Mitchell to discuss the book.

[quote]Ashley and Melanie's characters lampoon the gentility, high minded and idealist but hypocritcal profiteers of slavery all the same.

To be fair, Ashley did plan to free his slaves after his father died.

That’s what they all say.

The sequel was worse: Gunt with the Wind.

What a stinker.

The movie was a real accomplishment in film making, given it was only 1939. What a score and some enduring cinematography and costuming.

The book is terrific storytelling. Vividly written, often arch and wry, with well developed characters, especially in secondary characters. There was racism in too much of the prose and the action, without question, but there was also dignity and intelligence in some of the slave characters. It can still be read and enjoyed today, in part because we're smart enough and informed enough not to accept it on its face.

[quote]R67 I'm going to guess that book editors almost a hundred years ago probably had different minimum requirements for manuscripts

Yes. I don’t know what a publishing house or literary agency today would do with a manuscript comprised of “yellowed, moldering pages covered with penciled corrections.” (The Atlantic, 02/01/1973)

Perhaps throw it away.

But Mitchell’s discovery is also an age old case of “It’s Who You Know.” Her old friend Lois Cole had worked in the McMillan offices and told Latham to look up the writer while in Atlanta and try to get a peek at her book. So he was going to read it regardless of whatever state it was in.

It lacked an opening when he got it, as I recall reading, lacked several chapters, had versions of various chapters. She was stubborn about handing it over at all and relented at the last minute, delivering him the mixed up contents in a suitcase. It may all be legend now, but that is what I remember reading. And Scarlett was called Pansy.

Read the thread.

^^ are you referring to something specific?

R77, I think she's mad because somebody - probably her - already pointed out the Pansy thing.

It's a step up from Oh, dear, I'll grant you, but the same small sensibility.

Is it a chapter book?

R69 is 'aight.

What would you say the major themes in the story are?

”The Bluebird of Happiness can be in your own back yard all along”

“Perseverance is rewarded”

R81, “Yankees are bad and the the South was guiltless”.

"Wash the dirt off yams before you eat them on an empty stomach"

"Side saddles can be a pain in the neck"

"Curtains can really be the best costume for the day, you understand."

“Sometimes you have to be a high-riding bitch to survive, Dolores. Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has to hold onto.”

Tara gossip, a relative's relatives met Margaret Mitchell & her husband, circa 1940's, they were an odd couple, Margaret Mitchell was pleasant & talkative, her husband was barely polite, unattractive & overweight.

Miss Vivien Leigh is WOND!!

It’s a WOND-erful movie!

Mitchell's father was an educated man. I believe he thought it was junk.

I'm watching Glory.

“Practically speaking, a seventeen-inch waist is not sustainable, long term.”

[quote]"Wash the dirt off yams before you eat them on an empty stomach"

It was a radish.

“Some people are just mules.”

It’s a celebration of human suffering. It’s like making a romance movie set in Nazi germany with a concentration camp as the setting

^^^ I would go see that movie^^^

I will say that Melanie’s revelation in her (SPOILER ALERT) death scene is masterful.

I don’t think anyone was prepared to hear, “I’ve always known.”

It sounds like a porn parody

GWTW is no worse a depiction of antebellum plantation life than "Jezebel," the Bette Davis movie of the same vintage.

At least GWTW doesn't have the darkies and their little pygmy babies shucking and jiving and dancing in their bare feet and overalls.

^^^I love dat part-Happy Negros everywhere^^^

There are a million books and movies that glamorize certain periods to provide a pretty backdrop for characters and their plotlines. In reality those privileged individuals who lived in splendor did so at the cost of the terrible suffering of others black and white. When Scarlett decides to exploit prisoners to make money and Ashley objects she throws in his face he was a slave owner. When he says they treated their slaves well her attitude is 'yeah right.'

GWTW is certainly less offensive than, I don't know, Dumbo or Taylor Swift's Wildest Dreams shitty music video.

Blake Lively's plantation wedding. And her years of sudiste blanche cosplay in her shitty failed lifestyle brand.

We need a movie called "Gone with the Wund."

Gunt With The Wound

I think it was established that Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta was a racist, and was writing a romance novel about the last days of the Civil War set in Atlanta. I have no idea her intention but I doubt she was making anything resembling a political statement. She was one of those aspiring romance novelists so plentiful in the South. Whatever her intent, the work itself has a life of its own and its very subversive. Dashing Rhett is entirely critical of the Confederacy. He is an opportunist making money and has "friends on both sides, but mostly Yankees. Ashley tells Scarlett the South will certainly be defeated and their way of life will be destroyed. Now there was white trash, like the O Hara Overseer who knocked up his white trash girlfriend. Belle Watling was white, the trashy but decent old whore. And Prissy. Prissy was the most subversive character. Butterfly McQueen should have got an Oscar for spitting at Scarlett. Mammy was in charge. Period. Everyone deferred to her. The scenes of the wounded in the open at the train station was pretty amazing. It's no 12 years a slave, but considering its time, I thought it was more balanced than anyone could expect in 1939 or whenever. Now as determined as Scarlett was, tossing off convention becoming a businesswoman, etc. Rhett's speech to her sort of neutralized anyone thinking the movie had feminist leanings when he said, I like to think Bonnie was you as a little girl. I could spoil her the way I wanted to spoil you, Scarlett."

I don't think the character of Mammy redeems the sins of the movie, but she is utterly fantastic. It's possible that that role just existing makes GWTW a net positive for African-Americans.

I don't think you can rightly say we lost the war. We was more starved out, you might say. That's why I don't understand all these plays about love-starved Southern women. Love was one thing we were never starved for in the South.

Melanie doesn’t say “I’ve always known” but she does tell Scarlett how much Rhett loved her

I just take it for what it is. A Civil War novel told from the perspective of a Southerner, set in Atlanta. Sherman did march to the sea and he did burn down Atlanta. Slavery was important to the Southern economy. There were plantations. Scarlett doesn't give a fuck about the war. She has a very simple opinion. She hates Yankees and supports her friends and neighbors who went to war, many never to return. But she didn't give a fuck about politics. IMO she would have been no different if she had been in Manhattan with white servants. Spoiled, selfish, vain. And certainly not considerate of anyone. Hell she wanted to leave a pregnant woman, in labor in t he middle of a burning city with the enemy advancing and the army, the only law and order possible, "evacuating." She has never been anywhere outside the South, she is uneducated, although she can read, She was in the center of the action and the dangers of war. In the 30's movies weren't explicit, or gritty or realistic.

Exactly, R108. Scarlett is one of those posh women who doesn't give a second thought to anything outside her own little bubble.

I actually think there are six words that redeem Scarlett, and I tear up just thinking of them.

"I'm going to live through this and when it's all over, I'll never be hungry again. NO NOR ANY OF MY FOLK. If I have to lie, steal, cheat or kill I'll never be hungry again."

"No nor any of my folk..." and this included Mammy, Melanie, Ashley and her sisters.

Incredibly moving, and one of the reasons I love her despite everything.

[quote]Was there an episode of Bewitched named "Gone With the Wand"?

Why would there be? Neither Samantha nor Endora used a wand. There was, however, a GWTW parody. Samantha is transported to New Orleans in the 1870s. She meets the handsome Rance Butler and his housekeeper, Aunt Jenny (Isabel Sanford).

R109 - Mitchell based Scarlett partly on her grandmother, who antagonized everyone in Atlanta with her underhanded real estate dealings after the war. She built a huge house, similar to the one Rhett built for Scarlett, a monstrosity. She lived into her 90s and, after she was widowed, she didn't want to live alone, and no one would take her. She had sisters she tried to trick out of their rural home inheritance. Nasty woman.

GOSSIP: In the early 2000s, I met a very old gentleman in the Boynton Beach, FL Barnes and Noble. We got to talking, he had a heavy, courtly Southern accent. He told me that Mitchell was a complete 24-hour alcoholic by the late 1930s. Back then, he had been a Boy Scout and knocked on her door to collect money for something or other. It was around 2 PM. She answered completely drunk out of her mind. A black servant came running and gave the Scouts money.

Later, they were informed that Miss Peggy drank and that they should request funds by mail. I always thought that was why there was never a second book.

R17 Margaret Mitchell didn't like that, either.

[quote] It's beautifully crafted but with a message that is horrible and full of lies.

What message? I only get that it's the story of a beautiful and ambitious woman who's obsessed with someone who represents a decayed civilization (Ashley) while refusing to move on with the new (Rhett) until the very end when she realizes the new is where she belongs. I don't see that the slavery background, as misrepresented as it is, as part of any intentional message.

R110 I never interpreted that to mean Mammy or Ashley. They weren't her folk, She meant her blood kin, her family.

This message:

R115 I guess there's no way to know for sure, I always took it to mean the people who were then-currently stuck at Tara with her. Plus, really Melanie and Ashley were a part of her family by marriage. And she certainly loved Mammy like a family member.

R117, absolutely. She wouldn't have left Mammy in the lurch -- as though Mammy would have let her!

And she was stuck with Melanie because she'd promised Ashley she'd take care of her.

I read the book in high school and my sister reminded me of how evil it was. And I said fiddle Dee Dee

R116 That's not the message at least in the movie.

r115, r116 - What was Mammy's name? Her name at birth, before she became a nursemaid to the Robillard girls.

Scarlett loathes the Lost Cause and people who waste time (and money) mourning the past. All she cares about is securing the future.

R110, your sweet Scarlett and her family profited mightily from the forced labor of slaves

And when slavery was no longer permitted, she profited personally mightily from the forced labor of convicts who were paid nothing directly.

So your sweet, charming Scarlett is nothing but a miserable cunt who benefitted greatly by inflicting pain and misery on others.

Fuck her, fuck the genteel animals who allowed/permitted such arrangements, and fuck idiots like you who romanticize her barbaric behavior.

Would the movie have been as good with Paulette Goddard as Scarlett?

R123 don't care. It's a story. Too bad so sad!

R124 I think Goddard's screen tests are FANTASTIC. If only she was a few years younger. But she could've pulled it off.

Christ, the revisionism and white-washing some of you cling to. Ot romanticize slavery, as seen in some of these responses.

No, Scarlett did NOT consider Mammy "her people." Jesus Christ. She owned the woman, and she was attached to her like any southerner whose mother outsourced child rearing to a black servant (enslaved or "free"), but it was a purely transactional relationship where Scarlett held all the power and Mammy had none. Stop romanticizing that.

And before you come at me and claim Mammy would never "let" Scarlett abandon or neglect her, these are fictional characters. She was [italic]written[/italic] that way, specifically to mask the reality of slavery. No enslaved woman would address her owner that way.

And all of you just lap it up with rose colored glasses, never once [italic]thinking[/italic], and certainly not caring, what the truth of slavery, the civil war, and the (still) entrenched myth of the Lost Cause, are really about. It's just gowns and quotable lines and old hollywood stars for you shallow queens.

It's a great story and yes, Scarlett is far from exemplary but that's what makes her truly fascinating and seductive.

"If Gone With the Wind has a central theme, I suppose is the theme of survival. What quality is it that makes some people able to survive catastrophes and others, apparently just as brave and able and strong, go under? I have always been interested in this particular quality in people. We’ve all seen the same thing happen in the present depression. It happens in every social upheaval, in wars, in panics, in revolutions. It’s happened all the way down history from the time the barbarians sacked ancient Rome, And before that, I suppose, some people survive disasters. Others do not. What qualities are in those people who fight their way through triumphantly — that are lacking in those who do go under?"

"Yes, wars have a way of changing women, whether the women are dressed in hoopskirts and pantalets or in knee-length skirts and bobbed hair. The sorrow and hardships and poverty of the Civil War changed Scarlett O’Hara from a spoiled and selfish but otherwise normal Southern girl into a hardened adventuress, just as the wild period following the World War made modern girls cut loose from their mothers’ apron strings and do shocking things."

R127 Scarlett was in a situation with Mammy that she did not create. But within that wrong situation, Scarlett and Mammy loved each other like family. It's a complex and upsetting situation, sure. But it is what it is. And it's what makes the story all the more interesting.

Please spare me the white liberal guilt. I'm over it.

[quote]R104 I think it was established that Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta was a racist

Re: discrimination, I kind of choked when I came across this while looking through a Mitchell bio, looking up the r66 info:

When she responds to MacMillan’s contract with a six page letter outlining necessary clarifications, clauses, etc., Lois Cole writes back:

[quote]May I take the liberty of pointing out that you are not dealing with a fifth rate Jewish publisher? If your contract had come from Greenberg or even A. A. Knopf your suspicions, in fact all suspicions, might be easily understood. However, the contract came from us and it was the regular printed form which some twelve thousand MacMillan authors have signed without a qualm - In fact, I signed one myself.

"And Mitchell's legacy gets ever more complex when you consider her connection to historic, black Morehouse College in Atlanta.

Researchers in the 1990's discovered that Mitchell secretly sent money to educate young black men.

"We have in our archives, our collection, the bank books, the checks," says college archivist Herman "Skip" Mason.

She never spoke of her donations and delivered the checks by courier so no one would find out.

"It was the 1940's," Mason says. "It was the time. It just wasn't something that you would publicize and announce."

Dozens of black men went on to medical school and careers as doctors because of the notoriously publicity-shy Mitchell.

Atlanta historian Ira Joe Johnson says, the author took an interest in health care for blacks when hospitals denied her cancer-stricken maid care.

"Dr. Martin Luther King in his 'I have a Dream' speech talked about, 'One day, I'd like to have a nation where the sons of former slaves will be able to sit down at the table of brotherhood with the sons of former slave-owners,'" Johnson says. "And I say, at Morehouse, twenty years before Dr. King gave that speech, Margaret Mitchell not only sat down at the table, she pulled out the check."

Given the lasting images of Mammy and Prissy, some African-Americans might bristle at putting Mitchell in the same sentence with a Civil Rights icon.

But like many, Morehouse's Mason is left with these two sides of the enigmatic author and lots of unanswered questions.

What would he like to ask Mitchell if she were alive today?

"I would really want to know, What do you really think about African-Americans?' Mason says. "I mean, just your honest feelings, you know. Whether this was guilt money or whether she thought that this was a great cause we might not never know."

So when R125 is forced into working for free under threat of physical torture and starvation, we can all just laugh and go on our merry way and say "top bad, so sad."

Tops are never bad. They're scarce, though.

Gone with the Wund

You can like it without believing it.

r80 a'ight

[quote] The book is just a big, fat Historical Romance novel.

It's also an effective, still relevant in 2025 expository on why race relations among Americans still the way are they are in the US. Everything is in the book, including the US North talking out of both sides of its mouth with regard to slavery and Blacks.

r95, Melanie never says that. In fact, it's left ambiguous as the whether Melanie knew about Ashley and Scarlett. Even Rhett tells Scarlett, "She wouldn't believe it even if she saw it."

And it's not like they fucked.

R133 take your strawmaiing and your gaslighting and GET THE FUCK OUT.

As awful as the situation (one not created by Scarlett) may have been, within it Scarlett and Mammy had strong family bonds. In the movie (and the book for all I know) there's a reason Rhett says "Mammy is one of the few people whose respect I'd like to have." And there's a reason Rhett says respect rather than admiration or love.

Within the story at some point Mammy was free to leave and she didn't. She took greay pride in her role in the family.

It's a great story with great characters and I feel zero hesitation or guilty about it. If you do, see a shrink, honey chile.

*...zero hesitation or guilt

Even if you hate the story at least some of the money she made from it directly benefited black people

There is no getting around it that the movie's screenplay betrays the central tragic element of the Scarlett Rhett doomed relationship.

Both, out of pride, fear of vulnerability, and simply not believing the other actually is in love with them, never give in, or at least admit to the other, their true feelings.

Rhett, knowing he is helplessly in love with Scarlett and can never give her the power of knowing that because he knows how cruel she is and would hold his love for her over his head "like a whip".

Scarlett, stupidly besotted with Ashley, just plain old doesn't realize she loves Rhett until it's too late- he has fallen out of love with her, finally.

But the screenplay has Rhett 20 minutes in, discussing love with Scarlett.

This is a thread for Della if ever there was one.

Della Reese?

OP goes over the edge proclaiming her superior moral point (correctly) how loathsome the book and film, but then saying it was good the author was killed.

There's nothing more effective in undermining your superiority like proving your own lack of morality or ethics while pretending to the high ground.

The South lost and the Slaves were freed. IMO, Mammy and Poke and Uncle Peter represented the older generation of "house workers" who had become attached to the family and their ways. Prissy represented the younger generation who was happy to spit at Scarlett, only not to her face. Prissy resisted. She rebelled. She did it with a number of devices and tricks. So that's one way to look at it. Mitchell created characters that were more than one dimensional, and she did not ridicule or disparage them. She presented them and their personalities and their status and their situations in the environment she created in her novel. I thought the movie was consistent with the story.

And I do think that from Mitchell's perspective, her White folks were good and honorable, in contrast to Scarlett. Melanie, Ashley, and especially Scarlett's mother Miss Ellen. They prayed together every night. She tended the sick and as Gerald O Hara said when he was reprimanding Scarlett for talking "disrespectful to the darkies" Ellen treated their slaves kindly . Certainly this was not the norm. The horrors of slavery were never shown in GWTW. that was never the intent or the interest of Mitchell. This was a romance novel set in the South during the Civil War. So she glossed over those horrors. We were never allowed to see the slave quarters. Slattery, the overseer was a trashy cruel man, but we were never allowed witness his treatment of the slaves. Mitchell chose to ignore those aspects.

Her focus was on a society and a way of life that disappeared as a result of war. She wrote her novel, and this movie was made during a time of segregation. Movies with Black actors and actresses or entertainers had to be made in such a way that the Black parts could be cut out and a sanitized version shown at theaters through out the South. If you read about Lena Horne or other people from that time, the only way Bojangles and Hattie Mc Daniel could be featured in a movie was as subservient. While we might demand more authenticity, accuracy, truth from stories in these times, in the 1930's 40's, 50's, 60's it was a different world.

If you want to see a really racist movie, seriously, go watch Birth of a Nation. The original. Woodrow Wilson featured it at a White House Screening. That was back when 30,000 members of the KKK marched down Pennsylvania Avenue. The KKK didn't bother to hide either, not only were they heroes in the movies, t hey actually endorsed candidates in local elections.

[quote]R121 What was Mammy's name? Her name at birth, before she became a nursemaid to the Robillard girls.

Peaches Malone.

Her name was Viola.

It was Ruth. No last name.

One thing that gets lost in all this carrying on is the difference between racism and prejudice. Most of us are prejudiced. I am. I know it. It's mild but it's there. Was Mitchell racist? Possibly, in a genuine, of her time way. Yet she was not a hard hearted racist or she wouldn't have given away that money as she did. People are the sum of many parts. Few are all good or all bad. We forget that these days.

R123 She's a fictional character.

I think she stole R123's beau. And possibly her po'teers.

Ms. Mitchell failed to mention that the household slaves like Mammy and Prissy could ALWAYS be coerced/threatened into submission simply by slave owners suggedting they willl be demoted to back breaking work as field hands (under the brutal supervision of overseers) if they don't "shape up."

In downtown St. Louis, there was a privately owned prison where household slaves in the finest St. Louis households where penned up without food and water while they awaited being "sent down the river" to work as field hands on southern plantations, for various infractions to their masters.

One of Scarlett's major characteristics is her coping mechanism of turning a blind eye to a lot of things in order to survive ("I won't think about it today--I'll think about it tomorrow.") I don't think anyone (including the author) thought Scarlett was a perfectly heroic figure. She was human, with a lot of faults, and actually there are many times when the reader or the audience feels superior to her. She's petty, she makes a fool out of herself many times, etc. But she's a survivor at a time when a lot of her friends are going under. She's brazen and gets what she wants without thinking too much of the consequences.

A pretty fascinating character who could have been written as having existed during many other times of historic upheaval. Yes, there was once slavery in the US. There were horrible injustices of all kinds, in history. Margaret Mitchell was writing in the 1920s and 1930s. She wasn't writing the kind of book some of you seem to think GWTW is, some kind of pro-slavery argument. She was writing about one Southern woman's life from before, during, and after the Civil War. One of the most fascinating periods in American History. As a historical novel it's one of the most absorbing and readable, and well written. Just all the research she mut have done--before the internet--is incredible. And then to also create such compelling characters.

R155 you're talking reality. GWTW was not reality it was fiction set in a time during real historical events.

When GWTW premiered the NAACP rightly condemned it and criticized the way they sanitized and portrayed the characters and the story.

Scarlett threatened Prissy with sale south at least once.

"I loved my mammy growing up."

r151 - Ruth is Mammy's name, but it doesn't appear in GWTW. Nor does it appear in two sequels commissioned by the Mitchell estate. It only appears in the third book authorized by the estate. Essentially, the author Donald McCaig pointed out that Mammy had no name. Surprised, the authorized a book telling her story.

Ruth's Journey: The Authorized Novel of Mammy from Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind

I definitely think Scarlett considered Mammy her family. I can’t remember if it was in the book but in the movie she gave another former slave, Poke, her father’s own watch when he died instead of keeping it herself.

[quote] If you read about Lena Horne or other people from that time, the only way Bojangles and Hattie Mc Daniel could be featured in a movie was as subservient.

While Mammy is a servant, she's never subservient. In fact, she has no problem calling Scarlett on her crap and commands the house like a champ. McDaniel's portrayal is masterful in that she never acts happy to be a slave, hardly, she moves around looking positively exhausted at all times but never allows anyone (Scarlett) to demean her in any way.

[quote]r147 Prissy represented the younger generation who was happy to spit at Scarlett, only not to her face. Prissy resisted. She rebelled. She did it with a number of devices and tricks.

Prissy was a strong black womyn.

Ruth X

R163 excellent distinction. You're right. I said it poorly. I meant that her character was viewed by the censors and politicians as "well she's the mammy" Years ago I had a film class on Black Cinema and they talked about the stereotypes applied to black characters. Mammy in GWTW was a real force to be reckoned with.

I feel obligated to remind everyone once more that Aunt Pittypat (Hamilton) was Melanie's aunt, not Scarlett's.

Billie Burke was offered and declined the role of Aunt Pittypat. Apparently original director George Cukor personally selected the brilliant stage actress Laura Hope Crews.

But Scarlett was first married to Melanie's brother Charles so Pittypat was her auntie by marriage.

The only reason they didn’t fuck is because Ashley was too busy sucking as much dick as he could get.

The character dynamics are being stripped of the complexity presented in the book and film. There were certain 'slaves': Pork, Uncle Peter, who were not only status symbols in their presence/possession, they were considered property, yes, also were valued assets to their owners who in Geralds case, helped him know how to present himself as he was new to this culture, and Pork was a coveted and experienced 'asset'. He was both more and less than Gerald, as was Uncle Peter, who was ostensibly charged with being his owners manager and keeper. Without him, she'd have had NO independence as her father believed she had no sense, completely unable to cope without being overseen. Prissy is more character amalgamation of Sipsy, Porks wife, and the daughter they have, names escaping me, and Im too lazy to look-up right now.

Others were more like prized pets, I'd consider this as Mammys role until Ellen's passing, then she was elevated through her owners, as she was the hand rocking the cradle, and she knew it. Not all slave characters are created equal in this world, as Big Sam representing the field hand, was also depicted in a flabbergasting dichotomy, especially when deployed to go and work for the confederacy, and after being freed, he was still loyal to the family that sent him to fight a war to keep him enslaved.

Its so mind bending a reality it should be read by new generations.

It was mentioned above than a similar concept of a romance playing out at a concentration camp would never be attempted, didn't see Schindlers List when Liam and his mistress are horseback riding through the ghettos evacuation??

[quote]The Aunt Pittypat Troll

Thank all the gods and goddesses the Datalounge has an Aunt Pittypat Troll.

We've talked about Billie Burke being a more versatile actress than given credit for. She also was a very strong individual who paid off a mountain of her husband's debts after he lost everything in the crash which probably broke him. The same with Laura Hope Crewes whose character in Camille is very different from that of Aunt Pitty Pat. Wait a minute you're Aunt Pitty Pat! You can't behave like that!

And all of you just lap it up with rose colored glasses, never once thinking, and certainly not caring, what the truth of slavery, the civil war, and the (still) entrenched myth of the Lost Cause, are really about. It's just gowns and quotable lines and old hollywood stars for you shallow queens.

You seem to want a completely different film with the main characters of little interest. Instead you want a semi documentary about slavery and its horrors. Well then who would give a fuck about Scarlett and Rhett and Walter Plunkett's genius? All entertainment at its center is shallow. If you want deep become a coal miner.

[quote]Prissy is more character amalgamation of Sipsy, Porks wife, and the daughter they have, names escaping me, and Im too lazy to look-up right now.

Fuckin' Sipsy? Are you the last living writer from The Carol Burnett Show?

I assumed Friday afternoon drinky-poos were responsible for "Sipsy."

I believe her old granny was called Cryptsy.

They caut the character of Will Benteen out of the film--it's been a long toime since I read the novel but I remember the name. he was (I think) a former sharecropper on Tara who ends up there after the war and helps them with farm stuff, and he ends up marrying Suellen. I think this is why Scarlett married Frank Kennedy--who was Suellen's beau--something to do with Suellen and Will. In the movie--condensed for time--it's different.

*cut

I remember thinking if they'd put him in the movie he'd have been Henry Fonda or someone like that.

[quote] I also agree with [R25]. Mitchell was a shit writer who probably had just one good story in her. The film elevates the source material by prettying it up with jaw dropping costumes and cinematography and truly great performances, but it's still shit at its core.

The book was a publishing phenomenon, the biggest best seller, everywhere. A lot of critics praised it. The movie was more like an addendum to the incredible popularlity and success of the book. You seem to have it backwards.

Benteen was a soldier heading home after the war, who was dumped at Tara near death. They nursed him back to health and he won the confidence of the family. Scarlett married Kennedy to pay the taxes. After Gerald died, with the Wilkes intending to depart, Careen going off to a convent, Will proposed to Suellen since he couldn't stay there with an unmarried woman and he seemed to find something in her to suggest she could be lived with.

Poor Will was in love with Careen. Who was in love herself with a dead Tarleton twin (Brent, I think). Will was pragmatic enough to know he had no chance with Careen.

Either Suellen was less of a harpy with him or he must have taken up booze or drugs.

Is the character of Belle’s “goodness” compromised because she gave KKK arsonists false alibis after they attacked the hobo shantytown?

Didn’t poor Emmy Slattery marry the trashy overseer Scarlett didn’t like?

R184 yes. And she had a baby who died after being born.

"Has been born and mercifully has died." Scarlett's mother was COLD as ice with THAT one.

[quote]he must have taken up booze or drugs

Or the occasional field hand.

OP is full of shot.

Or should be.

I thought Emmy had the baby before she married the overseer. In other words it was illegitimate which is why Mrs. O'Hara says 'Has been born and mercifully has died.' She wasn't cold just a good Catholic woman.

[quote] r188 She wasn't cold, just a good Catholic woman.

Ellen probably wrapped the illegitimate brat's umbilical cord around its neck, and strangled it herself.

All dead babies go to Heaven.

No if it was ilegitimate it most definitely would not have gone to heaven. There is some holding baby soul purgatory. Whether they mix both illegitimate souls with non christened ones I have no idea. As I am both legitimate and christened I am sure I will have no idea because I won't be mixing with that riff raff. Unless the pointless bitchery in heaven is really good.

[quote]No if it was ilegitimate it most definitely would not have gone to heaven.

All baptized persons go to heaven, regardless of the parents. Unbaptized babies and people who have never heard of Christ go to Limbo.

Limbo can’t be that bad

Not after a couple Pina Coladas.

But they serve cherry Cokes in heaven

Dilcey was Pork's wife, and Prissy was their daughter. Gerald purchased both from John Wilkes because Pork and Dilcey married, and Pork wouldn't stop badgering Gerald about it.

In a faintly racist line, Mitchell explains-

[quote]Gerald was likable, and the neighbors learned in time what the children, negroes and dogs discovered at first sight, that a kind heart, a ready and sympathetic ear and an open pocketbook lurked just behind his bawling voice and his truculent manner.

Will no one speak of me?!

Prissy was Dilcey's daughter but not Pork's.

"Why India Wilkes, I just love that dress! I can't take my eyes off it!"

There R196

When I read the book that was the first time I had heard the name India and thought it was pretty.

The actress who played India was one of the possibe Scarletts they'd read while combing through the south on the talent searches. She didn't make any other novies.

Originally Judy Garland was to play Careen O'Hara.

Even though it was a smallish role, she would have had to shoot her scenes during the making of The Wizard of Oz. Ultimately the small size of the role for such an up and comer was not worth the inconvenience of scheduling the two films' schedules around each other, but she would have been wonderful.

TS Eliot probably had it right when he wrote, "Humankind cannot bear very much reality"

It's very normal to try to distance ourselves from the horrible things our ancestors did. Some of the people complaining about the whitewashing of the evils of slavery in GWTW probably have ancestors who dispossessed Native Americans from their ancestral lands. I'm pretty sure I did. I'm not saying that as a defense of Margaret Mitchell. There were white southern authors, her same age, who wrote very sensitively about the harm that slavery had done to black people and how racism and cruelty to black people persisted long after the Civil War. For example, Lillian Smith wrote a book called "Strange Fruit" (not named after the Billie Holiday song) which was a best seller in 1944, although not on the scale of GWTW. (Margaret Mitchell was born in 1900, Lillian Smith in 1897)

As some above have mentioned, I don't think Margaret Mitchell's intent in writing the book was to glorify slavery or even defend it. I think she was fixated on the compelling character of Scarlett O'Hara - and the depictions of the south just before the Civil War and especially in the decades following it were just backdrops for this character. I imagine that Margaret Mitchell, if she thought about it much at all, recognized on some level the evils of slavery, but focusing too hard on it would have put her at odds with the society of her day, and she probably preferred not to think about it.

It's a good, rousing story, but as a moral tale and a novel, it's no War and Peace.

A lot do Horrific shit happened in the past. We should y repeat it but we can’t ignore it.

[quote]r202 TS Eliot probably had it right when he wrote, "Humankind cannot bear very much reality"

Well, HE couldn't take too much reality, we know THAT. The asshole deserted his wife and then had her locked up in a mental hosital, never visiting her once there during her remaining life.

The name Emmy Slattery sounds like the slut she was ‘’Emmy Sluttery’’ Get off this land.

I liked Scarlett. She got shit done

R200, Alicia Rhett was an actual Southern aristocrat.

Was she Ashley's sister?

Didn't Plunkett have a whole troup of assistants designing the clothes for smaller characters? Like that dress for Alicia Rhett.

Did Adrian design all the clothes in TWOO like the munchkins and the population of the Emerald City and the jackets of the flying monkeys and the farm clothes?

Of course, not every costume was personally designed by Plunkett for GWTW or Adrian for TWOO or Travis Banton or Edith Head or Orry-Kelly or any of those Golden Age studio designers. They were only human and could do just so much. As they were all usually working on several projects simultaneously, they mostly focused on the leading female wardrobes and had associates and assistants do everything else, sometimes with their supervision and sometimes not.

In the 1970s I used to see Butterfly on the 104 Bus (going up B'way) all the time. She still had that voice, exactly like Prissy..

I have VHS copies of "Goon with the Wound" and "Groan with the Wand."

Hm. Wonder where I stored them.

I want somebody to make Gone with the Wund

[quote]R210 Of course, not every costume was personally designed by Plunkett for GWTW or Adrian for TWOO or Travis Banton or Edith Head or Orry-Kelly or any of those Golden Age studio designers. They were only human and could do just so much.

True. And in this case, Adrian could have “designed” India’s dress by simply giving his thoughts to an assistant to sketch: “Tailored, brown, high neck. And some big, crouched lace collar or maybe capelet.” And then the assistant might bring back sketches and make adjustments over a period of weeks until Adrian liked it.

Adrian also did a lot of pre production research for the film, being hired early on, and he might have simply handed someone a vintage photo or illustration he’d long ago marked INDIA.

Or - he did many sketches for Scarlett and Melanie that were never used. He could have liked one of those rejected Melanie ideas and just recycled it for India, changing only the color or a few details.

What I’m saying is there are ways Adrian might have “designed” India’s barbecue dress that required minimal effort.

The dress Scarlett wore when she was at the Lumber yard office with Ashley, and India Wilkes caught them in an embrace: It was white, and she wore a white hat and a delicious blue velvet jacket. I loved it. Of course everyone talks about the red dress she wore to the birthday "party" but I loved that blue and white confection.

^^ that is absolutely my favorite dress in the film.

Blue and white is such a classic combination.

There’s a biography on Gilbert Adrian I would love to read: [italic]Adrian: A Lifetime of Movie Glamour, Art and High Fashion,[/italic] published by Rizzoli.

I wonder if it gets into if his marriage to (lezzie) Janet Gaynor was just a lavender one, or more.

Their son Robin said, “We would talk about The Wizard of Oz. I saw that movie as a pretty young kid; in those days kids would go to someone’s house in Hollywood, and if the parents had a screening room, watching a movie was the way they entertained us. I think I was maybe seven or eight years old the first time I saw it. I remember my father saying that was the film he loved the most, because it allowed him to do whatever he wanted to do, including some pretty outlandish things. And he really loved animals, so putting together the look of the flying monkeys was a real highlight for him.”

Rachel’s clothes in BLADE RUNNER are based on Adrian’s 1940s aesthetic:

^^ Hmmm… I wonder why my link doesn’t work.

Search YouTube for[bold] “Blade Runner Costume Design and the Adrian Influence”

Here's my favorite outfit, I can only find a Pinterest photo, sorry. It's the scene where they're packing to go home after their honeymoon and Rhett asks what Scarlett bought for Mammy.

Oh, and I always wished the "woman taken in adultery" dress had been green like in the book.

r214, all good except Adrian didn't design Gone with the Wind. Walter Plunkett did.

In the early 1980s I found a gown with an Adrian Ltd. label (I think from the late 1940s) in a vintage clothing shop. It was solid black crepe with a plunging neckline, wide shoulders, a drapey bold silhouette, ankle length. But the seaming was incredibly complex with all sorts of asymmetrical bias curves and angles. I used it on an actress in a show and it was stunning, so flattering.

!!!!!!

[italic]Où est le petit chéri maintenant ? ? ?

R211 there was an adorable film on YouTube that I can't find anymore. It was her being interviewed either during rehearsals for The Wiz, or maybe there was an off-Broafway production before it went to Broadway.

Anyway, she talked about her role as Queen of the Field Mice. She was adorable. She seemed so thrilled. But it's sad because the role was either cut or drastically reduced by the time it officially opened on Beoadway.

I really with there was a bootleg of that 1975 version of The Wiz. Like Grease when they do it now, it's different.

Mammy knew Scarlett far better than her own parents, they never dreamed Scarlett's motivation to move to Atlanta was to chase a married man. In the book, after a fuss, Scarlett wants to send Mammy away, Mammy's reply: "You can't send me anywhere, I'm free".

Mammy would've made a perfect Datalounger, she was a complete snob who hated poor whites & white trash with money.

Robert Gleckler, a character actor of about 50, was cast as overseer Jonas Wilkerson and filmed his scenes at Tara when George Cukor was still directing the film. After finishing his scenes on a Friday, Gleckler went home for the weekend, and died. He was replaced by the younger Victor Jory.

Gleckler

Jory

Were “Wind” and “Oz” filmed at the same time or one after the other? Either way, Fleming must have been exhausted.

I wish the role of Cathleen Calvert had been larger; her life story ran a parallel course. She was Scarlett’s closest rival in the county and her home life was singular similar to Scarlett’s. Cathleen’s widowed father married “the Yankee governess” who was never accepted. Gerald escaped that fate by marrying Ellen.

Cathleen’s fiancé was killed at Gettysburg as were most local men. After the war, her husband now dead, the Yankee governess went back north. Her older brother who had been one of Scarlett’s many admirers was wounded and dying. He worried about leaving Cathleen on her own so she agreed to marry their plantation’s lower class overseer. “I came to tell you I’m getting married and you’re not invited.” Their two plantations alone had escaped being burned. The Calverts lost both sons in the war. The O’Haras, pitied because there were only daughters, but all three survived it. The final, brief mention of Cathleen in the book says it looked like she’d taken up dipping snuff.

I guess I’d love a book from Cathleen Calvert’s point of view.

R230 Imagine filming two of the most beloved classic films back to back?

As I get older, I realize more and more the lasting impact Wizard of Oz had on American film. To this very day. In its way, it was as important as Citizen Kane.

R230 They overlapped. Oz began filming earlier and wrapped earlier. GWTW started filming with Cukor but following Gable's complaints Cukor was fired and replaced with Victor Fleming. Oz was not quite finished and other directors incl. Norman Taurog, Richard Thorpe, George Cukor himself and King Vidor were hired to complete it. During GWTW production Fleming went on medical leave for exhaustion and was replaced by Sam Wood but I believe he returned to the film to wrap production.

GWTW is only a "classic" to today's youth, who have a vocabulary of about 10,000 words. The average high school graduate of 1940 had a vocabulary of 25,000 words and Margaret Mitchell was considered stupid on the level of James Patterson. Lots of sales, but not a classic of any kind.

The New York Times review of the novel was headlined: A FINE NOVEL OF THE CIVIL WAR; Miss Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind" Is an Absorbing Narrative. "This is beyond a doubt one of the most remarkable first novels produced by an American writer. It is also one of the best."

In 1937, Margaret Mitchell received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for GWTW and the second annual National Book Award for Fiction from the American Booksellers Association.

I had forgotten she won the Pulitzer.

Supposedly, when Bette Davis was at the height of her war with Jack Warner and was about to board an ocean liner to head for England to find new film work, Warner tried to cajole her back by telling her about a new as yet unpublished novel called Gone With the Wind that he was hoping to purchase for her and Errol Flynn. "Gone With the Wind?" she replied, "I bet it's a pip!" and stormed off beginning her notorious (and unsuccessful) strike against the studio.

As far as I know, that was the only attempt to make the film with Davis and Flynn. Of course, after Selznick purchased the rights, Warner soothed Bette's soul by buying the rights to another tale of the olde South, Jezebel, which had just been produced on Broadway with Miriam Hopkins.

R237, I guess I don't mind Clark Gable's Rhett. But I am not a big fan of his. But OMG, I would die to see Errol Flynn in t hat role. He is still the hottest thing on two feet IMO...from that era, he and Tyrone Power. What absolute beauties.

Aside from the way he looks, the great thing about Gable in that role is that he's completely unruffled by Scarlett. Practically everyone one else is overwhelmed by her, but he just laughs.

I don't understand the short shrift given to Clark Gable's acting. I've seen him in dozens of films over my life and he is really wonderful in pretty much everything. Every now and then he's trapped in a "Clark Gable Movie", but he knows his type and his audience and he delivers.

When the material is better, especially GWTW, The Misfits, Mutiny on the Bounty, It Happened One Night, and Run Silent Run Deep he is superb. He was popular but also very good. I'll watch him in anything.

Clark Gable thought the part of Rhett would be perfect for Ronald Colman. I love Ronnie, but I can’t imagine.

Didn't Margaret Mitchell say that Clark Gable is exactly who she pictured when she wrote Rhett? I will say t his. After reading the book, I think the movie was very well cast. Olivia was the perfect Melanie, Vivien was perfect as Scarlett, Leslie Howard was t he perfect Ashley, etc.

I agree, but none of them seemed Southern in the slightest

Well, Vivien convinces me she is with the force of her performance…

R242 I thought she said her choice for Rhett would have been Basil Rathbone. Good God, can you imagine!

Gable is perfect a Butler. It's a helluva performance.

Sorry. I forgot to mention I also have a black market copy of a 16MM-to-VHS-to-CD transfer of "Going Down on Ed Wynn." The quality isn't as bad as it would seem.

From Bud Abbott's famous collection.

'

??

I’m Cammie King’s older sister Diane, originally slated to play Bonnie. But by the time they get to my scenes I’ve grown a few inches….. and [italic]voilà! [/italic]They hire my (literally) little sister.

Bitch’s lucky she didn’t wake up with a goddamn pillow over her face!

Ronald Coleman would have made a great Rhett Butler. Looks, charm, and a great actor.

Ronald Colman was too refined to play Rhett Butler.

I also think Leslie Howard was too old to play Ashley.

Lesley Howard is a big snooze as Ashley. He's such a drip. Hard to see what Scarlett and Melanie saw in him.

Leslie Howard was hit but did seem a little old

I actually would have liked to see Errol Flynn as Ashley. I think he would have been wrong as Rhett too - especially with Bette Davis as Scarlett. He could act, though, especially in world weary types of roles. And it coincidentally would have reunited him with OdH.

[quote]Ronald Colman was too refined to play Rhett Butler.

Only because he played roles where the character was refined. He had swagger too.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of Ronald Colman. I'm sure he COULD play Rhett. I just think he'd be wrong for the role.

Did Ronald Colman ever appear in anything where he didn't play an Englishman? Could he really be believable as a barn-storming American?

Did Vivien Leigh ever appear in anything where she didn't play an English woman, excepting two Southern belles and Cleopatra where no one even pretended to be Egyptian or Roman.

Coleman did well as a roguish Sydney Carton in A Tale Of Two Cities, had a few action scenes in The Prisoner Of Zenda, and won an Oscar for the noirish A Double Life.

Errol Flynn as Ashley???? no. way. Ashley was supposed to be exactly as Leslie Howard portrayed him. A drip. Boring, weak, impractical, etc. maybe even inferentially closeted. He was the typical adolescent girl's dream. Pretty. Gentile. And of course he was part of their set. The Wilkes and the O Haras, etc. it was a tight knit clique of planters. Rhett was sexually attractive. He was dangerous, and had a past. Dangerous in the sense that he was not constrained by their conventions. Errol Flynn would have made a spectacular Rhett.

A gentile, R258? Why no wonder he was my absolute ideal!

No adolescent girl ever had a thing for Ashley the way Leslie Howard portrayed him.

You know how much I love Errol Flynn, but he was only 31 when filming started and still looked boyish. Howard was definitely too old to play Ashley and I used to think his portrayal was laughable. After numerous rewatchings, I've come to appreciate his performance. He has two bad moments, one when he returns after the war and he and OdH are running towards each other. Not his fault, it's the director's fault, but the scene is laughable. The other bad moment is later, when he throws his head to the side and says, "Oh, can't we go away and forget we ever said these things?" But he's very good in the rest of the movie, especially when with Gable.

Ronald Colman always read 54. Too old to play Rhett.

Ashley was the Romantic Ideal. And yes when adolescent girls develop their first crushes, it's usually with some wimpy pretty boy. A Timothee Chalamet type, Not some virile, manly man. I'm generalizing. Keep in mind I am not talking about today's teenagers necessarily. But back in the 30's and 40's it was certainly so. I think Ashley represented all the things Scarlett was not. Scarlett and Rhett were more alike than she realized in terms of flouting convention. It was only after Bonnie was born that Rhett appreciated the benefits of being accepted in society for the sake of his child.

In the 1960s, too, r263.

We forget how big a star and heartthrob Howard was in the 30s. I don't believe any critics at the time questioned him in the role. Maybe there were some but it has never been noted in what I've read. Also the teen Bacall had a crush on Howard not Bogart. Also Howard plays a not unsimilar role in The Petrified Forest. An attractive melancholy not for this world individual. What teenage girl who's not a cheerleader could resist?

Howard was considered "classy" in the same context as Fred Astaire. And he'd played Romeo opposite Norma Shearer just a few years before GWTW.

This is the same decade in which Bing Crosby and Nelson Eddy were considered heart throbs.

You have to get in a 1930s mind set to understand the appeal. Howard at the time was the perfect choice for Ashley.

Howard was hot but he looked middle aged

R267 while I don't disagree, as I thought about it, I remembered certain kids I knew in high school who always looked older. One girl in particular named Crystal. She was a very plain, borderline homely girl, slightly over weight, and another Gay friend of mine observed that Crystal would grow into her looks...when she was 40.

Leslie Howard at the age he was in Petrified Forest. Actually maybe a little older. Scarlett would’ve devoured Petrified-Forest- Ashley.

There had to be another actor in Hollywood who was the right age and looks. Who could also act…

^ answering my own question: Joel McCrea…Randolph Scott?

or—bear with me—Gregory Peck?

The actor who portrayed Ashley could not be someone perceived as having anything resembling the popular notions of strength. He was scholarly, read books, got lost in history, talked about poetry. And he could never outshine the #1 actor Clark Gable. They could never be seen as co-equal. They had to project different energy. Ashley was passive, not aggressive. He was swept away by events, by pressures, while Rhett swam against the currents and made his own way. Very successfully too.

How would you cast it today?

Well, DEI has to cast it according to Hollywood& Screen Actors Guild

Directed by Tyler Perry.

and Cynthia Erivo as Ashley Wilkes

Jennifer Lawrence as Prissy

Younger Natalie Dormer as Scarlett. (But you need someone with a sense of humor to balance out the ruthlessness.)

I’m surprised by the unmitigated harlotry on display at the movie’s premiere in Atlanta.

How were Gable and Lombard allowed to attend together when they were married to others?

How were Leigh and Olivier allowed to attend together when they were married to others?

When GWTW was cast Joel McCrea was just a boy ingenue, kind of a pint-sized Gary Cooper, no gravitas.

And Randy Scott was openly living with Cary Grant. Again, no gravitas.

Leslie Howard had gravitas!

Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott really don't work as Ashley. Physically, both were way too big and imposing.

David Niven might have made a good choice. Watch him in Wuthering Heights. Right age, right look...

That said, I never found him remotely attractive, but he was a good actor.

I’ve read a few books and watched a few documentaries on the making of the movie of GWTW. I can’t remember if any other actors were considered for Ashley. I do remember that Howard did not want to be in the film, and Selznick obsessed over Howard’s receding hairline and that Howard might look too old without the right make-up, lighting, and other camera tricks.

R281, Leslie looked "southern."

Howard accepted the role he hated in exchange for Selznick letting him direct the upcoming INTERMEZZO remake.

There are short wardrobe tests of Leslie Howard for GWTW in which he tries on different hair pieces, all very subtle.

There are also some clips of other Ashley auditions including Melvyn Douglas (who IIRC Selznick knew was too brawny - and maybe too Jewish) and Jeffrey Lynn (I think that was his name). Maybe a couple of others as well.

I believe Norma Shearer was a possible Ashley, too.

R285, Mary Kate blocked her from getting that one.

R250 Colman was also short.

Leslie Howard had the right poetic and noble qualities for Ashley. I don't think it was his best performance, it's very good, but not his best as he had to play it straight and boringly noble, without any dash, irony, or humor, as he had in other roles. But he was the same type in The Petrified Forest and nobody else seems to have had that kind of attractively poetic and doomed qulaity.

*quality

Not to mention a very poor version of a southern accent, r288

R290 I don't really care about the accents.

Why don't they have Mass. accents in Little Women? No one cares.

I don't remember Olivia de Haviland having much of a Southern accent either.

It comes and goes - but it's a little more convincing than Howard's

There are quite a few different southern accents to choose from. There are some which are hardly noticeable, others which are hardly understandable. There's the Jimmy Carter "cracker" accent, the Texas twang, the Tidewater Virginia strange "o" sound, Appalachian southern , which is its own language, and sort of a generic genteel Southern accent, often used in films - a Mississippi drawl might be an example.

It's cute to see Fred Armisen go through a map of the US changing states.

Of course other actors were considered for Ashley. Melvyn Douglas was one but Selznick correctly considered him too beefy. Also Douglass Montgomery, the guy who shows up in some of Vivien Leigh's screen tests. But I'm sure every weasely actor in Hollywood was considered for the part.

Even the sissy doorman at the Beverly Hills Hotel

Wasn't Leslie Howard a sort of matinee idol type? Like, in the Scarlet Pimpernel? A character who poses as effete and snobbish, and has a hidden identity as some daring dashing spy type, a James Bond for the 1700's. His characters were always sort of elegant upper class guys. He could have been cast as Mildred Pierce's husband. But I liked Burt as he was.

Lucy was tested for Scarlett, but Gary talked her out of it.

Thanks for the Ashley updates. Leslie Howard had a beautiful voice. You forget his age if you just listen to him speak.

Leslie Howard only had 4 more years to live after GWTW

OP, are you pret?

I know Leslie Howard died in a plane crash but was it the same one as Carole Lombard?

Bogart and Bacall's daughter was named Leslie after Leslie Howard.

No Leslie Howard's plane was a targeted WWII Luftwaffe downing of a commercial airliner in Spain. Lombard's crash was accidental in California.

R299 Lucy did read for Scarlett, She didn't test, though. She studied with an accent coach for a while first. The reading was during a rainstorm and Lucy arrived soaked. She did the audition in front of a fire.

The Burning of Atlanta sequence especially would have given Lucy a lot of opportunities for pratfalls, etc.

Ta this verra day, Gen'l Sherman's name cannot be spoken here!!!!

Is it ever addressed in the book why “Scarlett” isn’t spelled “Scarlet”?

(And is her first name Katharine?)

R309 "Scarlet" is a color, "Scarlett" is a surname.

wikipedia

R309 "Katy Scarlett" and they were Irish, so maybe Kathleen?

According to Wikipedia she was named Katie Scarlett, after her father's mother.

Joseph Cotton as Ashley?

Or Robert Taylor?

Joseph Cotten was not in Hollywood movies until 1941 (Citizen Kane), but he woouldn't have been a bad Ashley.

I wish they'd done a Lux Radio Theater version of GWTW...of course they would have had to do it over at least 2 broadcasts.

[quote]I thought she said her choice for Rhett would have been Basil Rathbone. Good God, can you imagine!

I had never heard of him; I had to look him up. He reminds me of Gene Wilder.

Basil Rathbone was apparently the choice for Rhett of quite a number of Southern women.

Of course, the Rhett of the book is (in my opinion) very different from Clark Gable. From the description, he seemed more like John Gilbert, to me. Rhett was dark (I think). Gable was not as dark in color as he looked in b&w. He had grey eyes and brown, not black, hair.

(But I loved Gable as Rhett.)

Wasn't Basil Rathbone firmly established in his role as Sherlock Holmes?

^^^Plus he was in 'The Adventures of Robin Hood" as the Evil Sheriff of Nottingham with Errol& Claude and Olivia.^^^

R321 I think they were talking about a physical type, not a preference for the actor per se.

They were talking about the actor.

Randolph Scott was actually from the Southern aristocracy. He grew up in Virginia.

First of all Robert Taylor was all wrong for Ashley and second of all, LB Mayer would never have loaned him out to play such a weak and effete character.

I could see MGM's other Robert, Robert Montgomery but he might have looked too old for Ashley at that point. Or fort aht matter MGM's other OTHER Robert, Robert Young. Or......maybe even Robert Cummings.

Wasn't Patric Knowles considered for Ashley? He played Will Scarlet in The Adventures of Robin Hood and was exactly the right type. Just probably not a big enough name for Selznick.

Joseph Cotten would’ve made for a VERY interesting Ashley if rumors of his ethnicity are true but I don’t think he was good looking enough. I still like Randolph Scott in the role. Very classically handsome and -blonde- which was necessary to contrast with Gable. I don’t know if he was a good actor. I can’t remember seeing any of his films as I don’t like westerns. Ashley is a very subtle role.

Ashley is a mincing prisspot.

^^^YES, yes, she is a "mincing prisspot" but that is how Margaret Mitchell wrote him in GWTW.

[italic]Ashley Wilkes is an insatiable bottom!

Stephen Collins played Ashley in the TV sequel!

I'm SHOCKED that no one is posting all those audition reels from the Selznick archives! They're verrrrrrry interesting.

In one of the "Making Of" documentaries they show a typed tally of write in votes fans did for different actresses.

Frances Farmer got 5 votes.

R328, what were the rumors of Cotten’s ethnicity?

Some black ancestry. I don’t know if the rumors were around when he was active or if they started after his death.

Wrong thread, OP

Randolph Scott wasn't a good actor (not a bad actor, but not a good actor). Also, taller than Gable.

And gay as a goose!

Gayer than color TV!

Randolph's rainbow shone so bright, he made Technicolor look like black-and-white!

All kidding aside, in actuality Randy was very straight-acting (if he was even gay). Nothing gay in his manner.

I've always found Randy rather wooden and bland. Blanding up so many otherwise perfect Paramount pictures, along with Fred MacMurray.

Whatever you think of his age appropriateness Howard gives a fine performance. Melanie and Ashley are roles almost impossible to pull off to be convincing. Yet Olivia and Leslie are excellent.

Randy Scott did not have that "dreamer" or intellectual quality necessary for Ashley.

Okay, was there another British actor who was younger who could’ve pulled it off?

Laurence Olivier?

Ivor Novello???

Ashley Wilkes is American

Yes but we’ve run through the US actors and none of them really suit.

Olivier, hmmm.

And Olivier bleached his blonde for various film roles....Orlando in As You Like It and Hamlet (that was post GWTW).

But IIRC at the time of VL's casting, Selznick was trying to keep them apart and out of the press as a romantic couple as they were each married to others and he feared a scandal. That may have prevented LO from being considered for Ashley.

Back then nobody knew the ages of actors. You would have had to look up an actor's birth date someplace. It'd probably take a trip to the library. Howard had been a star for maybe less than a decade. He often played somewhat younger.

Today everyone has access to the ages of every actor and they spend a lot of time writing about how age-inappropriate some actors are, either alone or in relation to other actors.

Another thing about today, vs. then: I will say Howard looks a bit older than I remember him looking in this film when I saw it on the screen--because these restorations are often not as accurate as they claim to be--as well as being too sharp and hi-def. Technicolor was a three-strip process and there was often a slight softness due to the less than razor-sharp alignment of the strips. Besides, makeup and lighting were tested a lot for an important film like this and Selznick was a stickler. I'm sure Howard looked his best, originally, and you didn't see the signs of aging as much. While I like seeing a sharp image, they really are "restoring" some of these films beyond what they ever looked like and taking away some of the beauty.

Forgot about Leigh/Olivier affair.

Not old?

R346 - I mentioned David Niven is this thread.

R352 - I like Leslie Howard, but there's no getting around his age. See R353

r353 He looks like Miss Hathaway there.

I love David Niven but always thought he was most effective in comedies and light fare. Can't see the gravitas of Ashley in him. And he'd look hideous as a blonde.

Is Ashley a blonde innthe novel?

Henry Fonda, Dougie Fairbanks and Richard Greene could have all played the part being more age appropriate but the fact that we're having such difficulty finding another Ashley shows you how good Selznick's choice was.

Don't underestimate Leslie Howard's natural blondness. I really believe it went a long way in getting him cast, though Selznick might never have admitted it at the time. There were not many blonde male movie stars back then.

A bluray or 4k of an old movie brings out more than a movie audience would have seen in the large old movie theaters of the past. I never realized how much those old film formats picked up. It can almost be like watching a film under a microscope. This is bluray not 4k but after all the times I've seen Funny Girl I had never seen Babs' acne scars before. And close-ups of Robert Redford's moles do him no favors. Also in the 4k of SITR you see a bruise on Charisse's leg when she extends it. Never saw that before either.

R360 Wow, never saw the bruise. I'm sure that wasn't meant to be seen!

Also--film has its own look, when shown on a screen. When seeing old movies in a theater, if they're actually on film, the image seems to have a more life-like quality. There seems to be depth than you get on a TV screen. Even b&w movies seem more like they're happening in front of you and less "flat."

I have seen singing in the rain many many times in the movie theaters when there were revival houses in New York and I also saw it twice at Radio City. In the many times I've seen it I've never seen the bruise only with the most recent 4K. Which is pretty amazing because the original negative was lost in a fire in the late 70s. I don't know what they did to make it look so good.

Singin' not Singing

The War of the Worlds (1953) was made in 3-strip Technicolor. The special effects were tested and previewed and so forth, extensively, and no wires were visible holding up the Martian machines in the original release (Again, Technicolor was a particular process that looked a certain way). When new prints were made for TV, later, they were done with a different process, and the wires were visible. This was also true on a restored DVD released some years ago. When Criterion did a new release, they took the wires out, feeling they were being true to the original Technicolor version, since the wires weren't visible in the original release.

[quote]Ivor Novello???

I'm unfamiliar with him, and I struggle to picture him with light hair and eyes.

I watched Lullaby of Broadway in High Def recently and I was shocked, SHOCKED at the size of Doris Day's acne scars. So many of these things were blurred by the simple vibration of the film running through a projector back in the day but now the image is rock steady and you can see everything you weren't meant to see like Scarlett's wrinkles when she's supposed to be 16 on the porch with the Tarleton twins.

Doris Day always joked that at Warner Bros. they applied her makeup with a trowel. I guess the joke's on her now.

She also joked the make up was so thick it looked like it was put on by embalmers.

You're right. I've seen the film so many times yet I still say Singing.

R367, R368 But that was to cover her freckles.

I’ve noticed that a lot of movies from the 80s with lots of special effects look shoddier on TV than in the big screen. Green screen is much more apparent as are images that looked pasted in. I think the larger the projection, the smoother everything looked. And I am talking about big budget films like “Ghostbusters” and “Temple of Doom”.

R353 That's from a trailer of the later re-release, by the way. GWTW had no trailer featuring the stars or scenes from the film when originally released. The movie was re-released in 1967 in 70mm and Metrocolor--aka Eastmancolor--a 1 strip process. Not Technicolor. So I can't vouch for how good or bad anyone looked in it. I did see the movie that way several times, and it looked somewhat washed out vs. how it looks now.

They also had to change the title from one that swept across the screen to a title that simple read "Gone With" on top, and "The Wind" on the bottom. Making the screen wider, meant the top and bottom of the image had to be cropped, so the sweeping title no longer fit on the screen.

I remember my mom asked me, what did you think when the title swept across the screen? And I said, It didn't. We couldn't figure that out at the time.

I saw Wind a few times that way when I first saw it as a boy so that's the way it should look to me being an epic. Now when I see it in its correct ratio it looks like Ben Hur with Heston in 1.33. It just looks plain wrong. Where's the epic sweep? Well I'm sure all those 70mm prints are long gone.

Hur with Heston in 1.33. Just plain wron.

WAY too much of the image was lost when it was converted to 70mm. That's a terrible format to see it in.

Just for the curiosity factor, I always hoped they would have added the 70mm version as a bonus feature on one of those multi-disc Blu-ray editions they used to put out every few years. Hide it deep in the menu so no one mistakes it as the intended cut but make it viewable so fans can see GWTW in that format--good or bad--for ourselves.

R374. You're right. But when you've never seen it before you have no idea. When this version was released in '67 it was a big hit. Running for close to a year in some places. I bet a lot of those people had already seen it before and were going for the 70mm stereophonic sound gimmick.

R373 I'm usually big on correct aspect ratios.

But when TCM showed GWTW (when I still got TCM), I would always "fix" the aspect ratio by changing it to fill the TV screen. That isn't quite 70mm, but in the "corrected" TV-width aspect ratio it looked more like the GWTW I remembered. Strangely enough, it didn't really cut off much of the image or look bad.

When I was a teenager I used to live close to a $1.00-a-ticket theater that had a Saturday matinee of old movies they deemed appropriate for children, and I'm a big old-movie buff so I used to go, to see these movies on the big screen, like The Yearling. Mostly Technicolor MGM movies from the '40s. What surprised me is that they were all cropped. Not "square screen". The credits were often a bit cut off at the top and bottom.

R372 So you were watching it in 1.85 or thereabout?

There was a lot of controversy about a year ago or so with the Lean film Summertime on bluray. When it was shown in theaters when it opened in the mid 50s it was shown in the cropped 1.85. Criterion insisted on releasing it in 1.33. People were not happy. Maybe people could do the same thing with this film?

Sorry I meant R377.

I've never had GWTW in any format so I'm waiting for the 4k.

R379 16:9, I guess. Whatever a standard old flat screen HDTV is.

(1.66:1)

I also watched the Summertime blu ray in both 1.33:1 and in 1.66:1, and I think the latter works far better. Though it occasionally cuts off the top of a building. There is way too much head room in 1.33:1. Dramatically, and in the compositions (including dialogue scenes) 1.66:1 actually makes the movie better dramatically. Hepburn's close ups register better, also.

Why would lean have framed a shot with this much headroom? It's not showing anything, it's just a lot of space and too far from the actors. (In my opinion.)

How much you missed if you saw it in 70mm.

Well, it wasn't *our* fault.

In most of the history of GWTW, the posters have featured only the 4 stars in the cast, no other actors' names. This was a decision made in 1939 and it was carried through for decades (may still be). No Thomas Mitchell, no Hattie McDaniel, no Laura Hope Crews or Evelyn Keyes or Ann Rutherford or Barbara O'Neill.

Vivien, Olivia, and David Selznick attended the 1961 Civil War Centenary in Atlanta, and the re-showing of GWTW where it premiered.

Vivien was greeted by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.

Nobody mentioned Doug as a possible Ashley. Of course he probably looked more like the book's Ashley than any other actor. But he was no Leslie Howard in the acting dept.

I did at R358.

R389 Matter of fact, I did read your post. Oops.

But I was caught up in trying to picture Fonda as Ashley (seemed wrong somehow, too dark) and I didn't pay too much attention to your mention of Doug.

I haven't seen this for many years but there were caricatures of actors as possibly choices in GWTW, maybe from a movie magazine. Joan Crawford as Scarlett, Gable as Rhett, I think Janet Gaynor as Melanie, Walter Connolly as Gerald O'Hara. Connolly was fat, and they had him going over a jump, on a horse. Wish I could find that.

By the way I think Selznick also mentioned two other actors he was considering for Rhett--Gary Cooper and Fredric March. March would have been okay, no Gable but at least not miscast. Can't see Cooper as Rhett at all.

I'm sure Selznick had to put some other viable options for Rhett out there or Gable would have had to have been paid even more money.

Fairbanks was all wrong for Ashley. Crawford's boy toy? Too frivolous, seen too much as a party boy back then. The original Nepo Baby.

MGM loaned Gable to Selznick in exchange for MGM distributing the film. Normally, Selznick International films were distributed by United Artists. MGM also financed half the production. Selznick covered Gable's salary and I think agreed to MGM getting half the profits.

The first credit on the film reads: Selznick International Pictures in association with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer presents".

How much was Gable paid? How much was Vivien paid?

R372 the original format was basically a square (as opposed to wide screen rectangular) so blowing it up to fill your screen, you don't lose too much picture.

I once saw the original aspect ratio compared to the 1967 aspect ratio and I swear it looked like they lost at least 30% of the image, if not more.

It used to drive me nuts with the syndicated Seinfeld circa 2009. They started cropping the original picture for HD. So much of the image was lost. It actually hurt the comedy. I'd rather have an HD transfer with the boxes on either side.

The Seinfeld thing bothers me too.

The series Family when shown on Tubi was cropped for wide screen TV. I had recently watched it on Youtube in bad prints (but the correct aspect ratio). I couldn't get used to it--the quality was great, but the cropping made everything look too close.

Disney was notorious for releasing live action movies shown in theaters at 1.85 on vhs in television ration.

Lean filmed Summertime knowing it was going to be cropped. Which is why a number of people were annoyed with Criterion releasing it in 1.33. They made their displeasure known in advance and the powers that be at Criterion said tough luck.

Disney also released a lot of movies on DVD in TV ratio.

r386, for the 1998 reissue, Hattie McDaniel, Thomas Mitchell, and Butterfly McQueen were added but once they changed the poster again, for the 65th or 70th anniversary reissue, it was back to just Leigh and Gable.

R401 Thanks, that's interesting. Just Gable and Leigh for the 65th or 70th, though? It was always Gable, Leigh, Howard and de Havilland in equal-size billing before that.

(In 1939, it was Gable "as Rhett Butler", Howard, de Havilland, and "presenting" Vivien Leigh "as Scarlett O'Hara".)

Didn't people know Leigh from Fire Over England? It opened at Radio City. But I guess nationwide it wasn't such a hit.

She was also in A Yank At Oxford, with Robert Taylor, which was an MGM picture (but made at their British studios). Maybe it was kind of like Audrey Hepburn, who got a "presenting" credit in Roman Holiday. She had been in British films up until then.

R393 by the end of the 1930s he was a respected actor