Gone with the Wind [1939 film]

This movie is a classic for a reason, though it could be pretty damn long! An ambitious project for its time, it's nonetheless a pretty solid film and has aged relatively well.

Scarlett is a woman who can deal with a nation at war, Atlanta burning, the Union Army carrying off everything from her beloved Tara, the carpetbaggers who arrive after the war. Scarlett is beautiful. She has vitality. But Ashley, the man she has wanted for so long, is going to marry his placid cousin, Melanie. Mammy warns Scarlett to behave herself at the party at Twelve Oaks. There is a new man there that day, the day the Civil War begins. Rhett Butler.
Produced before MP Ratings; Today's rating would likely be Rated PG

The manipulative daughter of a Georgia plantation owner conducts a turbulent romance with a roguish profiteer during the American Civil War and Reconstruction periods.

Set in the 19th-century American South. Scarlett O'Hara lives at Tara. She is the strong-willed daughter of a Georgia cotton plantation owner. Pursued by numerous beaux she imagines herself in love with Ashley Wilkes, who is to marry his cousin, Melanie Hamilton. When war breaks out she marries Charles Hamilton, but he dies of measles whilst serving with the Confederate Army. During the Battle of Gettysburg many of the men from Scarlett's town are killed and months later she is caught up in the Atlanta Campaign when the city is besieged by the Union Army. Confederacy blockade runner Rhett Butler helps her to escape the city along with Melanie and her newly born baby. They make it home, to find Tara still standing but pillaged by Union show more troops and the fields untended, her mother just passed from typhoid fever and her father suffering what seems like dementia. Scarlett sets her family and servants to work in the cotton fields and married Frank Kennedy in order to pay the taxes on Tara. When Frank is killed she finally marries Rhett, but things do not go smoothly, only the land will prevail.

Lovely to watch this classic movie yet again. show less

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David O. Selznick wanted Gone with the Wind to be somehow more than a movie, a film that would broaden the very idea of what a film could be and do and look like. In many respects he got what he worked so hard to achieve in this 1939 epic (and all-time box-office champ in terms of tickets sold), and in some respects he fell far short of the goal. While the first half of this Civil War drama is taut and suspenseful and nostalgic, the second is ramshackle and arbitrary. But there's no question that the film is an enormous achievement in terms of its every resource--art direction, color, sound, cinematography--being pushed to new limits for the greater glory of telling an American story as fully as possible. show more Vivien Leigh is still magnificently narcissistic, Olivia de Havilland angelic and lovely, Leslie Howard reckless and aristocratic. As for Clark Gable: we're talking one of the most vital, masculine performances ever committed to film. --Tom Keogh show less

A manipulative woman and a roguish man conduct a turbulent romance during the American Civil War and Reconstruction periods. (From IMDb)

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