As its 75th anniversary approaches, “Gone With the Wind” is again being celebrated as a timeless movie classic. But now, even the film’s distributor acknowledges the Civil War epic’s portrayal of slavery is dated and inaccurate.
“Gone With the Wind” is getting new screenings and is being reissued Tuesday in a lavish home-video box set, including a music box, an embroidered handkerchief and more than 8 hours of bonus features.
To produce something new for yet another “GWTW” box set, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment brought in filmmaker and historian Gary Leva. “‘There’s been a ton of stuff about the making of the film,’” Leva recalls the studio telling him. “‘Can you give us a deeper look at how the movie portrays the Civil War?”‘
Leva responded with the 30-minute documentary “Old South/New South,” which drew a surprisingly frank conclusion for a studio-commissioned commemorative project: One of the world’s all-time great films also has great shortcomings.
In the documentary, which is included in the box sets out this week, historians discuss how the film has perpetuated mythology dubbed “The Lost Cause,” which proposes Southern involvement in the Civil War was solely for noble reasons, including defense of states’ rights.
“But when you get right down to it, what state right are you talking about?” asks University of North Carolina history professor David Goldfield in the Leva film. “You’re talking about the right of individuals to own slaves.”
Based on Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 best-seller, “Gone With the Wind” is fiction, about a spoiled Old South socialite, Scarlett O’Hara. But the real-life war that serves as her story’s backdrop looms too large in the film for many to overlook.
“(Slavery) is such a component of the movie, and the characters who you are rooting for are oblivious,” noted film critic and TCM host Ben Mankiewicz.
Actress Hattie McDaniel, who played Scarlett’s devoted nanny Mammy, a slave, became the first African-American actor to be nominated for and win an Academy Award.
Nevertheless, the film’s portrayal of black characters has been criticized ever since the world premiere in Atlanta on Dec. 13, 1939.
-The Associated Press
