THE missing chandeliers and shoes of Gone With the Wind are to be restored to their original glory in a new cinema release.

The film will be shown in its correct shape and with its vibrant original colours for the first time in nearly 40 years.

Changes made in the 1960s that muted the colours and sliced off the top and bottom of the screen have been reversed in a new digital version to be shown in December at the National Film Theatre.

When Gone With the Wind first came to Britain in 1940 it was projected on nitrate film stock and in Academy Ratio, a thinner and taller shape than modern widescreen presentations.

It was the longest that film audiences had seen and one of the first colour features. It immediately captured the imagination of British filmgoers at one of the bleakest moments of the Second World War and became the most successful film ever shown.

Gone With the Wind was transformed in 1967 as cinemas embraced the Cinemascope format. Film executives believed that the new shape would enhance its epic theme, but they doubled the width of the film by cropping the top and bottom of the picture. The colour in this rereleased version was also distorted because it was printed on safety stock, a material that produced more drab pictures but was not liable to burst into flames.

The digital version will not only reproduce the colours of the original, but will improve them. Ned Price, who worked on the film for Warner Brothers, said that the digital techniques allowed him to get a better picture than any previous version. “The digital process sharpens the facial features and the texture of clothing,” he said. “It also yielded better colour resolution.”

Gone With the Wind was shot on three strips of negatives that would be combined to make a colour film. In theory these negatives should have identical images, but in practice they are not perfectly aligned.

When Rhett Butler sweeps Scarlett O’Hara off her feet, the cyan image of her dress might move ahead of the magenta image, causing a blurring of colour. With digital processing, the images can be reshaped for the colours to match perfectly.

The restoration of the negatives, kept at the George Eastman House archive in New York, took 100 people nine months to complete — half the time required for a traditional photochemical restoration.

The National Film Theatre is also showing a season of restored films as part of The Times bfi London Film Festival, including a new, crisp version of Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront.