In Frankly, My Dear: “Gone with the Wind” revisited, Molly Haskell, the author of From Reverence to Rape: The treatment of women in the movies (1974), turns her attention to one of the dubious classics of Hollywood cinema: GWTW, as the film is known by its many fans. Three individuals, Haskell explains, were central to the film’s making and enduring popularity: Margaret Mitchell, the author of the bestselling novel, David O. Selznick, the wunderkind producer, who put the novel on the screen, and Vivien Leigh, the then little-known British actress, was chosen for the leading role over numerous American stars. It was the “deep-down tension in Mitchell, Selznick, and Leigh between vulgarity and refinement” that, according to Haskell, made the film work.

Like her creation Scarlett O’Hara, Mitchell was self-willed and changeable. A rebellious Southern belle who was refused admission to the Atlanta Junior League for performing the “Apache dance” at a debutante ball, she went on to marry a less appealing version of Rhett Butler, whose brutish, ne’er-do-well behaviour propelled her to seek independence and a livelihood as a journalist. She began to write fiction after her second marriage, this time to a version of Ashley Wilkes, who indulged her in the lengthy process of writing and revising Gone with the Wind. (Mitchell completed the novel in the 1920s but fiddled with it for years. When it was finally published in 1935, the delay worked to its advantage: the tale of grit in the face of hardship was a perfect fit for Depression-era America.) With the advent of fame, Mitchell settled into respectability, embracing the role of the staid Southern matron that her younger self had gone to such lengths to escape.

Selznick set his sights on Mitchell’s novel soon after it was published, despite warnings that it was too long and complicated to be adapted for the screen. Selznick had a gift for making emotionally intense “women’s pictures” while adding enough action to satisfy a male audience. He also had a great respect for literature, insisting on fidelity to the source (in his next project, the adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, this reverence would irritate his director, Alfred Hitchcock). Selznick threw himself into the making of Gone with the Wind with unparalleled fervour, spending far beyond his budget and becoming deeply embroiled in the process on every level. One of his most notable battles involved wresting the famous line “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” from the censors. According to Haskell, Selznick took to referring to Mitchell’s novel as “the American Bible” to forestall censorship – after all, how could one change a work so sacred to the American public?

Finally, there was Leigh, whose fragile beauty, passionate nature and devotion to craft made her the ideal Scarlett O’Hara. She was able to turn this profoundly selfish character into someone audiences could care deeply about. Leigh, at the time, was in the early throes of the affair that would lead to her marriage to Laurence Olivier, and had not yet begun to exhibit the symptoms of mental illness or the tuberculosis that would eventually kill her. Haskell notes that some of Leigh’s best scenes were done after she returned refreshed from a weekend between the sheets with “Larry”.

Using these three as her anchor points, Haskell moves from them to address related topics. She discusses how Scarlett derives from Becky Sharp (though Mitchell claimed not to have read Vanity Fair), while pointing forwards to Madonna. She notes how Ashley and Rhett (borrowing from Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe) are structurally the Rowena and the Rebecca of the narrative. Depending on one’s taste, Ashley is poetical or a wimp; Rhett, coarse or manly. She describes how the vast parade of characters was sifted for the film and felicitously cast – one of the triumphs of the Selznick movie is that it is hard to picture others in the leading roles. Ronald Colman as Rhett Butler or Katharine Hepburn as Scarlett? Impossible.

Also discussed are the technical elements that turned the book into lavish spectacle: Max Steiner’s swelling score (he was told by Selznick to “just go mad with shmaltz in the last three reels”) and the art director William Cameron Menzies’s masterful handling of the new technique of Technicolor and dramatic composition of scenes, mapped on detailed storyboards. The script, by Sidney Howard, was a marvel of compressed fidelity to the novel, though this didn’t prevent Selznick from bringing in other writers and making his own additions. Two directors essentially divided the film between them: George Cukor, beloved by both Leigh and Olivia de Havilland, began the project, only to be fired and replaced by Victor Fleming, the consummate man’s director and friend of Clark Gable. The result, ironically, gave the film the best of both worlds: Cukor directed some of the core emotional scenes, while Fleming managed to elicit vulnerability and depth from Gable.

It has been said that the three most influential films in the history of Hollywood are Birth of a Nation, The Jazz Singer (1927) and Gone with the Wind, and that all three use the oppression of African Americans to build a heroic narrative for their white characters. One could argue that Gone with the Wind, because made last, is the most morally culpable of the three in this regard. Haskell, like Mitchell, grew up in a South still dominated by a myth of noble defeat, and acknowledges the distortions and blind spots of the myth. She takes time to discuss the problematic portrayal of African Americans in the film and the kind of backlash that it engendered. In 1939, when Hattie McDaniel won the Academy Award for her role as Mammy, many blacks protested against the portrayal; later, with the advent of the Civil Rights movement, the film was criticized in broader terms. Haskell also discusses ways in which the book and the film were in some instances ahead of their time. Watching the film in the 1960s and 70s might make one wince, but the effect is less disconcerting today as black performers, such as McDaniel, Stepin Fetchit, and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson have become more appreciated.

In the most undigested but provocative part of Haskell’s book, she rants against the hypocrisy of liberal Northerners, who tend to be most critical of Gone with the Wind. These people, she states, are often more inherently prejudiced than their Southern counterparts. In this angry riff, we see the Scarlett O’Hara in Molly Haskell – she has her own tenacious Southern pride. Her anger helps explain her deep-seated feelings for Gone with the Wind, and accounts for her ability to write about it with a pleasure often missing in film criticism.

Molly Haskell
FRANKLY, MY DEAR
“Gone with the Wind” revisited
272pp. Yale University Press. £16.99 (US $24).
978 0 300 11752 3

Paula Marantz Cohen is Distinguished Professor of English at Drexel University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Alfred Hitchcock: The Legacy of Victorianism, 1995, and Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth, 2001.

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