“The fire scene in the motion picture is NOT the 'burning of Atlanta,'” wrote a concerned Margaret Mitchell, author of “Gone with the Wind,” to filmmaker David O. Selznick. “The event pictured in the film occurred on September 1, 1864, when the ... read full story on Communities Digital News
shareNote: 73% of black people rank Gone With the Wind as a good/very good: https://today.yougov.com/news/2014/09/28/gone-with-the-wind/
Fearing a visit from the hooded night-riders of the alt-left, a.k.a. Antifa – currently engaged in an all-out war with statues of Confederate generals and bashing the skulls of peaceful free-speech marchers – inspired the management at Nashville’s Orpheum theater to cancel its annual showing of “Gone with the Wind,” a title which has graced the theater’s marquee every year for more than thirty years.share
Theater group president Brett Batterson told the Associated Press, “The Orpheum cannot show a film that is insensitive to a large segment of its local population.”
It’s worth noting that African-American actress Hattie McDaniel won the 1939 Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, edging out co-star Olivia de Havilland, Geraldine Fitzgerald (“Wuthering Heights”), Edna May Oliver (“Drums Along the Mohawk”) and Maria Ouspenskaya (“Love Affair”).
I didn't take that survey, but I vote the movie a 10 on the now defunct movie site. It was my grandmother's favorite film, and she was the granddaughter of a slave.
Today's idiots on the left don't understand what a landmark performance this was for black performers. In a time when blacks were portrayed as Stepin Fetchit type buffoons when they did appear in white movies, Mammie was a black character that held sway with the white folks she was a slave to. Mammie was the strongest and most moral character in the entire film. Back then, this was monumental - today it's shameful...
Today, the left is angry that GWTW didn't show slaves being abused other than being held as slaves. As a black American I submit that anyone who thinks that the two families depicted in this film could not have been benevolent to their slaves simply because they're white, are in fact themselves racist to believe that.
GWTW (as a film, I didn't read the book) does not glamorize or excuse the institution, it merely presents it as a way of life, which in fact it was in the South until the Civil War mercifully ended it.
A very interesting post...thank you for lots of food for thought!
Im a frequent reader of US history and recently revisited the era of the 'Peculiar Institution' as historians once described it
A shameful but fascinating time in the annals of the nation which ended in a calamitous war and 660,000 dead, 4 million displaced Freedmen and half the nation burned to the ground...not to mention generations to follow who struggled with the fallout
As Jamie Fox recently stated in an interview while addressing his amazing performance in the film 'Ray...' American history is the story of the evolution of freedom...i agree with that guy.
Thx strntz!
People also forget that slavery preexisted before America was founded. While some of America's forefathers were slave owners and indeed saw nothing wrong with it, many were uncomfortable with it while some hated it. In any case, trying to form a coalition of independent colonies in to a united Colonial front against the Crown would have been impossible if taking slavery off the table in the south was part of the deal.
America was founded with the cancer of slavery already deeply entrenched. To finally end slavery, hundreds of thousands were dead, the south lay in ruins both physically and financially, and a million (reportedly) black people died of starvation and disease (how many knew that) during reconstruction as a direct result of the Thirteenth amendment.
America had and has it's sins but eventually does the right thing and will continue to do so as long as the Constitution can be upheld. Once the Constitution is overthrown (it will, I guarantee it), then all guarantees of personal freedom will fall.
Seems youve taken me to school friend!
I googled your 1 million number quite a bit today and found a Connecticut professor/historian who believed 25% of the 4 million Freedmen suffered disease or starvation following emancipation...cholera ( from dirty water and horrid sanitation) seems to have been a primary viral killer...starvation was largely caused by war shortages and racist assholes who wouldnt hire freedmen or share...
Its a terrible era in our history.
Fascinating, tragic and with a great deal of heroism included!
We have a lot of work to do yet!
A lot of people complain that Mamie and Pork stayed with the O'Haras even after they were emancipated, but a lot of freed slaves did that. Some struck out on their own or were literally tossed out and paid the price with starvation and disease. Many others stayed with those bankrupt plantations if only to have a place to sleep and something to eat.
This i have read of
Its not that surprising really
There is some comfort in familiarity for all of us
good points - I haven't seen it in awhile and its time for rewatch.
shareProtesting against showing GWTW is so damn foolish, a waste of any public-spirited person's time!
Because there's so damn much to be learned from it's unrealistic portrayal of slavery and frank racism, this is the mindset behind the Jim Crow South, a mindset almost impossible for sensible modern people to understand. But if you see it in your face, see big dignified men addressed as "boy", and people blithely assuming that other people are happy to be slaves as long as they're not bullwhipped or starved, a lot of things become clear.
The Orpheum is in Memphis, and not Nashville. The theater's new leader, Brett Batterson, has turned The Orpheum into an African-American cultural center, and has excised anything he considers "objectionable" with the surgical skill of a butcher.
Memphis is a southern city. "Gone with the Wind" is a cultural landmark in literature and in film. And, the whole movie is about the downfall of the south and the end of slavery, with the south left in ruins. Hardly a ringing endorsement of the Old South. And, the lead character, Rhett Butler, chastises everyone else about their wanting war and their unwillingness to change.
OMG...NO!
The movie is not about the downfall of the south and the end of slavery. It's a romanticism of the antebellum South, showing how beautiful and wonderful life was before the Civil War. The romanticism is why the movie ends with Scarlett--after losing her child and husband and wondering what she'll do with her life--suddenly experiencing renewed hope and vigor after thinking of the Tara plantation. Tara represents the glory days of the Old South when all was right with the world.
Rorschach test, apparently. If that is what you want it to be, then so be it. I don't like GWTW, for how it depicts slaves as servants and nothing else, and for how it glorifies their slave owners. But, as I said, it does show the South getting its ass handed to it for four hours. I honestly don't see how Scarlett and Rhett could be seen as sympathetic.
The Orpheum's leader hasn't only gotten rid of GWTW. He's also gotten rid of the entire Summer Movie Series, which was a staple of summertime Memphis. And, allowed people to see a whole variety of classic movies that most have never gotten to see on a big screen. I had never seen "The Searchers," "The Godfather, Part II," etc. on the big screen. But, the series allowed me to. That's no more.
How Gone With the Wind Took the Nation by Storm By Catering to It's Southern Sensibilities
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/how-gone-wind-took-nation-storm-feeding-its-southern-sensibilities-180953617/
The Dangers of Gone With The Wind‘s Romantic Vision of the Old South
https://daily.jstor.org/the-dangers-of-gone-with-the-winds-romantic-vision-of-the-old-south/
Gone With the Wind’ is the one Confederate monument worth saving
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2017/08/29/gone-with-the-wind-is-the-one-confederate-monument-worth-saving/
Oh, dear. Looks like you can't hide behind this smarmy "Rorschach test" comment anymore, as everyone from the Smithsonian and the Washington Post to even contemporary critics of the book and movie saw it as a romanticization. Or maybe I'm just wrong. Everyone who saw the movie and understands it to be such "Rorschach tested" the movie but you, the pinnacle of clarity and wisdom, are the only person in the world to have seen it as being anything but.
As a sidenote, one of my greatest fears as I get older is that the younger generation will become so ignorant as to not even understand basic tropes, symbolism, themes, etc. in older stories that were evident to older generations. Your obliviousness about GWTW is emblematic of this. You saw a movie that glamorized the antebellum South as being comprised of nothing but beautiful parties and people and happy slaves, showed its heroine suffering in the aftermath of the Civil War, then when she appears to lose everything, looks on with hope as she imagines going back to the home that symbolized the Old South's glory days. You saw that and went, "Derp! Not a romanticization of the Old South at all!"
Whatever.
Okay, you're obviously terribly obsessed with this. Which is bizarre, quite frankly. It's mostly pure soap opera, and has little to nothing to do with reality. There are so many much better films on the Civil War.
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