@Bigbaymonstermare

11 months ago

I’m so glad to see people making shorts about this movie. I absolutely love Gone With The Wind, but the music choice - I’m so so so sorry to say to you, is purely awful - and the over editing of the photos and video don’t do it for me. The classic or remastered video and stills are gorgeous enough, they don’t need that overexposure look or filters. There are so many pieces of music that could elevate this, and it’s the highest grossing film of all time, adjusted for inflation. My grandmother skipped school and dodged a truant officer to see this in cinema! ❤

Sometimes things don’t need to be remixed and modernised…it was a film made in 1939 about life from 1860 to 1873…the lead up and duration of the civil war and its fallout and end of the antebellum South…a period which lasted from the end of the war of 1812 until the beginning of the civil war…which described the grazier type agricultural system they had with large plantations and it was rife with slavery.

According to historians, the best depiction of good slave owners and bad slave owners and the lives of slaves were best depicted in the film “12 Years a Slave”. People discuss how some slave owners treated their slaves with respect and gave them controlling or managerial type positions within the slave population, but a slave is still a slave and autonomy was non-existent. You were property. One of the most poorly depicted tropes of films is that slaves would be hanged or killed without much due process, and it DID happen, but the cost of buying a slave was prohibitive and the laws and rules of ownership were often complex.

George Washington had a large population of slaves on his farm Mount Vernon on the Potomac and when he died, in his will he had a clause for the manumission of the slaves that he bought, inherited and were born on his plantation. The elderly were to be cared for and the young educated. There was confusion because some slaves married and had children and the parents would be one slave that Washington owned, and one parent from the Custis estate, which were slaves that Martha, his wife, inherited from her first husband’s estate when he died. I think if the father was a Washington slave, the child would be considered a Washington and if the father was a Custis slave, the child would be considered part of the Custis estate. So when he died, only the Washington slaves were emancipated and it took some time. He was for the abolition of slavery in general, but he, like many other of the founding fathers, had inherited or kept slaves.

Times had advanced when Gone With The Wind was released, but at the premiere in Atlanta, in 1939, there were still strict segregation laws and the civil rights movement was still in its infancy. In fact, in Louisiana, there are still slavery laws! Present constitution provides that slavery and involuntary servitude are prohibited, except in the case of involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime.

But at the premiere, Hattie McDaniel was not allowed to attend due to segregation laws and Clark Gable wanted to boycott the premiere until Hattie convinced him to go. She was the first African American, AND African American woman to be nominated and who won an Academy Award! At the time, the director had to launch a petition (which was successful, and she was the only African American woman in the entire audience) to allow McDaniel to attend the ceremony, which was the 12th Academy Awards ceremony ever held, and that year, it was held at the Ambassador Hotel. The first televised Oscar’s ceremony was in 1953!

Sadly, when Halle Berry won her Oscar for “Monster’s Ball” in 2001, in her acceptance speech she incorrectly announced she was the first African American and first African American woman to win an academy award…she was wrong on both counts. Hattie won for her supporting role in the 1939 GWTW film, and Sidney Poitier had been nominated in 1959 for “The Defiant Ones” and won in 1964 for “Lilies of the Field”, something she should have known.

Whilst there was a lot of criticism for McDaniel to play a slave in a slightly exaggerated role of a civil war era “Mammy”, she said she would rather make “$700 a week playing a maid in a movie, than making $7 a week as a maid in real life” (I’m paraphrasing). There was a discrepancy of salaries in the movie, with Gable making $125,000 ($2.67 million today), Leigh making $25,000 ($534,000 today) and McDaniel making $700 a week, or ~$15,000 a week. But if she were working as a maid for $7 a week, that would be, in today’s money, $150 a week, or $7,800 a year…in today’s money. If she worked every week of the year making $700 at the time, that would be a salary of $780,000 a year, or 100 times more than what she would make as a maid. Crazy, huh?

For the highly coveted role of Scarlett, they searched worldwide, and auditioned some 1,400 young women (many were famous actresses at the time) and there was a lot of controversy, choosing Vivien Leigh, a relatively unknown English actress, to play the role of a southern belle. In the end, she’s one of the most iconic characters of the golden age of Hollywood, in GWTW, and one of the most iconic characters of all time, and can we really imagine anyone else playing the conniving, witty, incredible intelligent and business savvy Scarlett? With her determination to keep Tara alive and in the family and supporting its many residents? I think not. And as much as I can’t imagine anyone else playing Rhett, I’m in the minority of women who don’t find him as handsome and charming as he’s made out to be, as the selfish blockade runner of the civil war, out to make a buck, and completely self-serving, except in his love and devotion to Scarlett and Bonny Blue, although it took Scarlett about 1 hour too long to realise her love and devotion for him as well. A sumptuous and gorgeous film, steeped in history and regardless of its insensitivity to the antebellum practices, it still remains a classic and my favourite film to watch on a lazy, rainy Sunday afternoon ❤

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