Longest Best Picture

OK, so there may be some dispute over the correct answer to my last trivia question. If you go to Netflix, go through the list of Best Picture winners, and check how long each one is, it will tell you that the longest one, by about three minutes, is Dances With Wolves. That, however, is the length of the DVD release, which is the director's cut, which includes an extra hour of footage not included in the theatrical release of the film, which is the version that won the Oscar. The true answer, and the film that I am reviewing in this post, is Gone With the Wind. Winner of the 1940 Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director (awarded to Victor Fleming, though producer David Selznick actually burned through three directors during the course of this film - the others being George Cukor, who actually directed most of the really great scenes in the film, and Sam Wood, who was nominated in the same year for Goodbye Mr Chips), Best Actress (Vivien Leigh), Best Supporting Actress (Hattie McDaniel, the first African-American to win an Oscar), and Best Adapted Screenplay (by Sidney Howard), GWTW was also nominated for Best Actor (Clark Gable) and Best Supporting Actress (Olivia de Havilland) - making Gone With the Wind the first movie to lose an Oscar to itself.

As a lifelong film buff, it is pretty embarrassing for me to have waited this long to see this film. It is, of course, the prime example of epic Hollywood film-making. In what many consider to be the strongest year of movies in Oscar history, up against such classics as The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Wuthering Heights, and Of Mice and Men, Gone With the Wind almost managed to sweep the awards. (Its only loss, oddly enough, is for the one category that it most deserved, in my opinion, for Clark Gable's performance as pragmatic rogue Rhett Butler. It lost to Goodbye Mr Chips, directed by Sam Wood, who, as I mentioned before, was booted from directing Gone With the Wind mid-production.)

The story itself, I must admit, was difficult for me to get into at first. The romanticizing of the antebellum South, portraying it as the last noble time of knights and ladies, of masters and slaves as though that were something to be proud of, is rather hard to stomach. Tara, the plantation of the O'Hara family, is a land of fat, rich white men getting fatter and richer off of the work of the slaves, and of spoiled teenage white girls throwing themselves at every man in sight, not interested in the men at all, but rather in being the center of attention. The slaves are portrayed as loyal working men - why, they weren't mistreated at all! They were practically part of the family! And those evil Yankees! They simply had no business interfering in the noble Southern way of life! Heroic Southern plantation families bravely facing the injustices of the Civil War - this is whitewashed revisionist history, pure and simple.

Granted, there are many arguments to be made in the movie's defense. Story aside, as filmmaking goes, there is a reason that this is seen as the quintessential Hollywood epic. The set designs are lavish and extravagant, the story is involving and moving, once one gets past the moral issues of hailing a family of slave-owners as heroes, and the acting is a completely different artform than was seen in the films that I recently reviewed, which were made only eight years earlier. In defense of the story itself, it could be argued that Scarlett O'Hara cannot be blamed for being raised the way she was, that before the war she was simply living the life that she was raised into, and that during and after the war she was just doing what she had to do to survive. And it can be argued that the South did face injustice during and after the war, that Sherman's March was unnecessarily and excessively destructive. Certainly, there are few who would argue that the Reconstruction after the war was handled well.

But, as the film's fans will tell you, Gone With the Wind isn't really about the War. The War is just the backdrop for the love story between Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler. And as love stories go, this one, to me, is truly... unconvincing. Scarlett never shows any signs of affection for Rhett, nor for any of the other men she marries. She really loves Ashley Wilkes... or says she does. I rather think that she only wants him because she can't have him, because he is married to another woman. She marries men out of convenience - her first husband to hurt Ashley, and her second husband, and then Rhett, for financial gain. On the other hand, Rhett doesn't seem to love Scarlett either. He marries her for social status. His treatment of her is in turns demeaning, dismissive, and abusive, and his one great romantic act in the film is really nothing less than a drunken act of spousal rape. Throughout the film's four-hour runtime, the two treat each other with constant selfishness and cruelty, and they never once share a moment of mutual affection for one another. A love story for the ages? Only of the unrequited variety.

But, for all of my criticisms, I have to admit that the film is a classic for a reason. Yes, the film is a revisionist history lesson. Yes, it has at its heart one of the most cynical, least romantic love stories Hollywood ever told. But it all works. The performances are brilliant and utterly convincing. Despite being four hours long, I never felt that it was over-long or boring. And much as I may want to say that the characters were unsympathetic, and that it was hard to care about them, I can't say that I didn't want to find out what happened next. The last hour in particular held more surprises and more emotional development than most entire films manage to elicit, and showed me that, whatever rational reasons I had for not sympathizing with any of the characters, I was without doubt wrapped up in their story.