Gone With the Wind Revisited

Michiko Kakutani

Seventy years after its premiere "Gone With the Wind" remains at or near the top of many lists of the most seen, most loved, most admired movies, right up there along with "Star Wars," "Casablanca" and "The Godfather." It has endured through decades of social change, despite its romanticization of the Confederacy and its depiction of black Americans as mammies and slaves. And its central characters - Scarlett and Rhett, Melanie and Ashley - have entered the cultural pantheon as instantly identifiable archetypes.

It is small wonder then, that "GWTW," both as the 1939 movie and as Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel, has provoked reams and reams of scholarly exegesis and fan commentary: works that deconstruct and anatomize virtually every aspect of the novel and movie from the story of its creation to the casting of the film to its place in American cinematic and cultural history.

The newest entry in the dissection sweepstakes is Molly Haskell's "Frankly, My Dear: 'Gone With the Wind' Revisited," a highly discursive essay that breaks no new ground but manages to retrace familiar arguments and stories in an engaging - and occasionally inspired - fashion.

Ms. Haskell, a film critic and the author of "From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies," argues that "inside the tinkling charms of a Southern-belle saga are the rumblings of a feminist manifesto," but this is a pretty shopworn observation, given all the essays written over the years about Scarlett as a harbinger of the liberated woman, Scarlett as precursor to the Me Generation's narcissists.

When Ms. Haskell turns to the more cinematic aspects of "Gone With the Wind," however, her arguments have more bite. She writes that in an art form that has enshrined the auteur theory of directorial vision, "GWTW" was an anomaly: a product of five directors and 15 screenwriters ("including F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ben Hecht, though only Sidney Howard received official credit"), various "official and unofficial consultants" and through it all, a manic producer, David O. Selznick, popping Dexedrine, "up all night, micromanaging and multitasking, sabotaging his own project with endless interference."

In the end the real reason this movie with too many cooks miraculously worked, Ms. Haskell says, was "the fire and desperation of three people with strangely overlapping tastes and eccentricities": "In 'Gone With the Wind,' Margaret Mitchell's only book, every crisis and trauma of her life is transmuted into narrative; Selznick seized the reins and threw himself into the making of the movie like a man possessed; and Vivien Leigh invested Scarlett with something beyond beauty, something altogether uncanny - a demonic energy, a feverishness that would later tip over into illness and pathology."

"The intensely personal energy of this dividedness, the deep- down tension in Mitchell, Selznick and Leigh between vulgarity and refinement," Ms. Haskell concludes, "is what gives the archetypes in 'Gone With the Wind' their extraordinary human resonance," and thanks to the way the three of them threw themselves into the project, "that historical 'costume' story" never feels remotely past.

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