The Favorites - Gone With the Wind (#74)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Gone With the Wind (1939/USA/dir. Victor Fleming, George Cukor, Sam Wood) appeared at #74 on my original list.

What it is • Gone with the Wind doesn't need much introduction (but I'll provide one anyway). Seventy-seven years after its release, with virtually the entire cast, crew, and even most of the original audience long "gone with the wind" themselves (except for the game Olivia De Havilland, who will turn 100 this year), the film remains an infamous example of classic Hollywood romanticism. Ironically, despite its status as the archetypal product of the Golden Age, this isn't exactly a product of the studio system assembly line, owing its existence to David O. Selznick, an independent producer with a vision. Based on Margaret Mitchell's bestseller, the film mixes an epic historical scope with intimate melodrama, albeit not entirely evenly (the former dominates the first half, the latter the second). Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh) begins the story as a bratty teenage belle, living in splendor and luxury that she takes entirely for granted. When the tale closes four hours later, she is a thrice-married woman of the world who has experienced war, hunger, and poverty, who has worked a field and run a business, while watching many of her friends and family die off. She is not particularly admirable, wooing two lovers whom she doesn't love away from other women (including her own sister), trying to steal her loyal friend's husband, ruthlessly exploiting and manipulating strangers and friends alike to earn a living, and generally refusing to feel shame for her improprieties. She's also the best thing about the movie, rivaled only by the roguish Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) for similar reasons: both of them cut through the intoxicating but disingenuous air of Hollywood pomposity and Old South sentimentality. The film has many big setpieces but I think the cornerstone of its greatness is lain by this dynamic human element.

Why I like it •

The Favorites - The Wizard of Oz (#79)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. The Wizard of Oz (1939/USA/dir. Victor Fleming & King Vidor) appeared at #79 on my original list.

What it is • In early 1939, it was MGM Production #1060, just another job for the many professional actors, technicians, and businessmen involved with its making. That August, released six days before the outbreak of World War II in Europe, it was a lavish family film, touched by vaudevillian comedy, screen-musical, and adventure/fantasy influences - an escapist treat for parents and children, whose half-cost and/or matinee tickets made it difficult for the studio to recoup its considerable investment. The following year, on Leap Day, the film's respectable nominations (including one for Best Picture) yielded two wins (both musical) plus a special award for Judy Garland. In 1949, when Frank Morgan - the wizard himself - passed away, this role was not mentioned in his filmography. Within a decade, broadcast in black-and-white on early television sets - so that even the candy-coated world of Oz took on the dusty shades of the Kansas sequence - the movie finally became the pop culture phenomenon it remains to this day. Since then, it has inspired in-depth psychoanalytic analyses, sync-ups with Pink Floyd records, and endless parodies and references and analogies from editorial cartoons to everyday speech. By sheer coincidence, as I wrote the previous sentence, another person in the room opened a backpack and discovered a Barnes & Noble bag featuring the curled-up feet of the Wicked Witch of the East with text from L. Frank Baum's book (and while the original story remains a classic, it's unlikely it would be remembered nearly so universally today if not for the film version which long ago supplanted the literary images and phrases). The Wizard of Oz is truly inescapable; quite likely it is the most referenced motion picture in history, and certainly it is one of the most viewed. Yet at its core is a simple story, presented straightforwardly for all of its resonance and associations. A young girl, lonely and frustrated in her native Kansas, is apparently transported by a twister to a faraway land, where she must defeat the Wicked Witch of the West, befriend the lovably incomplete Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion, and discover the truth about the fearsome Wizard in Emerald City before learning that "there's no place like home."

Why I like it •

It's a Twister!

A short visual tribute to the tornado sequence in The Wizard of Oz (1939)

(In honor of the film's high placement in the musical countdown, and in recognition of its exclusion from my upcoming series "The Big Ones," due to an upcoming, extensive essay next year.)

For the rest of 2011, visual tributes will go up every Saturday.

Gone With the Wind

Gone With the Wind, 1939, directed by Victor Fleming (with uncredited assistance from George Cukor and Sam Wood)

Story: In an age of “cotton and cavaliers,” spoiled Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) is the belle of the plantation barbecue. But then war – the Civil War – comes to her chivalric South, and her way of life is swept away, or gone with the wind, as author Margaret Mitchell put it in her bestselling novel. Soon this young beauty (who was once fanned by slaves during afternoon naps) is vowing to the angry sky, “As God as my witness, I’ll never be hungry again!” Even as she pursues the married and genteel Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard), and is alternately seduced and bedeviled by the charming anti-gentleman Rhett Butler (Clark Gable), Scarlett does her best to keep good to this promise.