Gone With the Wind: A Treat for the Eyes, Not the Mind
by Ankit Kuchhangi
Gone with the Wind (1939) is a highly decorated classic film based on Margaret Mitchell’s novel of the same name. It's an epic in many respects—shockingly modern production value, gorgeous three-strip Technicolor, a glorious score, and a runtime just shy of four hours. This film romanticizes an “Old South” that had already been gone for nearly 80 years at the time of its release. The film revolves around Scarlett O'Hara, a wealthy belle on the cusp of womanhood, played by Vivien Leigh. Leslie Howard and Clark Gable play opposite her as her love interests, Ashley Wilkes and Rhett Butler.
I powered through this mammoth of a film, captivated by its vibrant colors: sunsets of Tara, ornate Victorian fashion, and varied indoor and outdoor settings. As a materials enthusiast, I was impressed by the detail in set design. Since the 1990s, construction has become increasingly commoditized with huge explosions in engineered materials, like oriented strand board (OSB), medium-density fibreboard (MDF), plastic sheathings, and fast-growth pine. Even the widespread use of plywood was uncommon in the 1930s, which makes the set design all the more remarkable.
Gone with the Wind was exquisitely shot in three-strip Technicolor, which must have been a financial risk during the Great Depression. This undoubtedly gave the skilled restoration team more leverage to restore the original negatives and remaster the audio for its 70th-anniversary rerelease. As a result, the film looks beautiful even in comparison to today’s scientifically flawless digital sensors.
Beyond its technical merits, many of which remain competitive almost a century later, Gone with the Wind falls flat as a romance film. The four-hour runtime dilutes the main storyline of Scarlett and Rhett's love with unnecessary scenes. Adapting a 1,000-page novel into a screenplay resulted in sluggish pacing for a film that would otherwise retain its epic-like qualities with abridged scenes or hybridized support characters. Scarlett and Rhett’s scenes were always enjoyable due to Rhett’s witty banter but the meandering storyline meant the two had only brief interactions for most of the movie. These scenes were clearly impassioned, and the actors had fantastic chemistry, but the oscillations between flirty banter and hatred did not significantly progress their relationship. As such, I felt the romance arc was not adequately developed and the untraditional ending felt weak. I did not feel hopeful or invested in their love. Despite their flawed relationship, Scarlett and Rhett drop their facades when together, allowing us to witness their truest selves. Their honesty reveals their flaws (selfishness, lust, greed, misanthropy, temperamentality), confirming their status as anti-heroes.
Modern audiences may feel uncomfortable with the setting of the film. Critics rightfully argue the film embodies historical negationism of Black slavery in the South. Gone with the Wind does not objectively depict Southern society. Margaret Mitchell, born long after the Civil War, constructed her version of the Old South from the nostalgic recollections of older family members—stories inevitably shaped by their race and class. By the time these memories were filtered through Mitchell’s novel, then adapted into a screenplay, and finally interpreted by modern audiences, any historical fidelity had long been lost. The film embellishes a mythologized South, presenting plantation life as genteel and dignified while largely ignoring the brutal realities of slavery.
This erasure is evident in the film’s framing of labor. Of the nearly four-hour runtime, Black enslaved field hands are shown for only 16 seconds—a sterile, idyllic scene devoid of cruelty or exhaustion. Later in the film, a contrasting scene of Scarlett and her entourage struggling in the fields lasts 92 seconds. The film devotes far more time to white suffering than to the enslaved, reinforcing the idea that the South’s loss of aristocracy—rather than the brutality of slavery—is its true tragedy. Gone with the Wind overlooks the horrors of slavery much like Lolita overlooks pedophilia—by centering the perspective of the oppressor and softening their crimes. This historical negationism does not make it a bad film, but it is important to recognize the bias in the art. Gone with the Wind is ultimately a work of fiction and its portrayal of the South must still be viewed through a critical lens.
Characters frequently lament the loss of their revered culture, but the protagonists’ lifestyles at the beginning and end of the film show few differences. Title cards describe the South as the last bastion of “gallantry,” of “knights and their ladies.” None of this is missing toward the end or diminished by a non-slave-centric economy. Protagonists repeatedly mourn “losing the beauty of that life [they] loved,” but it’s no surprise they miss their carefree lives because they ignore the institutions that made such a lifestyle possible. Their laments ring hollow especially when Scarlet and Ashley prosper as business owners in the end. Their culture isn’t ruined by grieving their dead fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons. That is a universal consequence of war, not unique to the South. (Ironically, more Union soldiers were killed than Confederate soldiers.) So what is it exactly they are missing? The film fails to properly illustrate the loss of greatness of Southern life, but perhaps that is the point—there is nothing tangible to romanticize about the Antebellum South.
Gone with the Wind is supposed to be an epic romance set in a fondly remembered era, but the plot does not deliver. It stumbles as a love story and fails as a historical epic, but its technical achievements and artistry remain its greatest strengths, and they make this film an enduring classic.