Today In Pop Culture: The Premiere Of Gone With The Wind

By Jeffery X Martin

It’s December 15, 1939, and Atlanta is all abuzz. The film, Gone with the Wind, is set to premiere at the Loew’s Grand Theater. Dig this, kids: 300,000 people made a line seven miles long, just to watch the limousines carrying the stars of the film from the airport to the theater. That is possibly the most boring parade imaginable. Oh, look. A car. Oh, look. Another car.

Gone with the Wind, much like the South itself, was built on the backs of African-Americans. Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen played vital roles in the film, yet they were not allowed to attend the premiere of the movie they appeared in, because of the Jim Crow laws in effect at the time in Georgia. Whites only.

Ain’t that a slap in the head?

Gone with the Wind, a movie about how the Southern faction of the One Percent dealt with the Civil War, is the highest grossing movie of all time, even when you count inflation. Titanic didn’t beat it. Avatar didn’t beat it. The Forbidden Dance: Lambada didn’t beat it. This costume drama about a woman who knows how to use a man but can’t figure out how to love one is the King of the Box Office.

Hollywood could never make a movie like Gone with the Wind now, and I’m not sure it would be a good idea, even if they could. All the main characters are terrible people. They’re all selfish, snotty little brats, except for Melanie, the frail consumptive who is so sweet, she may as well have marzipan for hair. The movie is also four hours long, and that’s quite a bit of time to spend with rich white people who don’t know how to not be rich.

Oh, yeah, then there’s that whole scene Rhett Butler rapes Scarlett O’Hara. He kisses her, she tells him to stop, he doesn’t. Then he carries her upstairs to the bedroom and, well, the film fades to black, but still. We’re not dummies. This is made even worse by the fact that, the next morning, Rhett tells he is sorry, and that he wouldn’t have done that if he hadn’t been so drunk.

Sweet Jesus, if that’s not a PSA, I don’t know what is.

The other strange thing about this movie is that all the slaves are really happy to be enslaved. If that were true, then why did so many black men join up to fight? If Mammy was happy to be cooking and cleaning for the white folk, why did the Civil War even happen? Economics? Manifest Destiny? Civil War. Huh. What would it have been good for? Absolutely nothing.

Say it again.

The fact is slavery was horrible, war is atrocious, and there’s no true way to come out of something like that in style. Except in Gone with the Wind, where Scarlett does what she has to do to survive and, in fact, gets to keep the house and the slaves.

You’ve come a long way, baby.

There are things to love about this movie, especially the gorgeous photography and use of Technicolor, and the stirring musical score by Max Steiner. It’s also important to remember that at one point in history, all the egregious things about this film were OK. That was all normal stuff. How interesting to watch a film like Mandingo or Slaves, and do a quick compare and contrast. The truth about slavery is somewhere in the middle, as it often is, but frankly, my dear, a lot of folks won’t give a damn.

After all the movie is almost 80 years old, just like your grandparents, and everybody laughs when the grandparents use racial slurs. “Oh, Grandma,” we say. “Nobody thinks like that anymore.” But we still love her, we sure do, and couldn’t imagine life without her.