By The Butcher
You love ’em, he hates ’em! The Butcher carves up your favourite films, and this week, he applies his sharpened cleaver to the 1939 Civil War-era epic Gone With The Wind.
There’s a rather large group of film fans (and film critics too…hello, Bill Collins…if you’re reading this from that great cinema in the sky) who like to bang on ad nauseum to anyone who’s actually stupid enough to listen about how much better movies were in the old days. You know, before terrible things like sex, violence and bad language came along and ruined the cinema. “It all started with those darn hippies in the sixties with their long hair and movies like Easy Rider,” The Butcher can practically hear the old crones mumbling as they point their bony fingers at the disrespectful youth of today.
Well, The Butcher has some bad news, people: there’s a hell of a lot of bad films stinking up theatres and streaming services these days, but there are just as many celluloid rotters emanating from the “good old days” when all men wore hats and a woman’s place was officially deemed to be in the home. At the risk of inspiring Bill Collins to do a from-beyond-the-grave spit take and spurt juniper tea all over the front of his canary yellow sports jacket, we’re thinking of limp musicals like Singin’ In The Rain, stone cold boring westerns like Duel In The Sun, and dishwater-dull dramas like How Green Was My Valley.
The most staggeringly, mind-numbingly, bum-deadeningly tedious movie from the alleged “Golden Age Of Hollywood”, however, is undoubtedly Gone With The Wind. Obvious period affectations aside, this 238-minute (yes, 238 minutes…and you thought The Brutalist was long!) 1939 snooze-fest is a big budget soap opera at best, and a racist piece of nostalgic bilge at worst. Either way, this florid epic – in which Vivien Leigh hams her way through The Civil War and its aftermath while a mannequin-stoic Clark Gable looks on twitchily) – is one of Hollywood’s great continuing jokes.
Despite its exposition-heavy dialogue and paper-thin characterisations, people have been hoodwinked into believing that they have to like this film, in much the same way as similar “darlings” such as Citizen Kane and Battleship Potemkin. Well, guess what? You don’t have to like this over-stuffed, southern fried turkey. Call it out for the soapy bore that it truly it is! And if that bothers you, Bill Collins-from-beyond, well, frankly my dear, I don’t give a f@#k!
For a far more positive reading of Gone With The Wind, check out Helen Taylor’s book-length appraisal of the film as published by BFI Classics and Bloomsbury. Click here for more information.
