Leonard Maltin, in his video guide, had this to say about Gone With the Wind : “If not the greatest movie ever made, certainly one of the greatest examples of storytelling on film, maintaining interest for nearly four hours.” It’s hard to disagree, even if the film isn’t in fashion anymore – at least, it’s not “cool” to say you’re a fan of GWTW , the way it is to say you’re a fan of, say, Citizen Kane . To me, the fascination of the film is simply that it’s one of the greatest melodramas ever made, and it’s an amber-preserved artefact of the Old Hollywood style, which also informed how our movies were made once upon a time. Why, even today, this is how our masala movies are made.
You have, for instance, the Face Reveal: When we first glimpse the heroine, Scarlett O’Hara, she is surrounded by two men she’s flirting with. These men are carefully positioned so that we don’t really see her face till the camera zooms in. That’s when one of them moves. We see her face. We still have this in our films: the Hero (or Heroine) Introduction Shot.
Or consider the Echo Shot. When Scarlett’s father first tells her about the importance of land (their plantation is named Tara), the camera begins to pull back, and we see the characters as silhouettes, we see brown/orange clouds above and the gnarly branches of a tree behind and, at a distance, we see the homestead. This shot is recreated at interval point, when Scarlett is no longer rich, and she vows she will never be hungry again. We see the same brown/orange sky, and, to a side, another tree with crooked branches. We hear the same score. Echo Shots (or Echo Dialogues) like these are a key component of
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Where
And then there’s all the accumulation of detail in the production design. When people are scrambling to flee from Atlanta before the siege, we see a harp in one of the carriages. A harp . And that shot of soldiers sprawled on the ground as Scarlett makes her way through is still astonishing. It’s hard to find this level of production here. It’s harder still to find women like these in our cinema. It’s easy to cite instances of heroine-oriented cinema – Mother India comes to mind – but those heroines were good, kind, pure. Scarlett is (in Rhett’s words) a bad lot, “selfish and shrewd, but able to look things in the eye and call them by name.” And yet, she’s so human. At first, she cares only about herself, but then she stays with Melanie in Atlanta, to help deliver the latter’s child (all because of a promise she made Ashley, the man she thinks she loves and who is married to Melanie). Then Rhett helps for a while, but after he leaves, Scarlett has to drive her carriage back to Tara, where she discovers her mother is dead, her father has lost his mind. It’s very much a Mother India narrative. But the difference is that Scarlett will do anything . She even offers to sleep with Rhett if he’ll give her $300 to pay the taxes on Tara. And when Rhett spurns her, she marries the man her sister is meant to marry, because he is now running a profitable business; she lies that her sister is carrying on with someone else and marries him. The most fascinating thing is that she’s not doing this for some noble cause. She’s doing it for herself, for Tara. Can you imagine Nargis in this part, throwing herself at the moneylender? Why doesn’t this film have the stature, today, of some of its contemporaries? One reason could be that its melodramatic style has fallen out of favour. Outside of Indian films, you have to try really hard to find something similar – though Steven Spielberg gave it a halfway-decent try in War Horse . A Citizen Kane , on the other hand, still seems relevant – its techniques are still in use. Another reason is probably the perceived racism, with its troubling images of black children fanning white women taking a nap. But if this is what those times were like, can you fault a film for showing that?
Furthermore,
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