Prometheus 6

Stephen L. Carter reviews Rhett Butler's People, and I'm not goiing to buy it (look Ma, no Amazon link!). But the review starts with an interesting discussion of Gone With The Wind, its sequels and reconceptualizations. Took a while for him to mention the actual book he's reviewiing. That's not a complaint.

“Gone With the Wind” was published in 1936, and despite heroic efforts over the last seven decades to transform it into something else, the novel stands as an apologia for the Old South — the South of gallant white plantation owners and darkies too foolish for anything but slavery, a civilization ruined by a vengeful North that subsequently flooded that idyllic world with rapacious Union soldiers, greedy carpetbaggers and the despotic power of the Freedmen’s Bureau. That Mitchell was able to defend this vision in a novel of such power, beauty and depth is a tribute to her literary genius. But the vision is no less terrifying for having been brilliantly presented.

In 1939, the film was released to near-universal acclaim. Adjusting the box office figures for inflation, “Gone With the Wind” remains the highest-grossing film of all time. Even now, the movie plays remarkably well. In scope, direction and especially acting, the film compares favorably with most of the best Hollywood products of recent years.

But the film’s vision was not Mitchell’s. The text emblazoned across the screen during the opening theme, referring to “a civilization gone with the wind,” appears nowhere in the novel. Mitchell buries the title phrase in Scarlett’s worries about the plantation where she grew up: “Was Tara also gone with the wind which had swept through Georgia?” The wind was Sherman’s army. Mitchell’s novel is obsessed with categorizing the supposed misdeeds of the Union forces.

The Hollywood version almost feels obsessed with race. With the notable exception of Hattie McDaniel’s Academy Award-winning portrayal of Mammy, the black characters in the film are even more offensive than those of the novel, particularly Prissy, portrayed in the film by Butterfly McQueen, whose panicked wail “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ babies” has become a famous laugh line — although Prissy seems, in the equivalent scene in the novel, less panicky than sly. The film’s slaves are, for the most part, stupid but loyal. In the postwar scenes, the freedmen are fat and arrogant.

And yet for all that, the filmmakers were in fact trying to sanitize Mitchell’s novel. So began a process that is still under way. The Rhett Butler who lives in our collective imagination is not Mitchell’s Rhett but Hollywood’s, ably brought to life by Clark Gable. Mitchell’s Rhett has been largely forgotten.