Gone With the Wind’s Biggest Secrets, Scandals and Lost Scenes

In a scene that didn’t make the ultimate reduce of 1939’s Gone With the Wind, Rhett Butler sits alone in his bed room, consuming and fondling a gun. A knock at his door interrupts him from his darkish ideas. He rises and finds Melanie Hamilton standing there.

Eighty-five years in the past, Gone With the Wind bowed in theaters and breathed Technicolor life into the tragic romance of Rhett and Scarlett O’Hara set amid the Civil Struggle and Reconstruction durations of American historical past. The film “involves the display as one of many actually nice movies, destined for record-breaking field workplace enterprise in every single place,” gushed John C. Flinn Sr. in Selection on December 19, 1939, noting that regardless of its three-hour-37-minute operating time, “it demonstrates once more that in leisure, the most effective is probably the most simply bought.”

As of 2020, GWTW was nonetheless the highest-grossing movie of all time (adjusted for inflation) due partially to its legendary performances by Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable. In 1976, 47 p.c of all American TV viewers tuned in for its NBC debut.

Lately, a backlash towards GWTW’s sugarcoated depiction of slavery and using racist stereotypes has grown louder. HBO even pulled the movie from its streaming library in 2020 so as to add a brand new introduction offering historic context. What trendy audiences and even longtime “Windies,” a.ok.a Gone With the Wind superfans, may not know is that the filmmakers struggled with convey the advanced, racially charged contents of Margaret Mitchell’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to the large display from the start.

Breaking Down Gone With the Wind’s Depiction of the Outdated South

Across the similar time as HBO’s motion, Yale graduate pupil David Vincent Kimel bought an authentic GWTW taking pictures script and found it contained a number of scenes that by no means made it into the film. Lots of them depicted a extra practical view of slavery. “In earlier drafts, the producer entertained the thought of displaying a way more brutal depiction of slavery, extra violent and merciless than what we see within the ebook,” Kimel, a historian who’s writing Lie, Steal, Cheat, or Kill, in regards to the making of GWTW, tells Nearer. “Producer David O. Selznick agonized that he didn’t need to create a monument of hate” towards Black individuals.

As early as 1936, a consultant of the NAACP contacted Selznick urging him to keep away from among the most offensive content material of the novel. Evidently the producer took a few of this criticism to coronary heart by eliminating the n-word, which seems in Mitchell’s novel and early variations of the script. “Selznick took the phrase out in addition to express references to the KKK,” says Kimel.

He additionally added just a few moments that seem to sentence slavery — though they’re refined. “For instance, enslaved staff pressured to dig ditches for the South sing “Go Down Moses” with the chorus ‘Let my individuals go,’” says Kimel.

Gone With the Wind’s credit listing just one author, Sidney Howard, however it was an open secret that many scribes labored on the mission, together with literary lion F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was introduced in to convey some humor to the position of Scarlett’s Aunt Pittypat. Different writers additionally got here and went. “The model of the script that confirmed slavery at its most brutal was written by a passionate however clumsy author,” explains Kimel. “The filmmakers in the end leaned in to a extra romanticized view of the Outdated South that might be fashionable with white audiences and make Scarlett much less unsympathetic.”

Vivien Leigh Was ‘At Her Finest’ within the Movie

Would GWTW have been as profitable if audiences weren’t rooting for Scarlett? It’s unlikely. Vivien is at her finest within the movie when conveying the heroine’s grit, braveness and willpower towards horrible odds. Likewise, if Clark’s Rhett weren’t a person whose cavalier attraction masked an excellent coronary heart, generations of ladies wouldn’t have swooned over him. Selznick created a timeless love story with flawed however relatable characters, even when his different decisions mirrored a soft-focus antebellum South that by no means existed.

Mickey Kuhn, who performed Beau Wilkes within the movie and died in 2022 at age 90, was in a position to reconcile artwork with GWTW’s inaccuracies. “Sure, it’s in all probability prejudiced,” he advised Nearer, “however it was one of many first actually nice films that got here out of Hollywood. There wasn’t one other studio that had the heart to do it.”

Even if you happen to don’t agree with the filmmaker’s decisions, GWTW may nonetheless have one thing to supply practically a century after its debut. “Typically an important artwork to revisit is artwork that infuriates and challenges us,” says Kimel, “not simply artwork that affirms what we already imagine.”