The Scarlett O''Hara wars
The Scarlett O''Hara wars
Of all the actresses wanting this role or considered for the part... your thoughts?
The two top contenders after before Viven Leigh were Goddard and Bennett:
Paulette Goddard - Would have been good!  Could have nailed the part!
Joan Bennett - Didn't have the talent for this role.
The others:
Tallulah Bankhead - Scarlett as a drag queen?
Margaret Sullavan?
reply 593
04/01/2010
None of them are very good in the tests except for Leigh, who is clearly the best of the bunch.  Jean Arthur, who is generally wonderful, is awful.
by Clark Gable
reply 1
04/03/2009
Goddard was the by far best of the bunch.  In a few years, Hayward could have nailed it, but she didn't have enough experience at that time to pull it off.  Andrea Leeds and Anne Shirley were the best of the Melanies (Leeds even looks a bit like de Havilland in the test).
by Clark Gable
Let's rewrite that first sentence!:
Goddard was by far the best of the bunch.
(and by that, I meant the also-rans).
by Clark Gable
I still think Bette Davis could have pulled it off.
by Clark Gable
reply 4
04/03/2009
The (real-life) Mrs Patrick Campbell was said to have been considered as well. She would have been far too old.
by Clark Gable
reply 5
04/03/2009
OP, sorry to burst your bubble, but Mr. Selznick offered the role first to Norma Shearer.
Her fans balked at the idea of Norma playing the wanton hussy that was the Scarlett character in the book (she married 4 times and popped out many kids in the novel.)
I think Norma would've been a great and interesting choice.
by Clark Gable
reply 6
04/03/2009
Margaret Mitchell, who did not take an active part in the movie, wrote to Selznick and told him that she believed that at 37 years old, Norma Shearer could not play a girl aged 16-28 in the movie. Actually, aged 16-19 during the first half of the movie.
BTW, Selznick had ID'd Leigh early on; she was always in the running. As George Cukor stated, she had a frantic quality that was perfect for Scarlett.
by Clark Gable
04/03/2009
Great link, R1!  Thanks!
Zak @ R6.  I never claimed to be an expert and I don't have a bubble to burst!  Thanks for sharing.
by Clark Gable
reply 11
04/03/2009
Vivien Leigh did a terrific Southern accent.  Certainly better than Bette's few pitiful attempts at an English accent.  Her Queen Elizabeth (both times) -- awful.
by Clark Gable
reply 12
04/03/2009
I thought they were all GOOD in the tests.  It's just that Vivien was so EXTRAORDINARY as Scarlett that she just blew the other girls off the screen.
by Clark Gable
reply 13
04/03/2009
Paulette Goddard was a dreadful actress and would have been terrible in the part.  The film would never have become the classic it is today.  Bette Davis could have done a fine job, she was then at the height of her box office and was a wonderful actress.  But no one could touch Vivien Leigh, who was absolute perfection and whose naturalistic approach to the role is in large part responsible for why the film holds up so well today.
by Clark Gable
No one could have been better than Leigh.
Did Davis really say that, r9?  Atypically stupid comment from a generally savvy dame.
No one loves Paulette Goddard more than I do but even I have my doubts that she would have been a good Scarlett.  Ditto Jean Arthur.  To me, Goddard and Arthur will always be the very modern, endearing, jazzy comic creatures they were - God bless them.  Perhaps I am doing a disservice to two supremely talented actresses in thinking they could only do what they were best known for, but I still find it hard to imagine either of them as Scarlett.
OP, the one person who was seriously considered for the role whom you haven't mentioned is Miriam Hopkins, a great actress who would probably have been wonderful, although perhaps she was a little too old at the time.
Shearer would have been the worst possible choice in too many ways to mention.
One actress who I think would have hit it out of the park is the great but all but forgotten Andrea Leeds, who had then recently given a justly acclaimed heartbreaking performance in Stage Door.
by Clark Gable
Leeds had been considered/tested for Melanie but not for Scarlett.
by Clark Gable
reply 17
04/03/2009
The studio gave Bette the part in Jezebel after she was passed over for GWTW, I believe... and to cash in on some of that box office drive for a big southern epic...
and the part is somewhat similar, so anyone who wants to see how Bette would have fared in the role can watch Jezebel and get a good image.
I think Bette was too sophisticated, too ironic, too New England no-nonsense Yankee for Scarlett and that the studio made the right choice with the more "frantic," as someone else put it, Leigh. (Same with Hepburn.)
I can't imagine T. Bankhead in the part. Oh, what might have been! lol.
by Clark Gable
reply 18
04/03/2009
I can't realize imagine Andrea Leeds as Scarlett, but I think she would have been a better -- more natural, less hammy -- Melanie than Olivia de Havilland.
by Clark Gable
Hedy Lamarr would have been SUPERB!!
by Clark Gable
04/03/2009
Thanks r1 - I've never seen my grandmother's screen test for GWTW.
And OP, I don't agree with your assertion of "Joan Bennett - Didn't have the talent for this role".  My grandmother may not have been right for the part, but I think she DID have talent.
by Clark Gable
reply 22
04/03/2009
I think you may be right, R19. Olivia plays Melanie as the simpiest simp who ever simped. Leeds made her seem more like a real person.
I wonder if Selznick ever seriously offered Tallulah the role of Belle Watling. That would have been fun.
by Clark Gable
reply 23
04/03/2009
I think Joan Bennett is the second best, but no one comes close to Leigh, who has some dark, driven quality none of the rest suggest.
by Clark Gable
so far nobody has taken the Helen Lawson bait.
by Clark Gable
reply 25
04/03/2009
That's because it's simply too tired and boring to haul out that old bit, r25.  But obviously you couldn't think of anything cleverer, so you did.
by Clark Gable
reply 26
04/03/2009
r24, some of the GWTW books assert that it was Vivien's Leigh's bi-polar illness, along with the incipient tuberculosis that ultimately killed her, that gave her that "dark, driven quality" that made her so brilliant as Scarlett (and that likewise, ten years later, contributed to her brilliant Blanche Dubois.)
by Clark Gable
reply 27
04/03/2009
I always thought Andrea Leeds was a mediocre actress.  And though Olivia is a bit much in the early parts, she's really great in some of the later scenes, like when she shoots the soldier and the scene on the stairs with Mammy. (Though that's really Hattie's moment... actually the moment that won her the Oscar.)
And if you want to know what Hayward or Goddard would have been like, see "Reap the Wild Wind."
by Clark Gable
reply 28
04/03/2009
I think Leigh was perfect.  No one else could have played it as well.  She is a gooddess.
by Clark Gable
Interesting watching this link.  A few obsevations.
Leigh is so much better than everyone else.
Goddard is quite impressive and with Cukor or Fleming directing her, she could have probably pulled it off.  Her instincts are very similar to Leigh's in some of the tests.  Leigh was the right choice, no doubt, but it is very suprrising to me how good Goddard - a favorite of mine but in very different roles - is in some of these tests.
Leeds is very touching as Melanie.  And very right for the part.  Douglas is great as Ashley but totally wrong for it.
Hayward and Arthur are totally wrong.  And Turner is not good at all - no surprise there.
But the most interesting thing to me is McDaniel.  She is giving 100% through each of these tests and fully there and in the moment no matter who she's testing with.  Her and Leigh together are, as they were to become, magical.  It would be very interesting to hear what McDaniel thought about this parade of Scarletts.
And the other thing these tests show is that truly fine acting is all about listening and attention to one's partner.  Leigh has it all over everybody else in this dept.  She is the most interesting Scarlett mainly because of this.
Physically she was all wrong for the part - way too beautiful - but who the fuck cares.
by Clark Gable
reply 31
04/03/2009
Tallulah Bankhead was never seriously considered for Scarlett, because she was too old (well into her 30's) at the time. I also wonder if Selznick  considered her for Belle Watling. That would have been interesting.
by Clark Gable
reply 32
04/03/2009
Goddard didn't have the elegent ladylike quality that Leigh brought to the part. Scarlett was raised by her strict French-Irish mother and an even stricter Mammy. Paulette would've been a better Belle Watling. Plus, Paulette was living with Charlie Chaplin at the time, and couldn't produce a wedding license. Selznik knew that wouldn't fly with the church groups.
by Clark Gable
[quote]I still think Bette Davis could have pulled it off.
As she proved in "Jezebel" shortly thereafter.
by Clark Gable
reply 34
04/03/2009
BTW, Scarlett in book and film only married three times, Charles Hamilton, Frank Kennedy and Rhett Butler. They did eliminate two of the "book" children from the film, Wade Hamilton, and Ella Kennedy and only gave us Bonnie Blue Butler.
by Clark Gable
reply 35
04/03/2009
[italic]Physically she was all wrong for the part - way too beautiful - but who the fuck cares.[/italic]
I dare say that most people who read the book nowadays can't help but visualize Scarlett looking exactly like Vivien Leigh. No one ever owned a part more than she does this one.
by Clark Gable
04/03/2009
Can you imagine Lucille Ball in the role?
In that famous scene where Rhett carries Scarlet up the staircase I can see her fall out of his arms and roll down the steps. At the end the camera could do a close up on her face and she can break out in that famous wail: WAAAHHHHH!
by Clark Gable
As god is my witness, dahling, I'll never be hungry again.
by Clark Gable
reply 38
04/03/2009
I still say Susan Hayward would have been perfect, but was just too young at the time ...
by Clark Gable
reply 39
04/03/2009
39 posts and nobody as mention the test where Goddard is doing both Scarlett's and Mammy's lines?  What a hoot!  Goddard was great, but too old and too hard for the role, as Cukor mentions in one of his off screen comments.  I wish they actually showed Tallula's screen test.
by Clark Gable
reply 40
04/03/2009
I agree that Joan Bennett might not have been right for the part but she was talented, as anyone who's seen her films for Fritz Lang knows. Joan could be seductive but I don't think she could have pulled off Scarlett's coquettishness. She was associated with film noir and as a femme fatale. You'd be expecting her to whip a dainty little revolver from her petticoats and plug someone!
by Clark Gable
reply 41
04/03/2009
Actually Joan B. was a blond ingenue type before she got her Heddy Lamour makeover so she was a possability. I think she got tired of what Fox cast her in so she went to Paramount where her films were not that much better.
by Clark Gable
reply 42
04/03/2009
I love Vivien Leigh in the darker and more dramatic parts of Gone with the Wind (her greatest scene is where she takes over the Kennedy sawmill and tells the workers what's what), but I have always her awfully phony when she's being a flirt, as iconic as those moments are (she talks too quickly and she seems so insincere that anyone would have seen right through her, including Charles Hamilton). I wonder if Goddard would have been better in those sections (though Cukor is right that her face is very hard... she can do wonders with her voice but has trouble softening her face when she's trying to be tender).
by Clark Gable
I'm thinking some of you haven't read the book.
Scarlett is beautiful.
And she is supposed to be phony and insincere when flirting. That is expected behavior for the age, and she saved her true passion for the insipid Ashley.
Vivian Leigh was the perfect Scarlett.
by Clark Gable
reply 47
04/03/2009
Didn't it come down to either MGM or Warner Bros. doing the film. MGM wanted to go with Crawford-Gable and the WB wanted Davis-Flynn. Bette wanted to do the film with Gable but that wasn't going to happen. Joan actually took herself out of the running believing (rightfully so) that she would never have done the character justice. Then Leigh was chosen.
Jezebel was released BEFORE GWTW, not after. That is why no one was too keen on her re-playing a southern belle.
by Clark Gable
reply 48
04/03/2009
The only part Norma Shearer could have nailed in GWTW is one of the Twelve Oaks.  She just about had the range to be able to pull that off.
by Clark Gable
R47, the very first words in the book are, "Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful...."
by Clark Gable
04/03/2009
Paulette Goddard probably would have been just as good in the role as Vivien Leigh.
Bette David liked to say she COULD have played Scarlett, but declined because Errol Flynn was talked about as the lead contender for Rhett and she couldn't stand him. Or something like that. Anyway it wasn't true; Davis was never offered the role.
Speaking of Flynn, he probably would have made a great Rhett.
EVERYBODY tried out for the role of Scarlett. Tallulah Bankhead tried out for it, even though she looked at least 20 years too old for the part.
I don't think Norma Shearer was ever seriously thought of as being right for the role; she was too old and and her film persona was that of a "lady", even when she played "sexy" parts. She could never have done the fiery Scarlett justice.
I think Joan Crawford would have LOVED to play Scarlett. But she was wrong for the role, too. Crawford always gave off a slutty or "weird" vibe onscreen.
The first line in the book "Gone With The Wind" DOES say "Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarletons twins were." But all throughout the novel Scarlett is being referred to as "pretty" and "beautiful." She is supposed to be very attractive. I thought Vivien Leigh was perfect Scarlett physically, right down to the black hair, green eyes and tiny waist.
by Clark Gable
reply 53
04/03/2009
r53, don't you get it - she's being referred to as pretty and beautiful by all those men who seldom realized it.
In any event, Vivien Leigh was a knock out beauty of the first rank.  And yes, Vivien had all those physical similarities to Scarlett.  Except that she was just undeniably gorgeous.
by Clark Gable
reply 54
04/03/2009
the link at r1 shows Leslie Howard with and without eye makeup. Could've ruined the movie right there.
by Clark Gable
reply 55
04/03/2009
Can we all recover from the absurd fantasy that Vivien Leigh knew how to act?  Her performance in Streetcar is unwatchably mannered: She plays crazy from the get go, and her Blanche has no arc.  Why not play Blanche as someone who's trying really hard NOT to have a flip-out, instead of as someone who's already WAY out there, and is planning to stay out there?
As for Gone with the Wind: NOBODY would've been a good Scarlett, because the movie is appallingly racist.  Malcolm X said he wanted to climb under his movie-theater seat when he saw the film, he was so embarrassed for the Black characters.  All prints of the film should be rounded up and destroyed.
by Clark Gable
reply 56
04/03/2009
If I recall the story correctly, while Tallulah was tested as Scarlett, the test was merewly photographic (thus no lines and why they show no dialogue in her test), and done as a formality to her, as a friend.  Selznick did actually consider her for the part of Belle Watling--but was afraid to offend her by offering it to her, as she wanted the part of Scarlett.
When I first saw these tests back in the late 80's, I was stunned by how good some of the actresses were.  But Leigh runs away with it; even though some scenes are played differently in the film--Leigh herself preferred the 'test' paddock scene vs. the filmed one directed by Victor Fleming--you can see she knows the part backwards and forwards during screen tests alone.
As for Bette Davis, Jezebel may have reached the screen first, but it was Warner's rip-off of the (Gone With the Wind) novel, whose success they were trying to take advantage of.  And she just didn't have what it took to play Scarlett--Jezebel shows this clearly.  Too much Davis, too little character.  Regardless, after Jezebel, there was no Scarlett in Davis' future because Selznick was pissed off at all involved with Jezebel, fearing it may have damaged GWTW's theatrical performance.  In retrospect, an unfounded fear, given the end result, but he had no interest in Bette Davis after that.
by Clark Gable
reply 57
04/03/2009
Oh, yes, R56.  We'll go ahead and do that.  Right now.  Because God knows, there are no films that depict gay people in unflattering light.
by Clark Gable
04/03/2009
LOL r49.
Actually, I think whoever said India Wilkes was the perfect part for Norma Shearer is exactly right. She was too ladylike for Belle Watling, too old for Melanie or Suellen, too wimpy for Scarlett, too young for Aunt Pittypat.
by Clark Gable
reply 59
04/03/2009
Goddard would have been merely okay.  Vivian Leigh nailed the crucial  combination of beauty, bitchiness, sex, ambition and greed.  She is (and I hate this word) luminous in the role.  One of the greatest star turns of that or any other era.
by Clark Gable
reply 60
04/03/2009
Goddard would have been merely okay.  Vivian Leigh nailed the crucial  combination of beauty, bitchiness, sex, ambition and greed.  She is (and I hate this word) luminous in the role.  One of the greatest star turns of that or any other era.
by Clark Gable
"She is (and I hate this word) luminous in the role"
Ma-(and I hate this word)-ry!
by Clark Gable
reply 62
04/03/2009
r57, dude: Bette Davis's three William Wyler-directed performances, in Jezebel, The Letter, and The Little Foxes, are three of the greatest screen performances of that era and acting style.  Wyler knew how to get Davis to focus her physicality, and there are chunks of Davis's performances in all three films that are minimalist in their economy, intensity, discipline.  Take a look at how Davis responds when Henry Fonda's new wife walks into the room.  It's a scene in which Davis has almost no dialogue, and it requires her to:
Deal with shocking new information (she had no idea Fonda was married)
Hide her shock at the information
Make clear to the camera her shock and her successful hiding of that shock
It's a moment that is both internal and external, when Davis is dealing both with an inner preoccupation - her feelings about her obsession with Fonda - and and external action: Her need to show Fonda that she is not hurt.
It's a brilliant piece of acting.
She totally could have handled Scarlett.
by Clark Gable
reply 63
04/03/2009
I knew I'd piss off a Bette Davis fan.  I didn't mean to, because I actually like the woman's movies, but I knew I would.
by Clark Gable
reply 64
04/03/2009
Scarlett O'Hara is basically a pale reflection as a character of Thackeray's Becky Sharp, as most scholars have pointed out.
by Clark Gable
reply 65
04/03/2009
Dude, I wasn't pissed off.  I was just reminding you of the proper order of the universe, which is this:  Bette Davis is the bright starry ring inside of which we all revolve.
by Clark Gable
reply 66
04/03/2009
Does anyone remember the TV movie, "The Scarlett O'Hara War"?  Was it Morgan Brittany who played Vivien Leigh?  (No dialogue, just one scene at the end.)  I hated that film because, although I love Vivien Leigh, they really portrayed Paulette Goaddard, who would have been very good, as just insanely strange, which I thought was pretty cruel.  After all, what did Paulette ever do to anybody?
by Clark Gable
Nobody wants to come out and play.
by Clark Gable
reply 74
04/03/2009
r67, I don't think that was a deliberate trashing of Paulette in that movie.  The movie wasn't very good and the portraits of all the stars were very bizarre.
by Clark Gable
reply 75
04/03/2009
r56, 68, and 71 are all the same insane nobody who can't handle the fact that no one else shares his bizarre opinion of Vivien Leigh.
He gets the cake for the statement that no one could have played Scarlett well because the film is racist.
WTF?  All sorts of films are racist but it doesn't mean actors can't turn in fine performances in them.
by Clark Gable
reply 76
04/03/2009
I always thought that JEZEBEL was Davis's consolation prize for not playing Scarlett. And it came out way before GWTW because, duh, GWTW took years to produce.
She was wonderful in it, but WIND benefitted from having an unknown (to most US audiences) in the fact that it was part of the excitement and drama surrounding the production of the film.
by Clark Gable
reply 77
04/03/2009
Sorry, r76, but Gone with the Wind is so relentlessly racist that watching it is like attending a lynching.
And I'm right about Vivien Leigh: She can indicate up a storm, but she can't act.
by Clark Gable
reply 78
04/03/2009
Sorry Zak, your obsession with Norma is kinda scary.  You worship a "star" who was only a "star" because she married MGM's greatest producer.
She was lucky she had lots of money, and married a ski instructor 20 years younger than her.
All that was gone when she ended up at the Actors Nursing Home suffering from demensia...
by Clark Gable
Norma Shearer was cross-eyed and she had no waist.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
by Clark Gable
reply 80
04/03/2009
"Sorry, r76, but Gone with the Wind is so relentlessly racist that watching it is like attending a lynching."
To compare a lynching to a film is pretty extreme and shows no respect for the many who were lynched by racists.  Sorry, your argument loses.  GWTW is no more racist--in fact, it can be argued it's much less so--than most old films of that same period.  Have you watched any screwball comedies on TCM?  GWTW is just an easy target for lazy pseudo-intellectuals who, despite their alleged intelligence and sensitivty, miss the much more blatant racist depictions of blacks in other films.  As someone who was raised in a racist family, Hattie McDaniel's Mammy made me affectionate toward the black community--and not because I thought of them as servants, but because she's the smartest character in the film.  I had been raised to detest black people; after GWTW, I realized how fucked up that mentality was and drifted quickly from it--going to the opposite extreme, many would say.  It may seem odd that a not-too-enlightened movie would have that effect on a person, especially given all the criticism the film draws for it's not-too-flattering depictions of blacks, but unlike countless films of the same period, it shows at least one black character as being human, rather than a pop-eyed comedic buffoon with no other qualities than that it's intended to be laughed at--and usually with an undercurrent of hatred.
by Clark Gable
reply 81
04/03/2009
I never knew Joan Crawford was considered for Scarlett. Now THAT would have been interesting, to say the least. They should have made two Gone With the Winds - the classic one with Vivien Leigh, and the over-the-top camp classic one with Crawford.
by Clark Gable
reply 82
04/03/2009
The only piece of miscasting in the film is Leslie Howard.  He's okay as Ashley but just too weak.  In the book he's an introverted dreamer but one doesn't get the image of a weakling; he's a handsome, virile soldier.  Howard, instaed, plays him like a closet-case Scientologist.
by Clark Gable
04/03/2009
Good one about Leslie Howard, R83.
The thing that I could never understand is why Rhett Butler had no southern accent. I assume that Clark Gable - otherwise perfect in the part - wasn't able to do a southern accent. And don't tell me Rhett didn't have an accent - he was Charleston born and raised (except for a few years at West Point).
by Clark Gable
reply 84
04/03/2009
Coming to this thread late I have no new insights to add except to wonder if it would have been a significantly different film if George Cukor had remained as director.
You can tell just from those few comments in the Goddard tests how obsessed he was with the minutest deatils and he was no doubt the force that needed to see Leslie Howard and Clark Gable in every shade of Max Factor.
Of course, if Cukor has stayed he might never have gone on to The Women, also in 1939 (and with Paulette Goddard).
by Clark Gable
I would have loved to see Joel McCrea as Ashley Wilkes....and with an added shirtless scene.
by Clark Gable
reply 86
04/03/2009
Clark Gable refused to even attempt a Southern accent; he had tried an Irish one a few films earlier and had been savaged for it.  He also refused to cry on screen (he thought it would draw more criticism and that he'd lose his tough guy image) so they filmed the scene where Rhett is torn up over Scarlett's miscarriage two ways: one with tears, one without.  After viewing both, he agreed that the scene of him crying was the better of the two.  But no matter what was said, he refused to attempt a Southern accent.
by Clark Gable
They've pulled the YouTube videos
by Clark Gable
reply 88
04/03/2009
"The (real-life) Mrs Patrick Campbell was said to have been considered as well. She would have been far too old."
They should have considered our own Mrs. Patrick Campbell who was only 28 when GWTW was filmed.
by Clark Gable
reply 89
04/03/2009
Other than Morgan Brittany, who played all those actresses in that silly  TV movie about the search for Scarlett?  I remember the show was a big event, at least until it was seen.
All I can remember is Sharon Gless as Carole Lombard (but who played Gable?) and Carrie Nye as Tallulah. Could Tovah Feldshuh have played Katharine Hepburn?  I know that sounds cazy!
by Clark Gable
reply 90
04/03/2009
Katharine Hepburn and Errol Flynn (who she wanted as her co-star)! Katharine Hepburn looked her best at that time and EF would have brought lots of sex appeal. It would have been exciting.
by Clark Gable
reply 91
04/03/2009
"As for Gone with the Wind: NOBODY would've been a good Scarlett, because the movie is appallingly racist. "
And the award for idiot of the thread goes to  . . .
by Clark Gable
Tony Curtis played Selznick in the TV movie....can't remember any of the others.
by Clark Gable
04/03/2009
R81, you're so fucking stupid and oblivious on the subject of race.
You're a fool if you think GWTW wasn't profoundly racist. "We just LOVE Mammy!" is how all racists feel. She was the sentimentalized epitome of the Good Negress -- the white racist's dream nigger.
GWTW presented the Southern institution of slavery in a nostalgic, affectionate, even reverential light. And because GWTW has become [italic]the[/italic] American image of the antebellum South, it has done much to support the racism intrinsic to that culture. It's a piece of propaganda, perhaps not so overtly as the crappy book, but insidiously racist none the less.
by Clark Gable
reply 96
04/03/2009
Leigh's acting can't really be judged by contemporary standards. She's very overrated, but it's unfair to say "she can't act." Granted, she didn't create ten minutes of authenticity in her entire career, but neither did a lot of "good" actresses of her time. She was incredibly beautiful and often interesting to watch.
by Clark Gable
reply 97
04/03/2009
"The only part Norma Shearer could have nailed in GWTW is one of the Twelve Oaks. She just about had the range to be able to pull that off."
Joan dear, she hasn't the range of twelve oaks.
by Clark Gable
04/03/2009
BRAVO, r81!!!
R56 is an idiot of the highest degree. Hatti McDaniel happily accepted the Oscar and said she hoped she was a credit to her race. She was because she gives one of the greatest iconic performances in American Film History.
by Clark Gable
04/03/2009
Enlighten us all, R81.
We find it amazing that a film and novel can be blamed for racism.  I mean, I always blamed it on politics, politicians, religions, and close-minded, ignorant culture.  To know that we can let those things off the hook and blame a story about a woman in love with another woman's husband--which is what the story is about--is a great relief to the masses.  Thank you, oh wise one.  You amaze all of us who know nothing of race.
by Clark Gable
How could they cast that psycho limey cunt?
I practically had Scarlett O'Hara written across my fivehead!
by Clark Gable
reply 107
04/03/2009
The studio still photographer Bob Coburn said this about photographing Leigh during the making of "That Hamilton Woman":
"There was a spark there which I couldn't see while we were shooting.  Vivien didn't know she had it, and I didn't either, but it was there in the pictures.  Just shooting her was like shooting a statue, an inanimate statue, but she was beautiful and whatever it was she had came across. "
by Clark Gable
reply 108
04/03/2009
Leigh is amazing in That Hamilton Woman.  If I did drag, I'd do it as Leigh's Lady Emma Hamilton.
"Remember, Mother:  It's knowing things like that which make you a Lady."
by Clark Gable
Aunt Pittypat always reminds me of Shirley Temple.
by Clark Gable
reply 110
04/03/2009
R104, it's one of those movies that seems like it's going to be fun but turns out to not be anywhere near as witty (or factual) as it could have been.  To it's credit, it moves quickly but it isn't very good.  And it mocks a lot of Hollywood figures (Goddard, Cahplin, Bankhead) with just Carole Lombard and Vivien Leigh escaping the unflattering portrayals.
by Clark Gable
reply 111
04/03/2009
The idiot who started the "racist/Leigh can't act" bullshit is SO fucking stupid he can't even realize what some people are saying.  Some people are not arguing that GWTW isn't racist.  They're arguing that one can give a good, or a great, performance in a racist film.
THAT'S what's stupid about your statement that no one could have been a good Scarlett, because the film is racist.
The racism has nothing to do with the quality of the acting.
And "I'm right" is such a solid argument, too.  Vivien Leigh couldn't act.  I'm right, so it's the truth.
You're the biggest nincompoop on DL all year, and considering how many inhabit this place on a regular basis, that's saying something.
by Clark Gable
R112, what were you adding to the thread?
by Clark Gable
reply 113
04/03/2009
Even though no screen test exists of Lucille Ball's test--she only gave an in-office audition rather than do a filmed screen test--it would have been great to see her read for this.  I read in some GWTW book that when Desilu bought what had been the David Selznick studio she took over Selznick's office and had the Tara set sold off to some lady in Georgia, who in turn sold it to some guy in CT.  (It later rotted away and what remained was sold off in one-foot blocks.)   Anyway, I always found it hard to belive that Lucille Ball ever had her heart set on the role of Scarlett, nor that she was all that upset that she didn't get the part or held a vendetta against Selznick.  I mean--she was the best at what she did; she didn't need GWTW anymore than GWTW needed Ball.  Thoughts?
by Clark Gable
reply 114
04/03/2009
What a stupid argument.  Its like saying someone else would have been better as Norman Bates in "Psycho" or as Dorothy Gale in "The Wizard of Oz".
ps, R68 was either joking or is a retard.
by Clark Gable
reply 115
04/03/2009
[quote]Can we all recover from the absurd fantasy that Vivien Leigh knew how to act? Her performance in Streetcar is unwatchably mannered: She plays crazy from the get go, and her Blanche has no arc. Why not play Blanche as someone who's trying really hard NOT to have a flip-out, instead of as someone who's already WAY out there, and is planning to stay out there?
Tennessee Williams said that Vivien Leigh brought to the role of Blanche "everything that I intended, and much that I had never dreamed of."
Pauline Kael wrote that Leigh as Blanche was "one of those rare performances that can truly be said to evoke both fear and pity."
I trust their judgment a wee bit more than yours, honey. Especially since the second part of your post would seem to indicate that you're rather unhinged yourself.
by Clark Gable
reply 116
04/03/2009
Well, I for one have always saud that Dorothy Gale would haved been MUCH better portrayed by screen legend/ingenue Deanna Durbin.
by Clark Gable
reply 117
04/03/2009
Why do Gone with the Wind Queens come unglued when someone brings up the racism of the movie?
I get it that you love the movie. I mean, I love Barbara Cook, but if someone says she's fat I don't burst into tears and call them deranged liars.
by Clark Gable
reply 118
04/03/2009
Because, R118, we aren't discussing that, we're discussing the hypothetical casting of others in the lead role.  Don't worry; we'll wait for you to catch up.
by Clark Gable
reply 119
04/03/2009
I've always felt really sad that McDaniel felt she had to say she hoped she was a credit to her race. Why is it that no white Oscar winner ever felt he or she had to say "I hope I'm a credit to my race."
While McDaniel's speech wasn't, IMO, a reflection of the film being or not being racist, it certain spoke volumes for how racist America was.
by Clark Gable
reply 120
04/03/2009
[quote]Granted, she didn't create ten minutes of authenticity in her entire career, but neither did a lot of "good" actresses of her time.
She has more than 10 minutes of authenticity if you look beyond [italic]GWTW[/italic], which, by the way, Leigh alone carries in an incredible star turn-- she's virtually the whole damned movie. If it weren't for the performances of Leigh and Hattie McDaniel [italic]GWTW[/italic] would be an unwieldy unpalatable overproduced melodramatic mess.
Watch Vivien towards the end of [italic]That Hamilton Woman[/italic] in the scene in which she realizes Nelson is dead but sits and embroiders in silence. In a seemingly endless monologue Hardy recounts Nelson's final moments until at last he breaks down and sobs openly in front of her. Leigh as Emma doesn't break down, but glares almost balefully at him in shock. It's an authentic moment in a film full of Hollywoodized historical hokum (although Vivien was at her most ravishing during this film).
I also think Leigh is better than one has been led to believe in the otherwise problematic 1948 adaptation of [italic]Anna Karenina[/italic], especially during a confrontation scene with Anna's husband Karenin (Ralph Richardson). He says something particularly cruel to her and Leigh's wounded reaction is as devastating and authentic as it gets.
Leigh has trouble with long monologues and talky scenes in general but her intense attention to other actors and authentic reactions to the other actors in a scene are what really set her apart from her peers. I find Leigh a better and more instinctive performer on film than her second husband, for whatever that's worth. Vivien Leigh's achievement is all the more remarkable given the peculiar challenge of being married to a man constantly lauded as the World's Greatest Actor and constantly being compared to him (and perhaps found wanting), her lifelong struggles with bipolar affective disorder, her attempts to self-medicate with alcohol, and so on.
by Clark Gable
reply 121
04/03/2009
Actually, R119, several people have been screaming and gnashing their teeth over the very specific issue of GWTW being racist. So your post makes no sense.
by Clark Gable
reply 122
04/04/2009
Katharine Hepburn, in the Scott Berg book, is quoted as saying that Olivier was jealous of Leigh's success in Hollywood and undermined it by constantly luring her back to the stage where she wasn't as skillful.
by Clark Gable
reply 123
04/04/2009
That scene in That Hamilton Woman is superb; she's great throughout that filom.  And, to her credit, she didn't play Vivien Leigh or Scarlett O'Hara again and again--which can't be said for most Hollywood actors (past and present).  Watch her in GWTW, then her fantastic turn in Wat5erloo Bridge.  Then watch her complete spin in Caeser and Cleopatra, That Hamilton Woman, Anna Karenina, or The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, and so on.  And, if you can find a bootleg copy, while she hated the film, "The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea" shows Leigh playing a very quiet, subdued part: a suicidal woman.  Not to mention her part in Ship of Fools.  When I see her movies, I wish she had never met Olivier; if it hadn't been for his influence, she likely would have made many, many more movies.  To say she couldn't act or was a weak actress is to not have seen enough of her work to judge her versatility.  She was much more than Scarlett O'Hara.
by Clark Gable
reply 124
04/04/2009
Can we go back in time and abort R122 in the moments after conception?  Sometimes it's kinder. . .
Back to topic:  Norma Shearer.  Did she ever test or did she decline an offer to test?  I can't even picture her being considered seriously for this part (and I'm a rare DL'er who liked her).
by Clark Gable
reply 125
04/04/2009
I read somewhere that Shelley Winters had the cajones to force her way into the auditions and tell the producers in her Brooklyn meets antebellum accent, "Lawsy, boys, I'm the only actress to play Scarlett."  Naturally, she was never in contention for that role, but one of the producers saw something to encourage her to continue studying.
by Clark Gable
reply 126
04/04/2009
Did Carol Channing ever test?  "As God is my witness. . .I'll never be--CORN?  When did I have corn?"
by Clark Gable
reply 127
04/04/2009
I didn't bring up the subject of racism, R125. I have only responded to what others said. As have you in your own histrionic way.
by Clark Gable
reply 128
04/04/2009
[italic]Anyway, I always found it hard to belive that Lucille Ball ever had her heart set on the role of Scarlett, nor that she was all that upset that she didn't get the part or held a vendetta against Selznick. I mean--she was the best at what she did; she didn't need GWTW anymore than GWTW needed Ball. Thoughts?[/italci]
Lucille Ball did not have her heart set on playing Scarlett. She auditioned only because every name actress her age was doing it. The story goes that she was caught in a pounding rain on her way to Selznick's office and was drying herself by the fire looking like a drowned rat when he arrived. I think it goes on that he offered her a large snifter of brandy and her only recollection is that she was bedraggled and half-bombed and not the least bit surprised never to be called back.
by Clark Gable
04/04/2009
From letter Selznick wrote to Ed Sullivan in September of 1938:
"MGM and my compnay played around with the idea of having Norma Shearer do the role.  It was never settled, but it was leaked out that we were thinking about it and you know yourself what an outcry was raised..."
by Clark Gable
reply 130
04/04/2009
Vivien Leigh's singular triumph as Scarlett is that she makes what is on the face of it a totally selfish and unsympathetic woman likeable, charming, admirable despite her outrageously bitchy machinations, even tragic and poignant. I don't quite know how she pulls off this magic trick, but she does.
Leigh herself claimed she never liked or related to Scarlett at all except when Scarlett cried that her mother would have been disappointed in her. On the other hand Vivien Leigh's personal assistant during the production of GWTW asserts that Vivien and Scarlett had much in common in terms of manipulative charm and a steely determination to get their own way, so maybe Leigh's incarnation of Scarlett was that rare thing, an example of perfect casting. The screen tests and the final product would certainly seem to bear that out.
by Clark Gable
reply 131
04/04/2009
I saw that personal assistant, R131, on some documentary and I recall thinking, "This is someone who says what she thinks people want to hear."  It never struck me that they knew each other well--not like friends or anything--so I always took her comments as a bit of a grab at attention.  You know, that "If I don't say something interesting, they won't include me" type thing.  I think her name was Sunny Lash?  I recall laughing at that name.  I assume by now she's dead.  Lashes to lashes, dust to dust and that whole thing. . .
by Clark Gable
reply 132
04/04/2009
R79, I am always being tongue in cheek about my love for Norma on here.  You either missed the nuance or your fat ass just fell off the turnip truck.
Miss Shearer was a silent film star long before she ever met Mr. Thalberg. Did he help her career?  Yes.  Did it continue after he died, yes.  You are repeating an often told piece of misinformation.  Sorry, it just isn't true.
Besides, Norma won an Oscar, and many nominations which doesn't make my admiration for her all that strange when you compare it to the facts of her career and accomplishments.
Fact, she was offered the role of Scarlett O'Hara first.  No screen test was made.  She was too big a star to be screen tested.
And we all die, R79.  I am sure you will too one day and you will pass on in relative obscurity, I am pretty darn certain.
by Clark Gable
They wanted Garbo to play Scarlett, originally.
by Clark Gable
reply 135
04/04/2009
Leigh's acting can't really be judged by contemporary standards. She's very overrated, but it's unfair to say "she can't act."
I don't think she's overrated, she was also brilliant in Streetcar. And you have to remember she was a manic depressive, before there was effective medication for it. If she hadn't had to battle that her entire career, she would've had many more successes. She got so depressed she'd just mope around the house for years, naturally her career suffered.
by Clark Gable
reply 136
04/04/2009
There is a theory, that I don't think has been brought up in the thread (I didn't check page 2) that they knew Vivien was the ultimate Scarlet from the start. But the choice would've been heavily criticized unless every possible American actress wasn't considered first. Plus wasn't Vivien's affair with Laurence Olivier also known at the time, making her highly scandalous? Either one or both of them must've been married when they started fooling around, which was a huge no-no at the time.
So they pretended to consider Bette, Hepburn and all the others, just to give them cover for choosing Vivien supposedly as a final resort.
by Clark Gable
reply 137
04/04/2009
I don't understand the posts that claim GWTW was racist. Didn't it depict SLAVERY, which EXISTED. Wasn't Mammy a smart woman who, within the context of her circumstances and time, did the best she could with her life? She did have that sassy "Mammy" personality, but ALL characters in the film had some sort of iconic and distinct personality. That is the stuff of drama. Yes, Prissy was portrayed as a stupid black girl/woman and Poke was portrayed as an ignorant black man. But many of the white characters were equally as stupid and many were hostile. Frank Kennedy was a tool. Scarlett's sisters were vain and shallow, spoiled girls. It's DRAMA. And slavery existed. The end. If anything, this movie portrayed the slavery situation as being more humane and kind than the horrific reality of it. The book and film are filled with what could be called stereotypes of all kinds. Not all southern belles were like Scarlett, either. Not all plantation owners were prideful Irish men with thick brogues like Mr. O'Hara.
The "look for it in books for it is no more than a dream remembered, a civilization Gone With The Wind" language must be what makes people think that slavery, itself, was glamorized and an acceptable part of a "perfect world that was lost."  The pre-war old South was portrayed as this magnolia scented paradise, of which slavery was a vital part.
Historical context be damned?
Louise Brooks as Scarlett would have been something, huh?
by Clark Gable
reply 139
04/04/2009
[quote]Plus wasn't Vivien's affair with Laurence Olivier also known at the time, making her highly scandalous? Either one or both of them must've been married when they started fooling around, which was a huge no-no at the time.
Yes, they were both married to other people when they began their relationship. Vivien married a barrister named Leigh Holman when she was 19; they separated in 1937 when Vivien left him for Laurence Olivier. Vivien had already had affairs with other men during her first marriage but before she met Olivier. Despite this she and Holman remained on friendly terms for the rest of Vivien's life.
Olivier left his first wife Jill Esmond and moved in with Vivien during the summer of 1937. Jill Esmond was gay but this was not public knowledge at the time for obvious reasons.
In the recent authorised bio of Olivier the author reveals that Olivier's best man at his wedding to Jill Esmond got into bed with him the night before the wedding but that Olivier allegedly did not 'go through with it'.
by Clark Gable
reply 140
04/04/2009
I think the above theory of Vivien Leigh being the chosen Scarlett, more or less, from the start is probable but there is that wonderful legend of her being presented to David Selznick as late as the night the 2nd unit crew shot some background scenes of the burning of Atlanta.  Vivien showed up there with David's brother Myron, an agent, who reportedly said: "David, may I present to you Miss Scarlett O'Hara?"
by Clark Gable
reply 141
04/04/2009
Selznick only GOT Gable as a concession for giving MGM the distribution rights. Period. He was their trump card for getting a money stake in the film. There was some controversy at the time in the choice of an English girl to play Scarlett after the massive publicity campaign had combed the four corners of the US. I don't know who said it (anyone know?) but someone said "Well, better an ENGLISH girl than a yankee!"
by Clark Gable
04/04/2009
I forwarded this thread to my mother and she loves it!
She also told me she has the letter from Selznick telling my Grandmother that she was not getting the role of Scarlett.
I want that letter!
My favorite fact from that "making of" documentary:
Scarlett was originally called Pansy.
by Clark Gable
reply 148
04/04/2009
Hattie McDaniel was forced to sit at her own table - her all-black table - at the Academy Awards ceremony the year Gone With the Wind won its Oscars.  I believe the ceremony was in the Biltmore Hotel?  In downtown LA?  Whatever, maybe I'm wrong about the location, but I'm not wrong that McDaniel was not allowed to sit with white people during the ceremony.
Imagine if the Academy Awards these days had a "Black Section" and a "Whites Only Section."
That alone suggests the racial climate that permeated Hollywood when GWTW was made.
"Oh, but it was 1939!  What about history!"
Blah blah blah.
I'm not saying that everybody else WASN'T racist in the USA in 1939.  I'm saying, in the midst of all that racism, GWTW is maybe the most impressive document of racist attitudes that prevailed at the time.
Please tell me, by the way, that you don't all really believe that forcing a black woman with genius comic timing to run around a bunch of white people saying, "Yass'm Miss this," and "Yassuh Massa that": Please tell me you don't consider that to be a depiction of a strong and independent black woman.
"Oh, but that's how them slaves talked in 1855!"
Okay, how do you know how enslaved African American talked in 1855?  For one thing.
And for another:
Please don't tell me you think that the "Sentimental Black Mammy" who loves all god's white children even more than she loves her own: Please tell me you don't think the figure of the enslaved and sentimentalized "good Negro" is someone to be held up to us all as a symbol of racial equality.
Just because it's entertainment and the pretty white people don't whip or rape the charming black people doesn't mean it's not racist.
by Clark Gable
reply 149
04/04/2009
Bette Davis fans can be as bullying and mono-maniacal as their heroine--she would have ruined that film with her pop-eyed intense charmlessness, and her constant twitching.
Leigh was brilliant, Goddard could have been suprisingly good.  Bennet might also have been--but she had a groundedness that seems unlike Scarlett.
by Clark Gable
04/04/2009
Fwiw, here are my thoughts on Leigh and the film.
*Are the black characters racist? Yes and no. Yes, Butterfly McQueen is a racist stereotype, but Hattie McDaniel's Mammy is a far more complex character. Mammy is the spiritual center of the film. Remember, Rhett tells Mammy she is the one person whose respect he values (and wants). Mammy is the one person who can speak the truth to Scarlett (not that she listens), and the person who initiates the closure of the film itslef by contacting Miss Melanie. In the context of the time, Mammy was a powerful figure representing honesty and love.
Interesting tidbit--iirc, Mitchell endowed a scholarship at Morehouse. For a Southern woman, she was quite ahead of her time.
This is why the character of Scarlett is so interesting. Scarlett is not the "old South" in any way, shape, or form. In fact, she and Rhett are far more "Yankee" than even they want to admit. They are (in the context of Southern culture)"Yankee" like in that they are materialistic, driven, and no in the least concerned with traditional "manners"--although ironically, Rhett wants his daughter accepted by the same Southern gentile society that would find his background suspect to say the least.
Melanie and Ashley are the "old South," and therefore, doomed. Their way cannot survive, and this is what makes Melanie such a poignant figure. She is the perfect lady--and therefore, the "white" counterpoint to Mammy. Both are deeply religious, and understand the terrible consequences people like Rhett and Scarlett pay for their actions.
As for Leigh, I cannot imagine anyone else in the role. She was always at her best playing characters who were on a knife edge--sensual, intelligent, and a bit mad. Watch Leigh's performance in "Ship of Fools." The film is pure melodrama, but the acting of everyone is superb. Imagine Scarlett in middle age on a cruise and you get the idea.
Bette Davis as Scarlett? No, since BD would have brought way too much irony and hauteur to the role.
by Clark Gable
reply 151
04/04/2009
Bette Davis would've been a wonderful Scarlett - though I don't see her having much chemistry with Clark Gable.  Davis is a far better screen actress than Vivien Leigh, who has nothing to offer but nerves and a V-shaped head.  And who cares what Tennessee Williams said about Leigh-as-Blanche!  Just because he's the playwright doesn't mean he's the expert on his play and how it should be performed.
by Clark Gable
Bette Davis was the main runner-up for the role as far as I know.
by Clark Gable
04/04/2009
[italic]  Davis is a far better screen actress than Vivien Leigh, [/italic]
That comment makes me laugh, because it's so untrue.  Bette Davis knew how to play one thing, and one thing only -- and that was Bette Davis.  When the character and the actress were the perfect fit, she could be stunning playing a variation of herself -- ie, "All About Eve," or "Baby Jane" (which allowed her to show off her constant rage to the world).  But sometimes she was embarrassing ("Dark Victory," "The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex.")
Leigh was a brilliant screen actress.
by Clark Gable
reply 156
04/04/2009
Okay, Gone With the Wind was the most rascist movie ever made. Racist racist racist. Are you happy now?
Now, let's get back to talking about Scarlett. Bette Davis, as great an actress as she was, wouldn't have been right as Scarlett, imho. Davis could never play "sexy," which the part of Scarlett required. Vivien Leigh was not only beautful, but also had an allure that Davis never could have projected. I love Bette Davis, but she just wouldn't have worked as Scarlett.
by Clark Gable
04/04/2009
She had to walk to the podium from the last row of seats.
We're still a racist country, even with a black man as president. But we're much more enlightened than we were in the '30s. It's a matter of degrees, and I think that McDaniel winning the Oscar that night was one of the million small things that made Obama possible.
Is the unhinged poster our own late and lamented David E?
by Clark Gable
I'm not unhinged.
I'm very hinged, thank you very much.
Bette Davis is a WAY better screen actress than Vivien "I can only indicate" Leigh.  Seriously, watch Davis's "recognition" scene in "Jezebel," where she realizes that her forever-love Henry Fonda has married a (tackily dressed) northerner.  It's a minimalist moment, Davis makes the whole thing work with her eyes.
People who like Leigh better than Davis are afraid of women!
Leigh is all dainty-girly with that steel subtext.
Davis doesn't play "fragile" in order to get what she wants.
Don't be afraid of a real women, you misogynists!
Davis is as sexy as they come!  She has just as much nervous energy as Vivien Leigh ever had!  And Davis knows how to channel her nerves.
Leigh is a tiresome, obvious actor.
by Clark Gable
Really, you have to admit that "Gone with the Wind" is endless and exhausting.
by Clark Gable
04/04/2009
Hattie McDaniel would've been an interesting Scarlett.
She's by far the best actor in the film.  A BRILLIANT comic actor - see her performance in Icky Katharine Hepburn's "Alice Adams."  Tragic that the best Hollywood could offer McDaniel was being Vivien Leigh's comic sidekick.  But them white women with high cheekbones love themselves some black womens to hang around and adjust their dresses - see Wanda Sykes sidelined in Jane Fonda's "Monster-in-Law."  Racism over?  Hardly.
by Clark Gable
reply 162
04/04/2009
R161. . .why do we have to admit that?  I don't know about the others but I've seen GWTW more times than any other film and have never found it endless or exhausting.
Your post, on the other hand. . .
by Clark Gable
reply 163
04/04/2009
[italic]I've always felt really sad that McDaniel felt she had to say she hoped she was a credit to her race.[/italic]
Cheer up! She had no say in the matter. The studio wrote the acceptance speech for her.
by Clark Gable
04/04/2009
David Kehr called it a "critic-proof movie if there ever was one."
And 162, if you see her role as "comic sidekick" you've never watched the movie, just admit it. What was comical about the scene on the staircase that won her the Oscar?
by Clark Gable
reply 165
04/04/2009
r 163!  My post was not endless!  Otherwise, you wouldn't have been able to post.  And it seems like you exhaust easy!  "Gone with the Wind" is sentimental clap-trap.  Not one word is true!  Including "and" and "the!"  The notion that it bears any kind of truthful relationship to the facts of US history. . .  Oh, please.  I admit: I have never liked Clark Gable, and I find Vivien Leigh trite and mannered.  Not to mention: Leslie Howard!  Help me, Jesus.  Who said he could act?  What's up with Gable's not-accent?  What's up with Howard's eye-makeup?  If only they had led Butterfly McQueen play Scarlett and Thomas Mitchell play Rhett Butler, and had given the camera to Robert Flaherty - maybe then it'd've been worth watching.
by Clark Gable
reply 166
04/04/2009
All the idiots screaming that GWTW is racist should read the book. It portrays blacks AND whites as people, individuals with vividly different personalities.
The rabid "GWTW is racist!" nits claim that all GWTW depicts blacks as docile, stupid, loyal to their masters and content. Actually, thoughtout the book there are slaves with every type of personality: some are lazy, some are hard-working, some are loyal, some flee their owners, some are dumb, some are smarter than a lot of the white characters.
In the book ALL of the slaves at Tara run off but three; so much for contented slaves.
Everybody thinks that Prissy is meant to represent blacks as a whole (she's empty-deaded and foolish and ridiculous) but she was just another character in the book, albiet one with a lot of faults. Two of the black characters, Mammy and Peter, are smarter than a lot of the whites. Peter is 100 times brighter than his mistress Miss Pittypat. Mammy holds her own with any of the whites, including Scarlett and Rhett; I love you "mule in a horse harness" speech to Scarlett when she tells Mammy she intends to marry the scoundrel Rhett Butler.
The speech of the slaves has been criticized. While probably exaggerated, it is representative of how African Americans talked back then. I hear African Americans who talk like that NOW! Speech like that appears to be the result of a lack of education. I've heard very uneducated whites talk like that. My mother's second husband was a white trash drunk who was barely literate; he would say things like "it sho do!"
Oh and another thing: this book primarily expresses the point of view of white Southern plantation and slave owners. Of COURSE they're going to use the "n" word and have the belief that blacks are inferior and need the guidance of whites. That was the pervasive attitude back then. A book that expresses the views of people in a particular place and time is not racist.
The movie GWTW tends to glorify that era, but the book doesn't, at least not entirely. In the book some of the primary characters pine for the "good old days" but some don't. In fact Rhett Butler has contempt for people who feel that way and calls the "old days" of Southern planation living antiquated and silly.
by Clark Gable
reply 167
04/04/2009
[italic]Hattie McDaniel's Mammy is a far more complex character. Mammy is the spiritual center of the film.[/italic]
While this is true and all too rare in a black role for the time, the racism is still there because Mammy has no life of her own. As complex as she is, she exists solely to serve white people. There is no mention of her having any life of her own.
by Clark Gable
r 165, I've seen the movie plenty.
I'm not saying McDaniel didn't deserve every award anybody had to give.
I'm saying: Watching "Gone with the Wind" is, for me, as shameful and painful and embarrassing as seeing photographs of lynched black men in the American south.
Ask Malcolm X what he thought of the movie!
I mean, whatever, he's dead, but do I have to translate every single figure of speech so you can understand me?
by Clark Gable
reply 169
04/04/2009
Oh, my.  You're so right, R166.  Because you say so, I will never enjoy the film again--now that I k nwo it's sentimental clap-trap (unlike so many Hollywood films which are realistic portrayals and dead-on with historical accuracy).  And, if I do, to appease the other crazy on the thread (I will assume you aren't the only one though I have my doubts), I will don a white robe and burn a crucifix in front of my romm-mate's door so there is no doubt that I am partaking in a racist activity and proliferating racist propaganda.
Now please go jerk off with a cheese grater.
by Clark Gable
04/04/2009
r 170, how'd you know about me and the cheese grater?
Imagine the Obamas hosting a screening of GWTW at a fancy dress ball attended by all the leaders of the free world.
And now tell me that you aren't squirming in your chair at the thought of the Obamas and everyone else being subjected to the film's demeaning, belittling, reductive, dehumanizing portraits of its black characters.
by Clark Gable
Malcolm X? Ask MADAME X!
by Clark Gable
reply 172
04/04/2009
Do those who question the dialect used in Margaret Mitchell's novel ever critique black writers who do the same?  An Oprah Book Selection, Cane River, featured quite a bit of dialect like that--and the author who used it was black.  Margaret Mitchell herself did research on writing that dialect by travelling and making notes as she drove around the South; a reader who pays attention will note that slaves with a background from one region will speak differently than those from another--just as some of the white characters (Archie comes to mind) also have dialect written into their dialogue.  It was not meant as a mockery nor did she intend for anyone to laugh at it from either white or black characters; it was meant to genuinely reflect how a character sounded.  To her ears, white Southern drawl was common, thus no accent.  But when a character was from the mountains, the North, or sold in trade, an accent appeared to make them as true as possible.  If you've read GWTW, you'll note that never at any point in the book do you think, "I'm lost; what character is speaking?"  You pick up rather quickly which character is doing the talking as Dilcey would pronounce words differently than Mammy or Uncle Peter and they'd speak in different tones, as well.
Again though, one has to wonder why Mitchell draws so much flack when Lalita Tademy, Alice Walker, and Alice Randall don't.  And again, in regards to white authors, where's the fuss over E.L. Doctorow's The March, Donald McCaig's "Jacob's Ladder" and so on?  Or have the intelligent ones upon us never bothered to read--and be disturbed by--the contents of any of those author's works?
by Clark Gable
"who cares what Tennessee Williams said about Leigh-as-Blanche!"
Certainly no one who knew him.
It was always laughed about among his friends. Williams told every Blanche she was the one, true Blanche.
And he told every actress he met that she would make the most divine Blanche of all. Sometimes he meant it (as with Kim Stanley) sometimes it was just courtly flattery (Natalie Wood) and sometimes it was just to amuse himself by watching them get all moist about it(Shelley Winters.)
by Clark Gable
reply 174
04/04/2009
Why are people acting as if GWTW being racist is an idea that first saw the light of day in this thread?
People knew at the time it was racist. Selznick was deeply concerned about putting such a racist book on the screen. The black community (not that their opinion matters, of course) was outraged at both the book and the movie.
I can't believe there are people here arguing that GWTW was not racist. It's such a flat-earth contention.
by Clark Gable
04/04/2009
What a lovely thread!
William Inge, Malcolm X, Shelley Winters all moist, Oprah's Book Club, Olivier's sex life!  I guess GWTW is doing some good in the world, after all!
r 173, just to take you up on something: Alice Walker doesn't write about black characters who have no agency!  Margaret Mitchell's slaves are just slaves.  Their private lives don't matter, their choices don't matter, they don't matter.  Alice Walker's characters have lives and make choices and act in the world.
As for Tennessee Williams:
Gore Vidal always said Williams was the stupidist genius he ever met.
by Clark Gable
reply 176
04/04/2009
"...there is one point of criticism that remains no matter how you look at it: even if this popular classic is perhaps informed by a feminist impulse, even if it is not as apologetic as it is made out to be, it is unremittingly and unforgivably racist. With the exception of Mammy, the personification of the earth mother, and Uncle Peter, the exemplary father figure, "darkies" are almost always children in need of a guiding hand or children gone wrong.
Gone With the Wind may not simplistically recreate the moonlight and magnolia myth, but it does argue that Southern society, complete with slavery, would have been a fine institution if uncultured, ignorant Yankees hadn't come along and ruined it all.
In no way does Mitchell admit slavery was wrong; instead blacks are portrayed as "creatures of small intelligence," as "monkeys or small children" (638, Ch. 37), and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan as thoroughly justified."
by Clark Gable
reply 177
04/04/2009
"Gone with the Wind is an extraordinarily racist novel even by the standards of the time when it was written. The movie - although still unpalatable - is a much-cleaned-up version with Rhett referring to the servants as "darkies" rather than "niggers" as they are in the book.
But like Mitchell's novel, it perpetrates the myth of white masters as gentlemen and slaves revelling in their own lack of freedoms because the paternalistic master will look after them. Gone With the Wind is an elegy for a lost world in which white men were gentlemen and black men and women knew their place and kept it - and if they didn't they faced the attentions of the Ku Klux Klan.
Novels and plays are of course a reflection of the times in which they were written. But Mitchell's story is much more than a product of its times: it didn't just relegate black people to the sidelines, it played a major role in shaping how Afro-Americans were seen over the next 40 years.
Mitchell was such a good storyteller that Gone With the Wind seduced readers with the romantic myth of the old south, and encouraged racism and segregation in the USA until the arrival of the civil rights movement in the 1960s swept away the mythology and showed the harsh reality of black people's lives and the tainted legacy of slavery.
Gone with the Wind is not just a symptom of the problem, but part of the problem..."
by Clark Gable
04/04/2009
I didn't mean to upset anyone.
Well then, what did we all think about Lillian Gish's performance in BIRTH OF A NATION?
by Clark Gable
reply 181
04/04/2009
"Miss Shearer was a silent film star long before she ever met Mr. Thalberg. Did he help her career? Yes. Did it continue after he died, yes. You are repeating an often told piece of misinformation. Sorry, it just isn't true."
Shearer was in movies before she married Thalberg, but it wasn't until she was Mrs. Thalberg that she started getting plum roles. After their marriage she became "the Queen of the Lot". After his death, her career quickly faded. And it was partly her own fault; she turned down the role in "Mrs. Miniver" because she was so prickly about her age that she didn't want to portray the mother of a 20 year old son. Greer Garson played the role and won an Oscar for it.
by Clark Gable
reply 182
04/04/2009
"r 165, I've seen the movie plenty......I'm saying: Watching "Gone with the Wind" is, for me, as shameful and painful and embarrassing as seeing photographs of lynched black men in the American south."
Why would you watch a movie plenty you thought was as shameful, embarrassing as seeing photographs of lynched black men, more than once? Surely you would never see it again if you could help it, as the horror would be sickening.
GWTW to me is the perfect Hollywood movie. When I first saw it at 10 I was spellbound. It was timeless, wonderful, fabulous.
Vivien Leigh is Scarlett. I have seen this movie over ..well many times and it is magical.
She has this well bred look about her matched with dark hair and gorgeous eyes which match what are suposed to be Scarlett's Irish French roots. Nobody plays this selfish but irresitable creature quite as well. I love Paulette Goddard and think she would have done a good job, but I think she was too obvious as a minx to play Scarlett. The suprise for Scarlett is she is not really a lady and when she tries to be she fails. Something she can't understand.
by Clark Gable
R182 are you high?
Norma's career did not "quickly fade" after Irving's death.
Irving died in 1936. She made 6 more major films after his death until she decided to retire in 1942.
Mayer and MGM kept asking her to return with pictures like "Mrs. Miniver" because she was such a big draw.
She didn't want to age on screen and retired.
When you look at what Joan Crawford and Bette Davis did later in their careers, Norma's decision seems wise.
by Clark Gable
reply 184
04/04/2009
Vivien Leigh is Scarlett, but Carol Burnett does a great take off. Did anyone else see the parody of GWTW on the Link by r1 it was fabulous
by Clark Gable
04/04/2009
Lyn Garnder, the writer of the ignorant article at R179's link is a moron.
Apparently she feels that a novel written primarily from the perspective of conservative white slave-owing Southerners is racist because...it depicts racism! The white conservative Southern slave owners enjoy their circumstances and consider blacks inferior...racism! They call blacks "darkies" or "niggers"...racism! They fight for the Confederacy in the Civil War...racism! Some of (but not all) the blacks are depicted are lazy or stupid or loyal to their masters...racism!
This dumb twat must also consider "To Kill A Mockingbird" pure racism also. There are characters who look down on blacks...racism! They say the "n" word...racism! The wrongly accused black man says "chillun" and "no suh" and "I sho did, suh"...racism!
A book that features the views and actions of people who lived in an era where it was considered NORMAL to look down on persons of color or a different religion isn't racist. Anyone who thinks so is pathologically paranoid about racism.
by Clark Gable
reply 186
04/04/2009
Of course the book is racist, R186.  Sputtering won't prove it isn't.  It's a book written in the era of segregation about an earlier era, glorifying the "good old days."  Racist books can be good reads and they can be made into decent movies but that doesn't mean they aren't racist.
by Clark Gable
reply 187
04/04/2009
Not to change the subjext, but I actually thought Melvyn Douglas was quite smart and hunky in his Ashley Wilkes audition. He certainly would have been far more believable as the object of Scarlett's lust than cold fish Leslie.
by Clark Gable
reply 188
04/04/2009
Sorry, but I voted for Obama so I didn't have to listen to whining about slavery and racism.
I don't give a shit if the movie is racist and I don't give a shit if it offends black people.  It's high time you non-slaves get over yourselves and move on because the rest of the country has.
by Clark Gable
Melvyn Douglas is so hot!
Loved him in "Theodora Goes Wild."
As for GWTW: Of course it's racist, and of course it matters that it's racist, because it put across the information - to white Americans everywhere - that the slaveholding south was a society and culture of benevolent masters lording over helpless Africans who were grateful for their servitude.
As other posters have pointed out.
And racism is no way over.  Pay a visit to your local prison in Anywhere, USA, you'll notice a weirdly disproportionate number of black guys in there.  How come?  How come the population of black men in prison began to skyrocket in the late '60s and early '70s, just when the US was resorting more and more legal and social rights to African Americans?  Young black men are no longer enslaved in America - they are imprisoned.
I have never understood how gay people - who suffer so much discrimination and abuse, even still - can fail to acknowledge the racist legacy of the various entertainment industries in the US.
What's up with you queens?
by Clark Gable
I mean "restored," not "resorted."
Don't hurt me.
reply 191
04/04/2009
[italic]While this is true and all too rare in a black role for the time, the racism is still there because Mammy has no life of her own. As complex as she is, she exists solely to serve white people. There is no mention of her having any life of her own.[/italic]
It's like that awful UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS where all those poor white British people are forced into lives of servitude because, complex as they are,  they were born into situations where the alternative to service was starvation. Why Rose and Hudson didn't simply rise up and kill the Bellamys I'll never know.
by Clark Gable
How come homos get angrier than almost anyone when somebody calls something racist?
All gay men are Republicans.
As for Vivien Leigh: It's not that she can't act, it's that she doesn't.  She has no idea what acting is.
by Clark Gable
reply 193
04/05/2009
To get back to what the thread is about. . .Katherine Hepburn was almost Scarlett.  How?  She actually bid on the movie rights herself so she could get the film produced with her in the starring role.  She bid more than Selznick--but Selznick bid earlier and the deal was already sealed when Hepburn made her offer.
by Clark Gable
Yes!  That's what a gay man IS: a Republican.  When will America figure this out?
by Clark Gable
reply 195
04/05/2009
How gay men love their belongings.  Hey they hate high taxes.  Hey deeply they need to believe that their actions have no moral or social consequences.  How incredibly huffy they get when you suggest that there's such a thing as social responsibility.  How they love to buy leather couches!  How much Rudolph Giuliani really excites them.
"Gone with the Wind" is the gay guys' wet dream: They can indulge in their hatred of women and loathing of black people, all the while weeping and WEEPING and weeping about unattainable love.
by Clark Gable
reply 196
04/05/2009
"Mayer and MGM kept asking her to return with pictures like "Mrs. Miniver" because she was such a big draw"
She was also a major stockholder.
by Clark Gable
By "gay men," you mean "gay white men," I presume.
But:
To get back to what this thread is about:
Bette Davis was never going to have gotten Scarlett.  Nobody would've cast her as two Scarletts in a row, and she got her Oscar for the Scarlett-alike, Julie, in "Jezebel," in 1938.
I wonder what kind of Scarlett Loretta Young would have been.
I think Loretta Young is kind of hot.
by Clark Gable
reply 198
04/05/2009
Why, of course GWTW is racist.  Why, I live in the South and all those racist Crackers who go around with their KKK insignia and Confederate flag bumperstickers are ALWAYS carrying around a copy of Gone With the Wind and reading aloud.  It's a rite of passage for good old boys to recreate the scene with Scarlett and Ashley in the library.  You haven't seen racism in action til you've seen Billy Joe Jim Bob tell Angus Applewood, crying out his heart, "You'd rather live with that mealy-mouthed fool who can't open her mouth except to say, 'Yes' and 'No' and raise a passel of mealy-mouthed brats just like her!"  Angus always gets the tone just right when he says, "You musn't say those things about Melly."  Billy Joe Jim Bob swishes his skirts just so--masterfully handlking the hoops!--and interrupts by crying, "Who are you to tell me I musn't!  You led me on, you made me believe you were going to marry me!"
The slap that follows is just indescribably ugly and hateful.
It makes their white hoods and bumper stickers seem so civil by comparison to the ugliness that is GWTW.
by Clark Gable
reply 199
04/05/2009
Re: K. Hepburn -- Wasn't it Selznick who said that he couldn't imagine Rhett Butler chasing after THAT for all those years?
by Clark Gable
How limited.
"Young black men are no longer enslaved in America - they are imprisoned."
Truly, I weep for all these charming victims who shoot innocent people or steal from them and are so cruelly expected to spend time in jail for doing so!  Why, it's crueler than watching a kitten strangled!
by Clark Gable
reply 201
04/05/2009
Let me guess, R196:  You're the queen who posted the thread about not knowing if you should take the Kolopin you had in your pocket, right?  Could you please take a fistful and chase it with some bleach?
For all others:  Tallulah Bankhead was a favorite of several Georgian civic groups, who wanted her for Scarlett.  I would have loved that--though I love Leigh in the part.
"Ashley. . . dahhhhling. . ."
reply 202
04/05/2009
Norma Shearer, after her fan club decried the idea of their idol playing Scarlett, actually held a press conference where she "removed" herself from consideration from the role, saying, "I'd rather play Rhett Butler."
Was Shearer sapphic?
Also interesting is an earlier comment made by Shearer where she said that IF she played Scarlett, she would play her softer and more gently than she had been written.  (I wonder if she also would have emancipated the slaves before the story began?)
by Clark Gable
reply 203
04/05/2009
R200:  Selznick did say something along those lines.  I think it was that Hepburn, "lacked the sex qualities so important to the role" and "If we keep lining people up like Hepburn, we'll have a lovely picture perfect for release ten years ago."
You so know that if he were alive today, he'd be posting on the DL.
by Clark Gable
reply 204
04/05/2009
Marlene Dietrich would have been fun as Belle Watling but she couldn't do an American Southern accent, or any other type of accent for that matter, to save her life.
by Clark Gable
04/05/2009
Was Margaret Mitchell a gay girl?
I've always thought the hidden love story in GWTW was Scarlett and Mammy.  I bet they were making the beast with two backs!
For that matter, weren't Tallulah and Hattie McDaniel girlfriends?
by Clark Gable
04/05/2009
"Davis doesn't play "fragile""
You got it, Bette always had to operate from a position of power. We got to see how wrong-headed it was for her to play a victim as she aged, and was forced into pathetic roles like Sweet Charlotte, where she came off as a screechy mess.
by Clark Gable
reply 207
04/05/2009
Norma Shearer was the phoniest actress ever.  Not one single syllable she ever uttered sounded genuine.  She was all pose, posture and pronunciation.
She is beyond risible as the fluttering, menopausal Marie Antoinette.
Her Scarlett would have been so bland people would have left the theater not realizing that Mr. O'Hara had any daughters.
by Clark Gable
04/05/2009
Scarlett shoots a Yankee!
SOH takes about a quarter second off from being a calculating bitch to show admiration for Melanie (and Leigh manages to show all that in a flash--what an actress!) and then goes back immediately to being her own sour self.
I think it's Scarlett's drive and greedy toughness that make this movie tolerable; the sticky romantic stuff is superfluous.
by Clark Gable
reply 209
04/05/2009
As a Person of the North, I find this film to be incredibly insensitive and feel that all copies should be rounded up and destroyed.  This blatant disrespect for Persons of the North is unacceptable, what with us being shot in the face and all.  When one thinks of the Great Divide between the North and South, one need look no further than GWTW; it is not part of the problem. . .it IS the problem.
by Clark Gable
My favorite interview with Olivia deHavilland where she recounts some interesting tidbits about making GWTW.
She looks sorta hot.
reply 213
04/05/2009
I wish you all would knock it off with the "fraus" stuff.  It's so offensive, and it makes you look like a bunch of stereotypical woman-hating fa***ts.
by Clark Gable
reply 214
04/05/2009
R186, I'm sure it wasn't your intention to sound stupid and insane, but you just had nothing to work with.
Many non-racist books depict the racism of the Civil War era South. Many [italic]anti[/italic]-racist books depict the racism of that time. But they do not soften, sentimentalize and celebrate the racism and justify the KKK as Margaret Mitchell did.
It's not objective reportage, R186, it's a work of fiction. It has authorial intent and themes. Mitchell is not guilty of writing about the racist culture of the South, she is guilty of promoting it.
You don't understand how racism works and you don't understand how books work. Limit yourself to commenting on the hairstyles in the screen tests.
by Clark Gable
reply 215
04/05/2009
R214 = Uber-fattie frau, typing with one hand and cramming an entire pan of Rice Krispie treats into her enormous, sugar-coated pie hole with the other.
by Clark Gable
reply 216
04/05/2009
I'm sorry, R214.  I actually never use that word and didn't mean to offend anyone.  I was picturing one very specific--and tragically wide-hipped--Napoleonic munchkin I work with when I wrote that.  Had I known it was harmful to anyone, I never would have written it.
As for you, you need to get the 'f' word out of your heart, you ugly cunt.
by Clark Gable
04/05/2009
"Limit yourself to commenting on the hairstyles in the screen tests."
R215, if you'd shut your yap, I think everyone in this thread would be glad to do just that.
by Clark Gable
I love this thread.  I hope it lives forever.  Like Irene Cara.
by Clark Gable
reply 219
04/05/2009
The thing about Southern gals, they always come home again. Just picked up this book today:
The Book:  FRANKLY, MY DEAR: x93Gone With the Windx94 Revisited By Molly Haskell  (Yale University Press, $24)
BOOK REVIEW:  A New Look at 'Gone With the Wind'
by Ben Steelman
The thing about Southern gals, they always come home again.
Rita Mae Brown, who grew up in Florida, went off to rebel, wrote that ur-text of x9270s sexual liberation x93RubyFruit Junglex94 and found herself immortalized by the play and movie x93Educating Rita.x94 Now shex92s back in Old Virginia, master of hounds for the Oak Ridge Hunt Club and author of a string of fox-hunting murder mysteries.
Then therex92s Molly Haskell. Most people recognize her, these days, for her film chats with Robert Osborne on Turner Classic Movies, with that elegant Southern accent of hers.
In her day, though, Haskell was a bit of a rabble-rouser. A feminist film critic, she earned her spurs with her book x93From Reverence to Rapex94 (1974), which defended the x93womanx92s filmx94 and argued that Hollywoodx92s image of women had regressed, from the strong, take-charge characters of the x9230s and x9240s x96 the ones played by Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck and Jean Arthur x96 to the Doris Days and Bond girls.
You canx92t escape your raisinx92s, though, and Haskell, born in Morehead City, was raised proper in old-time Richmond, in a style befitting the great-great-granddaughter of a Confederate general (Wade Hampton). Thus, she canx92t escape the Mount Everest of Neo-Confederate nostalgia, the 1936 Margaret Mitchell best-seller that became the Top-Grossing Film (in inflation-adjusted dollars) of All Time.
The result: Her new book, x93Frankly, My Dear,x94 released as part of Yale University Pressx92s x93Icons of Americax94 series.
It may seem improbable, after 70 years, that anyone has anything new to say about x93Gone With the Wind.x94 At a minimum, though, Haskell reminds us of things we might not have noticed (x93Gone With the Wind,x94 for instance, beat out Faulknerx92s x93Absalom, Absalom!x94 for the Pulitzer Prize). Just as often, though, she makes us look at old celluloid through new eyes.
Haskell discusses both the novel and the movie, which arenx92t exactly alike. (Mitchell allowed Scarlett and Rhett to voice a lot of skepticism about the x93moonlight-and-magnoliax94 aspect of the Old South myth; the film version is far less critical.)
While most accounts focus on x93GWTWx94 in its context as a Depression movie on the eve of World War II, Haskell reminds us that the story emerged from the 1920s. Margaret Mitchell had been a genuine x93flapperx94 x96 blackballed from the Junior League for a x93daringx94 French apache dance she performed at an Atlanta ball. Divorced from the dashing but abusive x93Redx94 Upshaw (a possible model for Rhett), she supported herself as a magazine writer, digging up the story of plantation belles whox92d turned into tough-minded managers in the Civil War.
Haskell also identified a few moments in Atlanta history x96 the great fire of 1917, for instance, or the race riot of 1906, a larger, worse version of what happened in Wilmington in 1898 x96 that might have ricocheted through Mitchellx92s mind as she wrote her book.
As expected, Haskell finds little sympathy for the moviex92s glossy view of the antebellum South or its neocon perspective on Reconstruction. Shex92s more intrigued by Scarlett as a feminist hero x96 a rebel against x93whatx92s fittinx92 x94, who holds the plantation together, cannily runs her own business and becomes more of a Yankee (ruthless, greedy and unsentimental) than those awful carpetbaggers.
What strikes Haskell, though, is how x93GWTWx94 speaks to new audiences over and over, even people one wouldnx92t suspect. A group of political prisoners in Marxist Ethiopia, for example, read and translated a bootleg copy of the novel, finding hope that x93The people who have brains and courage come throughx94 and that tomorrow could be another day. (x93GWTWx94 was the first novel my stepdaughter-in-law, a Polish refugee, read in English; she chose to be married in a replica of Scarlettx92s Twelve Oaks barbecue gown.)
For the film fan, x93Frankly, My Dearx94 holds plenty of trinkets: Hattie McDaniel, who grew up in Oklahoma, needed tutoring on her accent in order to play Mammy.
Haskell sheds light on the contributions of the brilliant production designer William Cameron Menzies, who x96 decades ahead of Steven Spielberg x96 used the relatively new technique of x93storyboardingx94 to plot out key sequences such as the burning of Atlanta.
Moreover, Haskell, a luminous stylist, makes a lot of post-modern critical terminology clear as a bell. Most of us, for example, would have a hard time defining x93intervention,x94 but Haskell provides us an ideal example in the form of a middle-aged female fan who insisted, against all logic that Melaniex92s second baby (the one that caused her death) was fathered by Rhett. The lady took over the text and made it her own, and so do the rest of us
by Clark Gable
r 216, I am not an uber-fattie frau.  You need to recover from your misogyny!  Kissy.
by Clark Gable
reply 223
04/05/2009
"It's like that awful UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS where all those poor white British people are forced into lives of servitude"
Not at all. In UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS the servants have full lives. They have relationships among themselves, with the world outside. Some of them leave. They each have a background. They have personal dilemmas and ambitions. The slaves in GWTW (yes, even in the book) have none of these. Has Mammy ever been laid? Been in love? Had children? Did she ever discuss the possibilities of Freedom with other slaves? Did she even care that she was no longer a slave? We don't know because the author didn't care. It seems all Mammy ever wanted in this world was a pair of red bloomers.
by Clark Gable
reply 224
04/05/2009
R224, I would be interested to know about Mammy's private life, what she thought and felt-- but that's a different book/movie. The author and the filmmakers chose to focus on other characters, which was their choice to make and I'm fine with it.
This reminds me of something the great Spanish Surrealist filmmaker Luis BuxF1uel discussed in his autobiography. Linear narratives in conventional films bored him. In his memoirs  BuxF1uel asked why can't we follow the life of one of the 'unimportant' subsidiary characters for a while, branch off and depart from the main storyline and principal characters and follow something else. BuxF1uel pursued this tangential narrative style in his later French films, [italic]Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie[/italic] and [italic]Le FantxF4me de la libertxE9[/italic].
Returning somewhat to the topic at hand while he didn't explore slavery [italic]per se[/italic] in his work BuxF1uel had an abiding interest in social class and directed a film about a domestic servant and her interactions and relationships with people who employ her and attempt to exploit her (the great Jeanne Moreau in [italic]Le Journal d'une femme de chambre[/italic]).
by Clark Gable
04/05/2009
[quote]Obviously R207 has never seen "Now, Voyager," or "The Old Maid."
You know, I love Bette in [italic]Now, Voyager[/italic] but I always get the sense that after the makeover she's like a high-powered car being driven in low gear. I kept waiting for her to GO OFF on her truly awful abusive mother (the brilliant Gladys Cooper, who by the by played Lord Nelson's bitchy wife Lady Frances Nelson in [italic]That Hamilton Woman[/italic]) but she never does give that old hag what she deserves.
by Clark Gable
reply 226
04/05/2009
Thousands of baby girls across America were named Melanie after the character in the book and Olivia's portrayal in the film.  Very few....just about 9, I think.....were named Scarlett.
Oddly enough, thousands of baby girls were also named Ashley.
by Clark Gable
reply 227
04/05/2009
"The author and the filmmakers chose to focus on other characters, which was their choice to make and I'm fine with it."
But why did they choose to do so? Because Mammy, as a black woman, has no motivation in life but the well being of her white masters to whom she is so devoted. It is an old southern fantasy. Still a great movie and a great story... no less racist because of it.
by Clark Gable
reply 228
04/05/2009
[italic]because she was so prickly about her age that she didn't want to portray the mother of a 20 year old son. Greer Garson played the role and won an Oscar for it.[/italic]
She also got to fuck the 20 year old.
by Clark Gable
"she chose to be married in a replica of Scarlett�s Twelve Oaks barbecue gown"
Trash!
reply 230
04/05/2009
226!  Bette Davis is a fine car driven in low gear in Now Voyager!  That's swell.  Davis spent so much of her film career - her personal life, as well, I guess - searching for a man, hoping for a man, missing a man, pining for the man she killed!, and I always wonder:
What on earth would Bette Davis ever need with a man?
Or Joan Crawford, for that matter, or Susan Hayward, or any of those suffering dames.
There must have been about a dozen men in American in the 1940s who would've been up to any of those high-powered women!
by Clark Gable
04/05/2009
I wonder if Marlon Brando would've been a fun Rhett Butler.
Are Blanche and Stanley, in our American pop-imagination, just a low-rent version of Scarlett and Rhett?
by Clark Gable
reply 232
04/05/2009
Judging from the screen tests Paulette Goddard would have been very well cast and very good in the role but wouldn't hold a candle to what Leigh did with it.
by Clark Gable
reply 233
04/05/2009
Paulette Goddard has a sense of humor!  Vivien Leigh doesn't have a sense of humor.  She's terribly earnest.  Literal-minded Scarlett!  Blech.
by Clark Gable
Was Joan Bennett ever really considered?
by Clark Gable
reply 243
04/05/2009
Judy Garland was considered for the role of Careen, but the part went to Ann Rutherford who, like Garland, was in numerous Andy Hardy comedies.  I heard Ann Rutherford speak at an event once; the topic was supposed to be GWTW.  She went off on a tangent and talked for an hour or so, just telling all sorts of stories about Hollywood.  If you ever get the chance to hear her, go.  She's a riot.
by Clark Gable
reply 244
04/05/2009
I had the great fun of seeing Butterfly McQueen perform a one-woman show in an intimate church-basement setting. After she was done performing a selection of songs and poems there was a question-and-answer period.
She talked about GWTW and how sassy she was on the set. Hattie McDaniel warned her that she needed to learn her place and keep it if she wanted to go on working in Hollywood. But apparently Selznick didn't feel the same way, according to McQueen, as he cast her in several more movies and never hired McDaniel again.
by Clark Gable
reply 245
04/05/2009
Re: 1980s tv.  "The Scarlett O'Hara War" was Part 2 of a three part miniseries called "Moviola".
Part 1 was "Moviola: The Silent Lovers"
Part 2 was "Moviola: The Scarlett O'Hara War"
Part 3 was "Moviola: This Year's Blonde"
by Clark Gable
Was Myrna Loy ever considered for Scarlett?  Could she have played the role?
by Clark Gable
reply 247
04/05/2009
Wasn't the Silent Lovers part of Moviola based on the Garbo/Gilbert romance?  Am I crazy or did Barry Bostwick play Gilbert?  Cannot for the life of me remember who was Garbo. I  think that was surprisingly the best of the Moviola trio.
by Clark Gable
reply 248
04/05/2009
Myrna Loy was far too urbane and actually too old at that point in her career to ever be considered for Scarlett.
by Clark Gable
reply 249
04/05/2009
If Jennifer Jones had arrived in Hollywood just a few years earlier, Selznick would have surely pushed her for Scarlett.....maybe even over Vivien Leigh.
by Clark Gable
This thread has stopped being fun.
by Clark Gable
reply 255
04/06/2009
"Because in 1930s America a lavishly budgeted feature film recounting the life and loves of a sassy black woman living as a slave in the antebellum South was not a viable commercial prospect for any major Hollywood studio."
That's what Show Boat was about until Irene Dunne got out her red china marker and started rewriting the script.
by Clark Gable
04/06/2009
What better way to play Scarlett than to make fun of her?"
That was Rhett Butler's job. You can't make fun of someone who's already making fun of themselves.
And it's stupid to say Vivien Leigh had no sense of humor, as if playing the straight man meant she (the actress) wasn't in on the joke.
by Clark Gable
Who else was considered for the role of Rhett besides Gable?
I'd always just assumed the studio wanted Gable from the get go.
by Clark Gable
reply 258
04/06/2009
I'm shocked that neither Eve Arden or Thelma Ritter were considered to play Mammie. As for Miss Scarlett, frankly Dears I don't give a damn!
by Clark Gable
04/06/2009
[quote]You can't make fun of someone who's already making fun of themselves.
Exactly, R257. I think Leigh is funny as Scarlett. Her shtick is so pathetic and transparent, plus it's fun to see Hattie McDaniel's reactions to Scarlett's shenanigans.
In the end though Scarlett is really a tragic character and it's to Leigh's credit that she makes Scarlett sympathetic despite the misery she's inflicted upon herself and others from being such a selfish biatch.
by Clark Gable
reply 260
04/06/2009
Selznick seriously considered Errol Flynn, Gary Cooper (who didn't want the part) and Ronald Colman (who was too old) for Rhett Butler. But Gable was everyone's favorite choice from the get-go and MGM got the distribution rights to the movie in exchange for his services.
When an interviewer asked Margaret Mitchell who she wanted to play Rhett her tactical reply was "Groucho Marx."
by Clark Gable
"Tactical," r 261, or "tactful?"
Vivien Leigh is a heavy-handed actress.
She does a lousy southern accent.
by Clark Gable
reply 262
04/06/2009
Casting is not really about finding the actor who'd demonstrate the "best acting" while playing the part. It's a crucial mean of interpretation. Selecting Hepburn would have made for a "feminist" Scarlet. Davis' Scarlet could've been a domineering, strong "bitch", Arthur's an approachable tomboy. And as seen in her tests, Paulette Goddard indeed could have brought a kind of almost Brechtian quality to her performance. These are all interesting, intriguing and most off all totally acceptable ways of reading the character of Scarlet as written. That is, without being aware of the movie, which no one seems able to be anymore. Leigh's brilliant performance stamped our collective grasp of Scarlet, but her take on that character, and even more so, that of the people who choose her for the part, is a very particular one, and not without its problems. It is also the smartest choice that could have been made. Leigh's Scarlet, while being a driven, sexual and manipulative woman, could be looked at as a coquettish, spoiled, self centered, kittenish brat, which made it easier for the masses to "forgive" her. It allowed them to relegate her into an "accepted" and known feminine mold. Each one of the above mentioned options would have made for a more challenging, even threatening (at least for that era), female portrayal which might have alienated the masses, at least to a certain degree.
by Clark Gable
Tactical -- she didn't want to reveal a personal bias lest her advice be very publicly ignored.
by Clark Gable
reply 264
04/06/2009
Hepburn would have played Scarlett as a sexless dervish. Arthur would have made her a daffy Modern and Davis would have required a corn-cob pipe, cigarettes not having been invented yet.
by Clark Gable
reply 265
04/06/2009
Yes Hepburn could've made a feminist Scarlett, who would've looked ridiculous with 20 handsome young men gathered around enraptured with her, ahem, beauty. Scarlett was supposed to be a exceptional beauty, Leigh was the only one up for the part who could realistically captivate every man in the room.
by Clark Gable
reply 266
04/06/2009
[italic] Thousands of baby girls across America were named Melanie after the character in the book and Olivia's portrayal in the film. Very few....just about 9, I think.....were named Scarlett.
[/italic]
Interestingly enough, however, although only 9 baby girls were named Scarlett, 257 baby boys were given the name.
by Clark Gable
reply 267
04/06/2009
Well R266, you've just proved my point. Assuming you've actually read the book, it's obvious you were blind to what ever was there on page but was altered for the film. "Scarlett was supposed to be a(n) exceptional beauty" my ass.
(Not that Hepburn wasn't, by the way. An exceptional beauty, that is).
by Clark Gable
04/06/2009
Lantern-jawed Hepburn, and exceptional beauty? hehe
The movie never would've survived as such a classic if it wasn't about the most beautiful southern belle imaginable. Who gives a fuck how the book was altered for the film, in old Hollywood stars were supposed to be flawlessly beautiful. Scarlett was certainly supposed to be a beautiful woman in the book, so naturally they'd make her ravishingly beautiful in the movie. Without the movie, precious book would've been forgotten as a racist soap by now. That's why they'll never remake it, the racism (which is moderate for the times, but definitely there), and you know it.
by Clark Gable
reply 269
04/06/2009
I love the movie. It holds remarkably well, largely due to Leigh's one of a kind turn. And I like my movies to feature beautiful people as the next guy. Still � my point was that the casting of each of these actresses would make for a different film. Hepburn's a probable failure, Goddard a potentially fascinating one.
(And Hepburn's facial structure - cheekbones, nose, forehead and, indeed, jaw line - is still the best manifestation of calcium since the white cliffs of Dover).
by Clark Gable
Katherine Hepburn is what I would call "a handsome woman."  Beautiful?  Not in my book.
by Clark Gable
reply 271
04/06/2009
Goddard would have fitted the book's description of Scarlett perfectly, ie. pretty but not exceptionally beautiful.
However, she just seemed way too stiff and nervous in her screen tests, like she was choking under the pressure of portraying a role that millions of people had great expectations of already. Face it people, she would have done a shit job and several more directors would have quit in frustration with such an uninspiring Scarlett.
Clark Gable was initially hesitant to play the role of Rhett for the same reason, but he walked in there and did the job like a true professional.
by Clark Gable
reply 272
04/06/2009
I guess that when it comes to looks, I'd consider beautiful women those who are extremely handsome (Hepburn, Garbo, Crawford, Loren, Aimee, Dunaway) rather than extremely pretty (Leigh, Lamar, Kelly, Taylor, Deneuve).
by Clark Gable
reply 273
04/06/2009
[italic]Leigh's brilliant performance stamped our collective grasp of Scarlet, but her take on that character, and even more so, that of the people who choose her for the part, is a very particular one, and not without its problems. It is also the smartest choice that could have been made. Leigh's Scarlet, while being a driven, sexual and manipulative woman, could be looked at as a coquettish, spoiled, self centered, kittenish brat, which made it easier for the masses to "forgive" her. It allowed them to relegate her into an "accepted" and known feminine mold.[/italic]
But don't you think that the "coquettish, spoiled, self centered, kittenish brat" aspects are intrinsic to the character that Mitchell wrote?  To me, it seems like an actress whose performance didn't include those elements would not really be playing Scarlett O'Hara.
by Clark Gable
reply 274
04/06/2009
It doesn't matter.  None of it matters.  Who can bear to sit through GWTW these days?  Apart from you all?  Who can bear to read the book?  The racism is just outrageous.  And, whatever, the whole Hollywood Golden Age - not to mention all of America - was out-of-control racist in the '30s and '40s.  Nonetheless, GWTW wasn't just another benign product of racist USA, it was - as someone stated above - THE purveyor of the murderous myth that the Old South was a lost paradise of benevolent masters and the happily enslaved.  Nobody misses the Old South more than Mammy: She's in love with her enslavers, her life-deniers.  It doesn't matter if Leigh was good or bad, the movie is intolerable, as offensive as "Birth of a Nation," and it has the same interest for us now as traveling art shows that feature photographs of lynchings.  DW Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" helped revive what was at the time a fading KKK, and "Gone with the Wind" kept people believing for the next 30 years that Your Black Mammy Loves You and Wants Only to Serve You.
by Clark Gable
reply 275
04/06/2009
Hepburn was too patrician for Scarlett.  There is no way it would have worked.  Plus the role of Mammy would have been reduced to a piece of scenery.  Hepburn always exuded liberated woman needing no help.  Scarlett needed Mammy.
by Clark Gable
reply 276
04/06/2009
Bette Davis was up against Vivien Leigh for the Oscar that year for Best Actress. When Vivien Leigh won for GWTW, Bette stormed out of the ceremonies.
She later said an Englishwoman has no idea how to play a southern belle.
by Clark Gable
reply 278
04/06/2009
Hepburn was all about playing a woman who needed help, 276.  Ever see, what was it, "Woman of the Year," where it's made clear that she can't prepare her own breakfast?  The whole point of Hepburn, after, say, 1939, was that she couldn't do any of the girly things, and she needed a man to slap her down and tell her that she had better learn how to be a girl.  All those Hollywood movies were busy humiliating strong women.  Not to mention: All those white girls had themselves some black slaves to attend to them.  Mae West.  Bette Davis.  Hepburn.  Joan Crawford.  Vivien Leigh.  And on and on.  They all had black maids.  White womanhood in the '30s, '40s, and '50s was defined, in Hollywood films, but the presence of subjugated black women.
by Clark Gable
reply 279
04/06/2009
Hepburn was all about playing a woman who needed help, 276.  Ever see, what was it, "Woman of the Year," where it's made clear that she can't prepare her own breakfast?  The whole point of Hepburn, after, say, 1939, was that she couldn't do any of the girly things, and she needed a man to slap her down and tell her that she had better learn how to be a girl.  All those Hollywood movies were busy humiliating strong women.  Not to mention: All those white girls had themselves some black slaves to attend to them.  Mae West.  Bette Davis.  Hepburn.  Joan Crawford.  Vivien Leigh.  And on and on.  They all had black maids.  White womanhood in the '30s, '40s, and '50s was defined, in Hollywood films, by the presence of subjugated black women.
by Clark Gable
R277 has some real, serious issues.
Unclutch sweetie.
reply 282
04/06/2009
r 282, who has issues?  Okay, I do, sure.  But what about all the gay guys on this board who have no problem with calling each other - or anyone - the "b" word, who display their constant unrelenting contempt for women, who seem entirely happy to imagine themselves as cliched "queens" who are obsessed with sex and fashion and with snippy little put-downs?
There's a reason they won't let us get married.
by Clark Gable
reply 283
04/06/2009
Oh, for fuck's sake, 277/283.  It's a thread about who else could have played Scarlett O'Hara.  Just for fun.  And you turn it into a rant about the movie's racism. WHY????   As has been pointed out, fully 75% of American movies of that time were racist -- this one stands out more because it takes place in the racist pre and post Civil War South.  But they were almost all racist.
And it has nothing to do with who would have been a good Scarlett O'Hara.  You should have started your own fucking thread if you wanted to discuss GWTW as a racist film.
by Clark Gable
reply 284
04/06/2009
[italic] She later said an Englishwoman has no idea how to play a southern belle. [/italic]
Bette had no idea how to play anything but Bette.  Her attempts to be "British" (in Of Human Bondage and her two turns as Queen Elizabeth I) were laughable.
by Clark Gable
04/06/2009
Bette Davis was perfect, don't say she wasn't.
There's no discussing GWTW in any aspect without talking about racism.  A thread about racism is the same thing as a thread about who played Scarlett in GWTW.
by Clark Gable
reply 286
04/06/2009
Bette was a jealous old bitch. Fuck her. Vivien is an icon of culture forever. Bette is rapidly being forgotten.
by Clark Gable
reply 287
04/06/2009
I read the book and of course seen the movie several times.  The movie held the original story line very closely.  I don't know how that is racism when in fact it was a pictorial display of the book.  The movie did not change anything that was realistic, and the author, Margaret Mitchell, portrayed the antebellum south exactly as it was and it was written from a southerner's perspective.  To say it should not have been written or the movie made is to say history, bad as it was, should be denied.  Its like trying to convince people no Jews died in the Halocaust.  It is beyond me how people can clutch pearls today over whether or not it was racist.  Whether it was or not, it was a very factual depiction of the times.  Just as "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was a factual depiction.
Back on topic.
The biggest controversy of GWTW at the time was the use of the word "Damn" in the end scene.  Some theaters refused to show it because of this.
Margaret Mitchell died a few years after the movie debuted in Atlanta.  She was run over by a car.
In Tallulah's autobiography written by Tallulah she says that George Cukor called her after Selznik saw her in the play, "Reflected Glory" in New York.  According to her Cukor told her Selznik called him and said, "I've got our Scarlett."  She did photographic tests for the studio but did not do an audition reel.  Word got out that she had flown to Hollywood to test for the part and Louella Parsons (of Hollywood gossip column fame) wrote the following the day after Tallulah got into town:  [italic] Tallulah Bankhead breezed into town last night to take a test for Scarlett O'Hara in "Gone with the Wind."  George Cukor, her friend, is going to direct; Jock Whitney, another fried, is backing it, so I'm afraid she'll get the part.  If she does, I personally, will go home and weep, because she is not Scarlett O'Hara in any language and if David Selznick gives her the part he will have to answer to every man, woman and child in America."[/italic]  Tallulah was none to happy about that calling Loella "An unpredictable witch, that Loella!"  She was cited as leading in the field for several months until Vivien Leigh was named.  Tallulah says, "But, I'll go to my grave convinced that I could have drawn the cheers of Longstreet and Beauregard and Robert E. Lee had I been permitted to wrestle with Rhett Butler.  And that, my sweets, is why Tallulah never got to Tara."
by Clark Gable
reply 288
04/06/2009
That's right, R283, blame us as the reason we can't get married.  It's not the problem of homophobic, hypocritical, pseudo-religious, bigoted legislators, it's all OUR fault.
by Clark Gable
reply 289
04/06/2009
R283, outside of you and Sarah Palin, who says "B-word" anymore?  Its bitch.  Say bitch.  What?  We say worse on DL, today I counted "FUCK" at least 1,234,435 times.  C'mon, get the stick outta your ass.
by Clark Gable
reply 290
04/06/2009
Those of you who think Goddard could have pulled off the role of Scarlett are deluded.  Despite her one Oscar nomination (Supporting Actress for SO PROUDLY WE HAIL) she had very little range.  Goddard had warmth and humor and sensuality -- offscreen she was considered one of the sexiest women and best lays in Hollywood.  But a great actress she wasn't.  The part of Scarlett is one of the best in the history of film (still!)  And Goddard didn't have the resourcefulness or born talent to carry it off.  The reason she got so close to the role was because she was a neighbor of Selznick's and he liked her, and she was perceived as 'hot' and straight boys Selznick and Jock Whitney (one of the biggest financial backers of Selznick's company) thought the actress to play Scarlett had to be sexy to offset what they saw as her unconscionable hardness, selfishness, bitchiness -- all traits that actresses weren't supposed to show onscreen.
Norma Shearer, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Katharine Hepburn -- whatever else they had or didn't have which made them inadequate for the part of Scarlett -- were not perceived as sexy by Selznick, Whitney, et al.  (Selznick is said to have commented about Hepburn's eagerness to play the role, "Who'd chase HER for ten years?")  What impressed them about Vivien Leigh in person and in her screen test was her 'wildness' (not franticness as has been reported here) which was code then for hot, hot, hot.  In her test with Leslie Howard it was clear Ashley could have fucked her for the asking.  That was just what Selznick and director Cukor thought was right for the role, and very much what most Hollywood actresses didn't bring to their parts -- it just wasn't part of the arsenal of actresses then.  Sincerity, yes, erotic longing, no.
For my money, Joan Bennett, with considerable coaching, would have been better than Goddard if Leigh hadn't played it.  But Leigh was perfect.  And had she been able to do both parts, she would have been a perfect Cathy opposite Olivier in WUTHERING HEIGHTS as well.  You would have really believed in their s&m, erotically-charged bond.  The part was way beyond the capacities of Merle Oberon, despite her nomination.  Just as Scarlett would have been beyond Goddard.
by Clark Gable
reply 291
04/06/2009
Bette Davis was a one-note wonder who stumbled into brilliance a couple of times in her career.
She would have made a mockery of Scarlett O'Hara.  And judging by "Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte," it's ridiculous that she thought an Englishwoman couldn't portray a Southerner, when her own Southern take is laughable at best.
by Clark Gable
reply 292
04/06/2009
I would bet anything that the hysterical, pathologically disturbed queens screaming "racism!" at the top of their little lungs have seen the movie version of GWTW, but never read even a paragraph the book. I suspect a novel as complicated and involved as Gone With The Wind would be beyong their reading comprehension.
As for the KKK, it's NOT depicted as totally honorable and acceptable in the book as the hysterical queens would have you believe. In fact, Ashley and Rhett are instumental in eliminating the KKK in their neck of the woods. Rhett has been staying out late at "political meetings" (which used to be the code words for Klan meetings); Scarlett confronts him and he tells her there is no Klan in Atlanta anymore, "probably not in Georgia." He tells her:
"Platitudinously, but truly, politics make strange bedfellows. Neither Ashley nor I care much for each other as bedfellows, but Ashley never believed in the Klan because he's against violence of any sort. And I never believed in it because it's damned foolishness and not the way to get what we want. It's the one way to keep the Yankees on our necks till Kingdom Come. An between Ashley and me, we convinced the hot heads that watching, waiting and working would get us further than nightshirts and fiery crosses."
by Clark Gable
reply 293
04/06/2009
For the deluded souls who keep debasing Ms. Shearer and her acting talents, I doubt you've seen even one of her films.
Most of your criticisms sound like the parroting of film critic Pauline Keal who was anti-Norma and based most of her assessment of her on the film "The Women."
Film historians and film buffs have really started a re-thinking of Ms. Shearer's career and her talents. (Mick LeSalle of the SF Chronicle has been very outspoken in championing a re-thinking of Norma's talent.)  Take a look at her Academy Award winning role in "The Divorcee", a pre-code gem that was finally released on DVD.  Or better yet, check her out in "Private Lives" opposite Robert Montgomery.
She shines in Noel Coward's comedy and gives quite a beating to Mr. Montgomery. Warner's finally made "Private Lives" available for download or purchase, as well as "A Free Soul" and "We Were Dancing."
Norma beat amazing odds to become a big time movie star.  Why she's not liked more is odd to me.  She came from nothing, and literally willed herself (and her cast eye) to be a big time star.  She also had the forethought to leave before she had to start taking less interesting roles.
Yes, Norma's role in "The Women" seems mannered by today's standards, but when you realize she is the character you must sympathize with, or the piece fails, she really does a great job.
This thread has been one of my favorites.  Thanks for all the insights, bitchy comments and the heated discussion about race in GWTW.
Pretty amazing that an old flick like that still holds people's attention and interest.  Speaks volumes about the level of the work of Fleming, Cukor, Leigh and Gable.
Another Norma GWTW tidbit, Southern fans of the GWTW book were thrilled when Norma was first mentioned to play Scarlett.  "Better a Canadian, than a yankee!" was there thinking.
by Clark Gable
reply 294
04/06/2009
That same quote has been attributed to "Southerners" about the casting of Vivien Leigh ("Better an Englishwoman than a Yankee") -- it's in most of the GWTW books.
by Clark Gable
reply 295
04/06/2009
I happen to like Shearer a lot, Zak.  But I would never argue that she wasn't an "artificial" actress, because she was.  She modeled herself (as did many of the biggest female stars of the '30s) on stage actresses like Ina Claire, Gertrude Lawrence and Lynn Fontanne.  They were brittle, airy, mannered.  It was a stage style left over from the '20s and much admired.  And we would be foolish to assume this made them bad actresses.  Sometimes real truth can come out of a good actress whose style is artificial.
Shearer did what she did very well.  You can see that she was a smart woman and she was miles more effective than Crawford (who was truly not a natural onscreen except for her extraordinary facial bone structure).  But I would still never put Shearer in the same league as Davis -- for me the best film actress of the '30s and early '40s.
It is interesting to me how Vivien Leigh divides some here.  She did have some of the same artificiality of a Shearer -- but also had the drive, immediacy and aliveness of any contemporary actress working.
by Clark Gable
04/06/2009
No one is more sublime than Bette Davis when she is being sublime.
Anyone who thinks GWTW - book or movie - isn't racist needs to go back to 1936 where he or she belongs.
The amount of icky woman-hating "queeny" bitchery on this site is appalling, and suggests to me that gay men are guilty of all the cliched behavior of which they are accused by homo-hating religious bigots.  Not to mention the absurd body fascism that flies around this site as if it were perfectly reasonable.  If gay men are like some of the gay men here, I'm ashamed to be gay.
by Clark Gable
This has been a very interesting thread.
by Clark Gable
reply 299
04/06/2009
"Because in 1930s America a lavishly budgeted feature film recounting the life and loves of a sassy black woman living as a slave in the antebellum South"
No suggests the entire movie should have been about her, dumbass.
by Clark Gable
reply 300
04/06/2009
"If gay men are like some of the gay men here, I'm ashamed to be gay."
297. . .It seems like you have an issue in that you'd be ashamed to be gay no matter what; you're just looking for a reason.
And really, we've all played along with you well enough, as you forced your way in and screamed "racism!" again and again.  You know what?  At the end of the day, it's a book, it's a movie--oh, here we go; I don't know how books work so it's pointless to argue.  So here's something else to argue about:  You aren't a slave.  The slaves are all dead.  State governments have actually APOLOGIZED for slavery.  It's over.  Done.  Just please shut up about it.  No one cares.  You're not going to change anyone's opinion of the movie--love it or hate it, your opinion is irrelevant to those of us that love the story.  If gay people learn anything from your posts, I hope it's this:  When the day comes that we achieve civil rights and liberty, I hope none of us bitch, cry, and moan as you are so embarassingly doing about slavery.  I hope we have the good sense to know our history--but not to eternally cry "victim" until people who are not the criminals feel they have to apologize for another generation's crimes.
Get the fuck over yourself.
by Clark Gable
reply 301
04/06/2009
Bette Davis is a joke. People now look back at an actress who came before her, Louise Brooks, and now realise that Davis is an embarrasment to the acting profession. She belongs in a daytime serial.
Louise Brooks, even Vivien Leigh (due to Scarlett) is a huge hit with the younger generations. Davis? No. She will only continue to lose appeal as the years go by.
by Clark Gable
reply 302
04/06/2009
MGM should have fuckin' hired Joan Crawford and Bette Davis to play Generals Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant.
Now tell me that wouldn't have been an awesome ass supporting cast.
Even a cameo would have been fun.
Picture the action at Antetum...
Bette (as Grant): I'm going to kill you!
Joan (as Lee): Not if I kill you first.
by Clark Gable
reply 303
04/06/2009
Oh sweet Zak. I used to think Norma was a big drip, but after seeing two of those Pre-Code movies ("The Divorcee" & "A Free Soul") my opinion of her was elevated.
But I cannot, for the life of me, picture her as Scarlett O'Hara.
Leigh was perfect casting. Just watch a clip on YouTube and it's very plain to see. Nobody and I mean [italic]nobody[/italic] could have done that part better. IMHO, of course.
by Clark Gable
reply 263, you are a wonderful writer making valid, thought-provoking points.
Who the fuck are you?
by Clark Gable
reply 307
04/06/2009
"the author, Margaret Mitchell, portrayed the antebellum south exactly as it was.... it was a very factual depiction of the times."
This is the problem.
A romanticized paean to the Glories of the Good Old Slave-Holding South -- a biased, propagandistic fantasy -- is mistaken for reality by twitterpated queens enchanted by hoop-skirts and horse-shit.
Who on earth ever told you it was a "factual depiction of the times"? Your high school history teacher in Buttscratch, Mississippi?
"Its like trying to convince people no Jews died in the Halocaust."
No, dunce. GWTW is like trying to convince people that the Jews went to the gas chambers singing and dancing and madly devoted to the Nazis.
It's not racist that GWTW depicts slavery, dimwit. No one has said that. It's racist that racism is depicted as a rather charming and benevolent aspect of the antebellum South. And that the antebellum South is posited as the highest cultural expression of Americanism.
by Clark Gable
04/06/2009
"It's over. Done. Just please shut up about [slavery]. No one cares."
R301, we're not actually debating slavery. Except for you and a few of your Sisters in Sheets, it's pretty much been accepted that slavery was a bad thing.
We're talking about racism, which is not over. Which is not done. And about which many people -- all decent people -- care deeply, just as we care about homophobia, anti-semitism, misogyny and other forms of social injustice.
You're living proof that for some unhinged white supremacists like yourself, a movie like GWTW is stroking material. Many people -- mentally healthy people -- can watch it, acknowledge and perhaps set aside the racism, and appreciate it as a brilliant piece of film making. But I find the motives of a ranting racist like you a little suspicious.
by Clark Gable
04/06/2009
[quote]No suggests the entire movie should have been about her, dumbass.
Au contraire. There is a very shrill obsessive poster in this thread who seems upset that a 1930s feature film doesn't conform to his or her contemporary sensibilities. Yeah, the film's a racist artefact of a racist culture. Yes, it's a shame we didn't get to explore the black characters' lives with as much quality screen time as those of their white oppressors. We all get that, genius.
It's still a classic film. Flawed and overlong, but classic. Get over yourself and try to enjoy [italic]GWTW[/italic] for what it is: a big old fashioned Hollywood movie with all the stops pulled out graced by the presence of some wonderful actresses.
by Clark Gable
reply 311
04/06/2009
Help me out, R311. Who said the whole movie should be about Mammy? I've read the whole thread and totally missed that.
And why would people want a novelist and film makers who know nothing about black people to make a movie about a black woman? It would have been dreadful.
by Clark Gable
[quote]Picture the action at Antetum...
Antietam.
aka the Battle of Sharpsburg.
by Clark Gable
reply 313
04/06/2009
"There is a very shrill obsessive poster in this thread who seems upset that a 1930s feature film doesn't conform to his or her contemporary sensibilities."
It's not necessary that you tell us what one [sic] poster thanks, since the several posters who have discussed the film's racism have been more than adequately articulate on the subject.
And it's not a matter of contemporary sensibilities at all.
You do realize that even in 1936 the book was considered racist by many people -- you know, the "progressive" types... like the ones who now believe in gay equality.
The book's overwhelming popularity required Hollywood to film it, but from the beginning Hollywood saw the book's racism as something that would have to be handled carefully.
by Clark Gable
reply 314
04/06/2009
I so appreciate Zak's thoughts on Norma Shearer. It's clear he's quite fond of her (as I am). His thoughts are eloquent and spot on.
But they're wildly juxtaposed with his bizarre, unwarranted obsession with that talentless sea cow, Patti Lupone.
Zak, seeing as we haven't seen you defend Patti throwing her shit fom the stage like a diseased chimpanzee lately, can we assume the meds are working and your back to your reasoned self?
To make this thread related, Patti Lupone would have made a great cow in GWTW.
by Clark Gable
You say, 'Antetum'; I say, 'Antietam' You say, 'It's racist'; I say, 'You're crazy!'
Antetum! Antietam! It's racist! You're crazy! Let's call the whole thing off!
by Clark Gable
reply 316
04/06/2009
[quote]And why would people want a novelist and film makers who know nothing about black people to make a movie about a black woman? It would have been dreadful.
Help me out here: which major Hollywood studio would have taken a risk on producing a hugely expensive movie about the black experience during the Civil War in 1939? Even if there were plenty of black screenwriters at the majors who could have tackled the topic in a way that would have assuaged your sensibilities, where were the black filmmakers and studio execs to collaborate on such a project? You are positing an impossible scenario.
Look, the anti-GWTW contingent in this thread are in a dither because the movie isn't the movie they want or like. Maybe that's because it's the movie [bold]Selznick wanted to make.[/bold]
The naysayers are free to make their own Civil War era megaproduction and upload it to youtube whenever they are so inclined. I for one would enjoy seeing it. Meanwhile [bold]this[/bold] thread is devoted to discussing the film and its production as it exists in the context of its own time and as a product of a particular culture, not some platonic ideal of the perfect movie capable of pleasing future generations across different cultures. Jeez.
by Clark Gable
reply 317
04/06/2009
Even though I think this thread has gone on too long (unlike the movie it was inspired by), I do find it incredibly amusing that there's one or two people out there who are getting their panties in a wad over a film from 1939.
One has to wonder what they could achieve if they'd direct their efforts to fixing modern-day inequities rather than pontificating on those from seventy years ago.
In the meantime, fight on.
by Clark Gable
04/07/2009
Thank you, R307! (An elegant bow, followed by a twirl of the hand).
I have nothing to do professionally with making films or with writing (certainly not in English). I'm a small time architect who just happens to like movies.
by Clark Gable
reply 319
04/07/2009
[italic]The book's overwhelming popularity required Hollywood to film it, but from the beginning Hollywood saw the book's racism as something that would have to be handled carefully.[/italic]
Oddly enough part of that careful handling included casting the popular Eddie "Rochester" Anderson as Uncle Peter. His familiar shtick may have been a welcome addition to film-goers at the time but it's a bit jarring to those who recall the somber and dignified character from the novel. When he mumbles to himself as he chases a chicken in the rain "fo' de white folkses dinnuh" you expect to see it being carved by Jack Benny.
by Clark Gable
reply 320
04/07/2009
Gloria Stuart was also in the running for Scarlett. Poor dear never got her shot at stardom until she was at death's door.
by Clark Gable
Jennifer Jones was a man-stealing cunt.
by Clark Gable
reply 326
04/07/2009
R322, some of us aren't denying GWTW is racist.  This whole thing started when a poster  said NO ONE could give a good performance as Scarlett O'Hara because the movie is racist, which is a completely idiotic statement.
Vivien Leigh is brilliant as Scarlett.  Other actresses of the time might or might not have been very good in the role.  The movie's racist.  But very few movies in 1939 weren't racist, so why pick on GWTW.  Just because it's about the South doesn't make it any more racist than, say, all the other movies that presented blacks as maids, janitors, etc, happy to be serving white people.  At least Mammy is a character to admire in GWTW.
And none of that is pertinent to what this thread was supposed to be about, which is simply who else might have made a good Scarlett.
by Clark Gable
reply 327
04/07/2009
Oh, for Christ's sake. It's possible to view GWTW as a racist film, and STILL enjoy it.  All the queens shrieking here should channel that righteous anger into something that might possibly make a difference to the world today.  I suppose, by their lights, we should burn every film with Franklin Pangborn flaming away, too.
by Clark Gable
04/07/2009
R308,Jezuz, take a pill will ya.
First of all, my point was that the story was told from the SOUTHERN perspective (it was Scarlett's story, so it was told through Scalett's eyes).  And the plantation owners and their families truly believed they were making a better and far more comfortable life for slaves than they might otherwise experience.  If the Nazi perspective was put forth, I imagine the portrayal of death camps would be significantly different.  You should pick up the book, QB XII, by Leon Uris. It tells the story with both perspectives and has an ending that astounds...yet you ultimately can see why it ended as it did. Similarly, if the GWTW story was written from Mammy's perspective, it would have been quite a bit different.  It was what it was.  As a gay man, you see yourself differently and feel your experiences differently than someone who is not gay and homophobic.  They see denying us our freedoms as right, we don't need those rights, we are not entitled to those rights, and they feel very justified in their opinion.  You and I both know that's wrong.  But, it is their perspective, my only point.  Its irrational to argue whether or not the film was racist in that it was the portrayal of a person's experience with a particular perspective.  She didn't think what she was doing was wrong or ungodly...and the place and historical era reinforced her own perspective.  Your arguement is akin to someone saying Shindler's List was a work of fiction.  We know it wasn't, but you're not going to change their perspective.  I think its very important to understand the other person's perspective before true change and understanding can really happen and, hopefully, not repeat the mistakes of the past.
And no, I'm not from the south, I was born and educated in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.  My Master's degree is in American History.
by Clark Gable
Oops, that's "QB VII" not XII.
by Clark Gable
reply 331
04/07/2009
"The plantation owners and their families truly believed they were making a better and far more comfortable life for slaves than they might otherwise experience."
Dude, where on earth did you get THAT idea?
Plantation owners were raping their slaves, they were selling children away from their parents, they were beating their slaves to submission. . .
No doubt there were variations in the way owners treated their slaves, but: Come on!  They OWNED people.  In a country that was founded on freedom and equality.  It must've taken a big dose of denial for slave-holders to imagine they were moral or democratic in any way.
by Clark Gable
reply 332
04/07/2009
You gay guys gotta start objecting to posters like r 329 with his "Your pussy stinks" comment, or else everybody on this site is gonna look like a woman-hating scumbag.  Perfect that a thread dealing with racism would include misogynist comments: It points out the way in which the denigration of one group makes room for the denigration of another.  It's not cute and it's not funny and it's not humane to make vile and invalidating comments about women's bodies.  It's like this site exists in 1973.  You guys need to act out against misogyny.  I'm serious.  Homphobia is a sub-category of sexism: When women are subjected to abuse, verbal or otherwise, all lesbians and gay men are subjected to abuse.  Stop the nonsense.
by Clark Gable
reply 336
04/07/2009
Okay, brother, whatever.  It's your own grave, man.  People hate fags because they hate women, and the faster the gay community gets over its women-hating, the better for everyone.  Otherwise we're all subject to violent abuse by gay-bashers, no matter how many states legalize gay marriage.  In fact, fag-bashing is gonna go up for a while, directly in response to the recent legalizings of gay marriage.  Teenaged thugs who beat up little gay boys are being up the boys because they think of them as girls.  And teenaged thugs hate girls.  Do the math, sweetheart.  We're all involved in the same struggle.
by Clark Gable
r337 the lethal combination of Nan Michiganwoman and the IVILLAGE frau.
by Clark Gable
04/07/2009
[italic]Dude, where on earth did you get THAT idea?[/italic]
Dude, I read.  I read a lot.  Something you might want to try because you,re sounding more and more ignorant with each post...Dude.
I'm done with you.  The string is about the Scarlett O'Hara wars, not your personal platform for showing what an ignoramous you are.
by Clark Gable
reply 343
04/07/2009
"The string is about the Scarlett O'Hara wars, not your personal platform for showing what an ignoramous you are."
Dude, have you READ these strings?  Every single one of them is a personal platform for showing what an ignoramus everyone is.
By the way, I LOVE the name Nan Michiganwoman, that's so swell.
And I'm a guy, by the way.
by Clark Gable
reply 344
04/07/2009
Who cares if it was racist.  Vivien Leigh was the best person for the role, she got it, won the Oscar for it and her winning was well deserved.  Case closed.
One more thing....Tallulah would have made the best Belle Wattling.  Apparently David Zelznick did want her for the part but was too embarrassed to offer it to her when he didn't offer her the role of Scarlett Ohara.
by Clark Gable
reply 345
04/07/2009
p 339, Nothing wrong with overalls.  Or crumbs.  And I assume you're saying "crumbs" in Barbara Stanwyck's  voice?  Love always,
by Clark Gable
04/07/2009
Can we get back to Joan Bennett and the other ladies?
This racism shit is tiresome... OP wanted a thread about the actresses who were in the running for the role of Scarlett.
Posters who hijack threads (like the race-baiting trolls) need to be ejected from the DL.
GET BACK TO THE ACTRESSES and SCARLETT!!
by Clark Gable
Mia Farrow's mom as Scarlett.
Was she Maureen O'Sullivan, or Maureen O'Hara?  I can never remember.
by Clark Gable
reply 349
04/07/2009
"For the deluded souls who keep debasing Ms. Shearer and her acting talents, I doubt you've seen even one of her films."
Yes, of course.  Anyone who doesn't share your blind adoration does so out of ignorance, not a differing opinion based on the same films.
*looking into the camera and rolling my eyes in a very stagey way, like Norma, as I type . . .*
by Clark Gable
04/07/2009
R350, Norma?  Norma Desmond or Norma Shearer?
I read somewhere that they seriously considered Norma Desmond but she turned down the role because it was a "talkie" and with the advent of sound she felt pictures got small, and she demanded Cecil B. Demille direct.  Besides, she was in the midst of writing her own movie based on the life of Salome.  Alas, she retired to a mosaleum of a house on Sunset Blvd. She was racist you know, had a monkey for a pet.
by Clark Gable
[italic]But very few movies in 1939 weren't racist, so why pick on GWTW.[/italic]
Because it dealt extensively with the crucial issues slavery. "The Wizard of Oz" didn't.
Because there are many idiots like the one in this thread who believe "Gone with the Wind" to be historically accurate and accept its propaganda as truth.
Your failure to comprehend the issue results in your inability to understand why it is an issue at all.
[italic] Just because it's about the South doesn't make it any more racist than, say, all the other movies that presented blacks as maids, janitors, etc, happy to be serving white people.[/italic]
Those happy servants were not slaves and their faux-cute little appearances were not intrinsic to those movies. Those moments were generally cringe-worthy and, indeed, racist. But no one of them -- and no dozen of the -- had the enduring impact on American culture that GWTW has had.
[italic] At least Mammy is a character to admire in GWTW. [/italic]
It is usually racists who go on and on about how [italic]admirable[/italic] Mammy was.  And why wouldn't they? Mammy was the cultural excretion of a white racist writer, intended to show black people what they [italic]ought[/italic] to be. She is a white racist ideal; the quintessential "Good Nigger."
by Clark Gable
R365=thread killing cunt. Start your own GWTW thread you worthless piece of shit.
by Clark Gable
reply 368
04/08/2009
So what's the problem with talking about a film's racism?  Seems to me to be one of many useful ways to discuss a film.  Wow, you queens sure get all hot and bothered when somebody calls something racist!  Maybe you need to ask yourselves why it gets you so upset.
by Clark Gable
reply 369
04/08/2009
And maybe you need to fuck yourself with Papa's old blunderbuss. This thread was supposed to be about the actresses in the running to play a character, and we've discussed the racism to DEATH.
by Clark Gable
reply 370
04/08/2009
R368, you're silly. If someone started a thread called "'Gone with the Wind' Is Racist and Nobody in This Thread Is Allowed to Think Otherwise" I suspect a few people might appear to disagree.
by Clark Gable
reply 371
04/08/2009
R367 is a refined lady, but he's dumb as doggie-doo. "The Good Nigger" is clearly stated as "a white racist ideal," not as the term of choice for Black people.
by Clark Gable
I'm smart enough not to use ugly words.
by Clark Gable
reply 373
04/08/2009
"This thread was supposed to be about the actresses in the running to play a character"
Then why aren't ypou posting about that, R370? Is there something more you want to say on the subject? Some wet dream involving the magic Hope Hampton could have brought to Aunt Pittypat?
Because I'm not seeing what your post has to with "the actresses in the running to play a character."
by Clark Gable
04/08/2009
Why not start a thread about racism in cartoons? Or on racist radio shows?
Why not just leave this thread to the original discussion, which was about WHO COULD HAVE PLAYED SCARLETT FUCKING OHARA.
by Clark Gable
reply 375
04/08/2009
The thing is, yeah, by contemporary standards, GONE WITH THE WIND is racist.  By the standards of 'progressive' and 'liberal' politics of 1939 it wasn't particularly racist, because even people who were appalled by Jim Crow laws were guilty of benign neglect and/or condescension where blacks were concerned.  As a Jew, David Selznick was sensitive to the NAACP charges that the book was racist, and did what he felt he could do to tone that racism down.  Most at the time felt he did a great job, especially as he was making a tremendously expensive movie, a big personal gamble for him, which had to appeal to millions who had loved the book, with its even more racist assumptions (I won't get into how relatively moderate -- by the standards of Georgia in 1939 -- Mitchell's politics seemed to most southerners then, as bad as they seem to many of us now).  And yeah, even then many blacks hated GWTW.  But guess what?  Then and NOW, many blacks love it, politics or no.
So okay, that brings us to those of us who watch and enjoy GWTW today.  If I look at the movie through the prism of its views on race, I can see what seems cringe-worthy and unfortunate about it.  If I were black, maybe I would have a hard time seeing past that, though I have talked to black GWTW fans who do see past it.
I'm not black, and I can and do look past it.  Because it's a movie about a tragic heroine, someone who -- like Charles Foster Kane in CITIZEN KANE or Michael Corleone in GODFATHER II -- has the fatal flaw of not being introspective, not knowing herself or anyone else in her life, and of therefore ruining her life.  She's a doer, not a thinker, and she achieves a lot, but destroys her own life as well as those of people around her.  She is a very American heroine.  And when she finally gets a glimmering of self-understanding, it is too late for her, too late to save her great love.  That's why people watch it over and over again.  If insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over again, knowing the outcome but hoping it will end differently, when that definition goes triple for GWTW fans, who watch thinking, deep down, that maybe now Scarlett will be more mature, more sensitive.  She never is.  And it hurts in the same great way every time.
Despite it's racism, it has some home truths about relationships and human nature buried in a luxe and brilliantly crafted movie.  It is much more grownup about sex and death than many contemporary films (can you think of any mass entertainment from Hollywood now that would kill off a child?  Death was a constant in the 19th Century and only a little less so in the '30s).  I for one, don't look at the movie through the PC-politics of today -- why would I?  If you choose to, fine.  But in my view, you're very much missing the forest for the trees.
by Clark Gable
"I'm not black, and I can and do look past [the racism]."
That's quite an achievement there, JimBob.
by Clark Gable
04/08/2009
"I for one, don't look at the movie through the PC-politics of today"
I'm trying to imagine someone actually saying "the PC-politics of today" and I keep coming up with a sobbing Glen Beck grieving over how badly racists, homophobes and antisemites are treated by the commies who run this country.
by Clark Gable
reply 378
04/08/2009
Thanks, 377, feel better now?  I felt I should be clear about where I was coming from.
Does your smart-ass remark in any way negate what I said?  Which is that GONE WITH THE WIND is ABOUT a lot of things, but race politics isn't one of them.  An accurate view of 'the race problem' (as it was called into the 1960s) was in no way the theme or intent of the movie.  And isn't what most whites who watch it and love it took/take away from it.  And I yet I think some people who criticize the film for its racial politics DO think that -- that we all love it because its racist.  Whereas the race politics of the film are very much beside the point for those who still watch it and love it.
by Clark Gable
[italic]But very few movies in 1939 weren't racist, so why pick on GWTW.
Because it dealt extensively with the crucial issues slavery. "The Wizard of Oz" didn't.[/italic]
R365, that was a really dumbass statement.  This movie did not, in any way deal, much less extensively, with the crucial issues (of) slavery.  Slaves were in the movie, as it depicted the 1860's south with slaves, but other than that, it dealt with relationships and the southern losses from the Civil War.  But, it did not in any way deal with the issue of slavery.
However, I am surprised you say that about the Wizard of Oz.  I would think the flying monkey people would disagree since they were infact owned in indentured servitude by the Wicked Witch of the West.  You'll recall the monkey people were pretty happy when Doroty melted the WWW, they even gave her the broom (albeit a tad scorched)!  You'll note, Glinda, the good witch, had no indentured servants.
I'm just pointing out the inanity of all your arguements that have had no place in this thread.
by Clark Gable
reply 380
04/08/2009
"GONE WITH THE WIND is ABOUT a lot of things, but race politics isn't one of them."
And yet here we are, 70 years later, still arguing about the racial politics of "Gone with the Wind."
Your being oblivious to those issues doesn't mean they aren't there. The racism of GWTW has been an issue since the day the book hit the stores.
We are talking about a book with passages like this:
[italic] The negroes had not yet been given the right to vote but the North was determined that they should vote and equally determined that their vote should be friendly to the North. With this in mind, nothing was too good for the negroes. The Yankee soldiers backed them up in anything they chose to do, and the surest way for a white person to get himself into trouble was to bring a complaint of any kind against a negro.
The former slaves were now the lords of creation and, with the aid of the Yankees, the lowest and most ignorant ones were on top. The better class of them, scorning freedom, were suffering as severely as their white masters. Thousands of house servants, the highest caste in the slave population, remained with their white folks, doing manual labor which had been beneath them in the old days. Many loyal field hands also refused to avail themselves of the new freedom, but the hordes of "trashy free issue niggers," who were causing most of the trouble, were drawn largely from the field-hand class.[/italic]
This, of course, is highly political and ideological identical to the "The Negroes is takin' over!" shit smeared from FOX News to Stormfront to the leaders and base of the Republican party.
You can say "But that's not in the movie!" -- but in cinematic terms, it is. IIRC, there's a scene after the war showing black people on the city streets in their fine new clothes and the tone is clearly "The world has gone mad!!!" That's how a film maker translates those two paragraphs of Mitchell's clunky propaganda to the screen.
It is a luxury of the privileged to imagine that politics is some compartmentalized thing over there on the shelf, separate from life. A movie that deals with black people and white people is dealing in racial politics. If you don't understand that, you either don't understand racial politics or you don't understand movies.
by Clark Gable
04/08/2009
"By the standards of 'progressive' and 'liberal' politics of 1939 it wasn't particularly racist"
That is simply not true. And why are the words "progressive" and "liberal" placed in little semi-quotation marks, Colonel?
The outcry about the book's racism were there from the beginning.
by Clark Gable
"it did not in any way deal with the issue of slavery."
No more than "Titanic" dealt with a sinking ship.
by Clark Gable
reply 385
04/08/2009
I actually agree with the poster early on who said that Heddy Lamarr would have nailed the part.
by Clark Gable
reply 386
04/08/2009
I actually agree with the poster early on who said that Heddy Lamarr would have nailed the part.
by Clark Gable
reply 387
04/08/2009
R375, I've read and re-read your post several times now and I still can't figure out just WHO SHOULD HAVE PLAYED SCARLETT FUCKING OHARA.
by Clark Gable
04/08/2009
WHO SHOULD HAVE PLAYED SCARLETT FUCKING OHARA.
My suggestion?  Vivien Fucking Leigh.  True, audiences of the time would have had coronaries as her full name appeared on the screen, but they already would have died a few seconds before when, in the largest and most sweeping movie credits ever seen, the title GONE WITH THE FUCKING WIND swept across.
by Clark Gable
04/08/2009
"This racism shit is tiresome"
I agree. The film was made in 1939, long before the civil rights era. Of course it's not going to be politically correct.
And the book it was based on presents the viewpoints of conservative, white slave-owning plantation owners; they didn't exactly believe in equality for blacks. Many northerners didn't believe in equality for blacks. It was the pervasive attitude then.
As for the "glorification" of the lives of rich slave owners...I thought the film did more of that than the book. All those images of the white-columned mansions and gorgeous costumes and the life of ease with all the work done by the slaves...it did seem like the film was saying this was a heaven on earth existence. But anybody with a brain should have known the film was a fantasy, not reality. It was played up for dramatic effect; history reveals that life in the South back then was NOT the bowl of cherries it seemed to be in GWTW.
The book is much more complex and complicated than the movie. The book contains characters, both black and white, of every type and temperament. They have vivid individual personalities and are entirely believeable. It's a NOVEL, after all. A lot of people on this thread seem to think it's a historical textbook that presents slavery as preferable to freedom for slaves and the slaves themselves as mentally inferior and the KKK as heroes. It's not. It's a novel about the old South. A NOVEL about THE OLD SOUTH. So enough screaming and crying and squealing about "racism." It's pointless. And stupid.
by Clark Gable
So it sounds like we have a consensus.
by Clark Gable
reply 391
04/08/2009
Here's something I found amazing in the novel. One of Scarlett's children appears to have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome!
In the novel Scarlett has 3 children, one with each husband. Her child with Frank Kennedy is a girl; as a baby she's "ugly as a hairless monkey" and as she grows older it's apparent that something is not right with her. She's afraid of all animals, has no attention span, and can't seem to concentrate on anything. Scarlett is dismayed to realize that she's a "silly" child. The silliness probably was the result of Scarlett having a belt of brandy every night while she was pregant with the girl. Stressed out by the demands of starting and maintaining a business (she owns 2 sawmills) and being pregnant, she has a good stiff drink every night to calm her nerves. Her doctor never thinks to tell her not to drink in her condition because he regards Scarlett as a well-bred young lady from a good family and women like that just don't drink hard liquor, except for maybe a glass of wine once in a while. Scarlett is the exception. I really think that her daughter Ella, poor child, got FAS due to her mother's fondness for brandy. Just another example of what an absolutely awful mother Scarlett O'Hara is.
by Clark Gable
reply 392
04/08/2009
It was (and in many circles still is) considered the greatest film of all time. At the very least it was the greatest box office hit of all time. For decades. It is always at or near the top of lists of the greatest film achievements from Hollywood's golden era. The public LOVED this film. If the film is racist, then it certainly reflects America (and, actually, the WORLD's) innate racism. Then again, most people could put into check the historical context of the film.
All of the posters here who have tried to make arguments about what a heinous film it is and how racist it is (and that Viven Leigh couldn't act! WTF?)are nothing more than little pissants with no significance. You are a tale told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. GONE WITH THE WIND? Are you kidding me? The Hollywood CLASSIC against which all other films are measured to this day? What a joke.
by Clark Gable
reply 393
04/08/2009
Actually, I think my kind took more of a hit than the black folk in GWTW.  We were always being referred to in a derogatory manner and being faced with hate and unkind representation.
by Clark Gable
reply 394
04/09/2009
I hope that there's a special type of hell for the misguided, ill-informed and reactionary people who swarm to every and any thread regarding GWTW to spew their idiocy about the "racism" in it.  A hell with a widescreen TV that only shows "Amos & Andy," Stepin Fetchit movies and all of Eddie Cantor's blackface numbers would be good.  I don't consider any of those products "racist" because I can actually conceive of time, place and societal structure within them, but it would give these twits something to scream in agony over for all time.
by Clark Gable
Two sentences that drive otherwise peaceful male homosexuals insane:
"'Gone with the Wind' is racist";
and:
"Vivien Leigh can't act!"
In the future, when they are rounding us up to put us in cattle cars headed to a concentration camp outside Trenton, New Jersey, that's how they'll know us!  They will say: "Please respond to the following two assertions: '"Gone with the Wind" is racist' and 'Vivien Leigh can't act!"
Never heard such cascades of cacas - to quote Eugene Ionesco - in response to what seem to me to be perfectly reasonable statements.  To say Vivien Leigh can't act is like saying, "The sun shines!"  It's a truth everyone accepts!  As for "Gone with the Wind"' being racist, well: to deny that statement is tantamount to insisting that Copernicus was wrong and Ptolemy was right, and, yes, the sun revolves around the earth.  Of course it's racist!  Everyone knows this!
by Clark Gable
04/09/2009
"So enough screaming and crying and squealing about 'racism.' It's pointless. And stupid."
R390, please quote the screaming, crying and squealing about racism. It appears to me that most of the posts on the racism of GWTW --aside from the assertion that one can't give a good performance in a racist film -- are     articulate, knowledgeable and well thought-out.
On the other hand, there is an amazing amount of screaming, crying and squealing in defense of GWTW, along with a startling ignorance of history, cinema, racial issues and the basics of literature.
Your own post is an example.
by Clark Gable
reply 404
04/09/2009
I am a black woman who has read both the book (1037 pages) and seen the film more than once.  I love classic films and dealing with the racist imagery is something I had to learn to deal with.  As far as GWTW glorifying slavery, I agree with the poster that says the author was trying to glorify the OLD SOUTH and contented slaves and benevolent masters were part of that mythology.
Notice there is hardly anything about poor whites in the novel?  And what little is written isn't very good.  They were "trash".  Poor whites were the dirty little secret of the old south.  Their lives were miserable and they're the ones who paid the price for the confederacy in the civil war.  But they are hardly seen in the film if at all. Don't want to start a debate on the old south, just wanted to say that there was a LOT of white washing going on in the novel and the film.  The entire story, including the history it's based upon is utter fantasy.  And knowing that it's fantasy allows me to watch it without being upset.
I don't think anyone could have done better in this role as Vivien Leigh.  The woman became Scarlett O'hara.  Plus, I don't know of a woman who ever filmed as well as she did.  She was pretty in real life but on film her beauty became almost other-worldly.  She was breathtaking in that film.
peace out!!
reply 405
04/09/2009
GWTW, as a previous poster noted, was a giant piece of propaganda that worked like a charm on white Americans - and perhaps some black one? - who wanted to believe that the Old South was full of happy slaves who were in love with their charming owners.
As a piece of racist propaganda, it is comparable to "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a notoriously anti-semitic tract that was translated into German in 1920 and added significantly to Germany's anti-Jewish feeling, and helped make the holocaust possible.  GWTW is an extremely well-made and powerful and clearly quite effective piece of propaganda!
It might be other things, as well, just as Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" is a beautiful piece of film-making in addition to being a brilliantly effective piece of pro-Nazi propaganda.
by Clark Gable
reply 406
04/09/2009
"That's why people watch it over and over again. If insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over again, knowing the outcome but hoping it will end differently, when that definition goes triple for GWTW fans, who watch thinking, deep down, that maybe now Scarlett will be more mature, more sensitive."
This may come as a surprise, but most of us are not this stupid.  I think you've let a previous compliment go to your head; you are overreaching in your preening explanations.
by Clark Gable
"Overreaching in your preening explanations!"
Ouch!
Wow, you guys are so hard on each other!  Good thing I never had any of you as English teachers for Freshman Comp!
by Clark Gable
reply 409
04/09/2009
I like you, R405.  You seem to really GET it.  And I know that it can be tiresome and insulting when people compare gay insults to black insults, but it's somehow similar to when gays look at old films and see grotesque sterotypes.  Some are offended, some can laugh at it or get past it, some learn from it.  You get out of things what you decide to.  And you are SO right about Viv.  Pictures and home movies from 1938 do her NO favors, but, my GOD, she was magical to look at in GWTW and also "Fire Over England."  The cinematic camera worshipped her.
On another note, mostly unrelated to R405, I don't know if the film presents a COMPLETELY idyllic slave existance!  Prissy sure got slapped around good when she disappointed her mistress!  And I firmly believe that a house slave like Mammy would have no choice over time, but to genuinely care for white people she literally knew and helped raise from the cradle on.  Unless the people were downright horrible, those relationships would develop to some extent, slave or not!  And it is a fact that some slaves didn't WANT to leave their masters because of the fear of the unknown and the fear of trying to cut through the more severe racism of the outside world in order to make a life.  There are a lot of cut and dried opinions about something that was never cut and dried.
by Clark Gable
If Maria Ouspenskaya had played Prissy, would the film stil have been racist?
by Clark Gable
reply 417
04/09/2009
Vivian Leigh as Scarlet O'Hara is one of the great screen acting performances of all time.  If you cannot appreciate it, then, well, your loss.
You cannot evaluate art, events etc written in another time and era, through the looking glass of another era.  That kind of vision does a disservice to both the original work and those who are appreciating or analyzing something in the present.  When that happens, you have a basic sign of a lousy historian or critical writer.  Even people as supposedly smart as Gore Vidal (who comes to mind immediately) often make that mistake- which is one the reasons he is such a miserable historian.
Sometimes you run across and individual or a work of literature that is for all time- Lincoln was one of those- he was so far ahead of his time.  Eleanor Roosevelt was way ahead of her time too.
GWTW is very much of it's time and as such, is still a great potboiler and epic film.
by Clark Gable
reply 418
04/09/2009
Yet I think Vivien's performance often seems to scream through the decades and come off as very contemporary.  It's so fresh and vivid, even now.  Even people who hate classic movies respond to her.  (versus, for example, Leslie Howard.)
by Clark Gable
reply 419
04/09/2009
Vivien Leigh is stagey an actory and flat, and her lines sound rehearsed, and her accent is clearly fake.  I never believed she would ever have said "fiddle dee dee" in real life.
by Clark Gable
reply 420
04/09/2009
Vivien Leigh is stagey and actory and flat, and her lines sound rehearsed, and her accent is clearly fake.  I never believed she would ever have said "fiddle dee dee" in real life.
by Clark Gable
reply 435
04/09/2009
For those to whom viewing GWTW is akin to a lynching. . .avoid turning on Turner Classic Movies this Tuesday night from 8pm to midnight.  They're showing that movie again that no one cares about.  (Also, avoid Fox Theater in Atlanta next weekend where they are showing GWTW as part of the Atlanta Film Festival.  Somehow, even though no one cares about it, two showings have sold out.)
For those who feel otherwise. . .tune in Tuesday night!
by Clark Gable
reply 436
04/09/2009
"On the other hand, there is an amazing amount of screaming, crying and squealing in defense of GWTW, along with a startling ignorance of history, cinema, racial issues and the basics of literature."
Oh piss off, you self-righteous twit. You queens shrieking "racism!" see racism in EVERYTHING. It's pure paranoia. You're the type who considers "niggardly" a RACIST word.
by Clark Gable
04/09/2009
"Notice there is hardly anything about poor whites in the novel?"
Actually there's a lot about poor whites in the book, especially the Statterys, poor white trash who depend on the charity of their neighbors to get by. Emmie Stattery has an affair with Jonas Wilkerson, the overseer of Tara, which results in a baby that dies soon after birth; Wilkerson gets fired for his indiscretion. Ellen O'Hara is always called upon to take care of the Statterys when one of them takes ill. When Emmie comes down with typhoid, Ellen dutifully does what she can to help; as a result, both of Scarlett's sisters catch the disease, and Ellen does too. The girls recover but Ellen dies from it. The Statterys are considered the scum of the earth and they are.
by Clark Gable
reply 438
04/09/2009
R437, I adore GWTW, but I would consider the adverb you just typed to be racist due to it's intent.  Let's face it:  if you said that word in a business meeting, you'd be (appropriately) sent to HR for your exit interview.  I agree that the cries of GWTW fan=racist are insane but the 'n' word and all derivatives have no place in today's society.
by Clark Gable
reply 440
04/09/2009
"I adore GWTW, but I would consider the adverb you just typed to be racist due to it's intent. Let's face it: if you said that word in a business meeting, you'd be (appropriately) sent to HR for your exit interview".
"Niggardly" means cheap, miserly. It has no racial connotations at all. But because it SOUNDS like a racial epithet some people consider it racist! That's just...crazy.
by Clark Gable
04/09/2009
[italic]"You queens shrieking "racism!" see racism in EVERYTHING."[/italic]
Really? That's supposed to disprove the racism in GWTW? Can you show us what threads you're talking about? Is there someone claiming "The Sound of Music" is racist?
You seem incredibly sensitive and over-reactive to the word racism.  Is this about something that happens to you a lot in your own life? Is that why you're so emotional about this? Because these weird accusations makes you sound paranoid.
The racism in "Gone with the Wind" has been discussed for over 70 years. It's not a figment of anyone's imagination. Why are you coming unglued about it?
[italic]You're the type who considers "niggardly" a RACIST word.[/italic]
What an odd thing to say. Do you feel the Conspiracy of Anti-Racists and Commies have taken the word "niggardly" away from you? Have you been robbed of a word that was an important part of your vocabulary? I don't understand your concern about a nonexistent situation.
by Clark Gable
Vivien Leigh could not even really indicate with any conviction.
by Clark Gable
reply 446
04/10/2009
If you observe most any of the many screen tests for Scarlett, you will see that stagey, actory and flat defines almost every actress and none of them can begin to say "Fiddle Dee Dee" with the right inflection or offhandedness.  Bedies, why WOULD 1940's British stage actress ever say the phrase in real life?  Why would anyone?  The people knocking Vivien are just flame baiters, trying to come up with anything to discount her stunning, landmark performance.  And the question is begged.  Why do people who hate GWTW and find it racist continually flock and swarm to all the threads about it to spew their propaganda and venom?  It's almost militant in tone and it's so foolish.
by Clark Gable
Who said books should be banned?
Not me.
All I said was, Think twice before you show GWTW to your children!  It will having them growing up thinking that acting is the thing Vivien Leigh does!  Which we all know is so wrong!
by Clark Gable
reply 452
04/11/2009
"It's like saying 'Schindler's List' is anti-semitic because it features Nazis who believe in the extermination of Jews."
Dear, you tried that comparison before and it didn't work then, either.
You are so deluded you can no longer tell the difference between reality and a writer's intent. They are often two different things. Certainly that was the case with GWTW.
If Margaret Mitchell had written "Schindler's List" it would be about a bunch of Nazis after the war, reminiscing about how lovely the days of killing Jews were. And they would have a fat Jewish woman waiting on them hand and foot, saying, "We Jews loved it, too. If only you had killed more of us..."
And Schindler would be the villain.
by Clark Gable
04/11/2009
[italic]And Schindler would be the villain.[/italic]
Just in case you missed it, the "villain" in GWTW is Scarlett herself, in part because of her shabby treatment of her former slaves and the prison-labor she allows to be driven harder than slaves.
by Clark Gable
reply 454
04/11/2009
Scarlett is in no way a villain, because Scarlett is pretty pretty pretty Vivien Leigh, and the film tells us endlessly to love love love her despite her vicious racist abuses.  The villain of GWTW is the north, which forced all them nicey nicey masters to give up their sunny lives in the Gentle Old South where even the slaves - especially the slaves! - were happy, happy, happy, happy, happy.
by Clark Gable
Cheryl would have made a great Mrs. Merriweather!!
by Clark Gable
reply 462
04/13/2009
What would a Swede be doing in America making movies?!??  In case you aren't aware, everyone white in America came from someplace else originally and then settled here creating offspring which resulted in the people of Atlanta and all other cities.
by Clark Gable
reply 463
04/13/2009
[italic]Scarlett is in no way a villain, because Scarlett is pretty pretty pretty Vivien Leigh, and the film tells us endlessly to love love love her despite her vicious racist abuses.[/italic]
I suspect you have never even watched the movie if this is your take on it. Scarlett is shown to be vain, self-centered, deceptive, duplicitous, mean-spirited and greedy. She follows through with her vow to lie, steal, cheat and kill to the very letter. The film tells us that while we may be inspired by her tenacity we are also to be shocked by her endless acts of self-aggrandizement. We are scarcely surprised to find that she winds up alone and unloved in a ridiculously overdone mansion having become an object of universal scorn.
by Clark Gable
reply 464
04/13/2009
[italic]She follows through with her vow to lie, steal, cheat and kill to the very letter.[/italic]
She doesn't exactly vow to do those things; only if she has to to stop from being hungry (or any of her folks.)
by Clark Gable
reply 465
04/13/2009
Considering the first line is "Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful" I think either of our two fine actresses, Patti LuPone or Meryl Streep, could have nailed it.
by Clark Gable
Going by that reasoning R466, Sarah Jessica Parker would have really nailed it.
by Clark Gable
reply 467
04/14/2009
Nah.  Sarah Jessica Parker wqould never hanbdle the "but men sledom realized it when caught by her chamrs" bit.  Emitting an ear-piercing shriek and calling Ashley Wilked her "lavah" would never have done it.  Although, there might be a certain appeal to the voiceover, "I couldn't help but wonder. . .if Ashley and Melanie had a chaste union now that childbirth had left Melanie's health decimated. . .what do men with wives they can't touch go when they themselves need to be touched?  The next day at lunch, with India Wilkes, Mrs. Meade, and Mrs. Merriweather, I found out. . ."
by Clark Gable
I can't believe this thread! Do any of you anything about Margaret Mitchell?
GWTW is book written by a young woman in the 1920s.
Her father was a member of the Atlanta Historical Society -- the book is perfect in terms of historical details -- down to descriptions of "The Girl of the Period" saloon, the clothes worn by the belles, etc. It relates civil war history as was told to her by her elderly relatives, many of whom lived through the events in question.
Mitchell's mother was a suffragette -- very women's movement and sexually liberated. In her apt, Mitchell had porn on the walls to shock her visitors. (Been there, seen it.)
All the characters are based on personal acquaintances. Melanie - on nun who was a relative; Rhett on her grandmother (!) - not the sexual aspects but the conversations/attitudes; Scarlett she based partly on herself; partly on descriptions of some very fast women from the post civil war period she heard about.
The book was heavily edited by her husband -- about which we don't know much. But, many think that reason she only wrote one book was because it was really collaborative effort.
Regarding attitudes to race - well, by the standards of her time and place, 1920s Atlanta, it was benign. Regarding attitudes to sex, it was surprisingly liberated for its day. (The nun told her "That's a dirty book.")
It is what it is -- written by a young woman intersted in family and local history with a flair for storytelling.
Complaints about GWTW are like saying The Godfather glorifies the Mafia. Yes, it does. But, it's still a great yarn. The Illiad glorifies war; great story, though.
That's all GWTW is "a great story."
by Clark Gable
04/15/2009
Regarding Vivien Leigh -- it was perfect casting.
Regardless of how the book describes Scarlett's appearance, the actress had to be a great screen beauty for the events of the movie to be believable. From dangling 20 men at the barbecue to having Rhett chase her for 12 years, to showing Ashley to be obvious loser he was. (How many times did she throw herself at him? In the book, that's one of reasons Rhett thinks Ashley is a jerk.)
Leigh is other-worldly beautiful in this movie. And she has to be.
Her performance may not seem natural by today's standars, but it was very good by 1939 standards.
Moreover, she didn't need to be better; there weren't that many close ups and the movie was very fast paced. The character was created by the script, casting, costume and pacing.
I disagree with Elliot Templeton (who escaped from a Somerset Maugham novel to post on DL). I don't think wildness was just a code for hot -- Cukor was specifically looking for a desperate/frantic aspect -- because that's Scarlett frame of mind during most of the movie.
by Clark Gable
04/15/2009
Interesting trivia ---
Mitchell's relative who was a nun was the nun who was the great love of Doc Holliday's life. The one he corresponded with all that time. This is what happened.
Doc and the woman were cousins and eloped; but for some reason (I forget) the family disapproved and had the marriage annulled. The woman entered a convent; Doc went west and became Doc Holliday. They corresponded until his death.
Now remember Ellen Robillard, who loved her cousin Phillippe and wanted to marry him. But, Phillipe was wild - getting into gun fights, had to leave Savannah and died in bar room brawl. How Ellen threatened to enter a convent and how the father allowed to marry Gerald instead.
Hmmm....
"Do any of you anything about Margaret Mitchell?"
Are we missing a word?
If the word was "no", there are many informed posters on this thread; you may want to read through.
And, by the way, while John Marsh may have proof-read from time to time, to call GWTW a 'collaborative' effort is insane.  He did not write the book, he was not creative, he did not give tips or impact Mitchell's style.  He proof-read, at most.  Knowing that people would assume that he was somehow involved--and perhaps understanding that there would always be someone thinking 'a little woman' couldn't possibly have written it by herself--the GWTW manuscript was the only remnant of her writing not to be burned after her death.  Part is in a SunTrust vault, part in a university library, for proof that she and she sloned wrote the book, and that she did so alone.  John Marsh may have been a wonderful husband and a former English teacher, but he was not a writer--just a proof-reader.
by Clark Gable
reply 477
04/15/2009
Elizabeth Taylor as Scarlett, had she been old enough, would have been the greatest performance ever captured on film. Earth, fire and waterworks.
by Clark Gable
reply 478
04/15/2009
Let's bring this thread back.  If I read another thread about Grey Gardens or the First Drag Queen of Cameroon, I think I'm gonna flip.
Norma Shearer would have been a disastropus Scarlett but might have been a good Melanie.  Thoughts?
by Clark Gable
[italic]"Do any of you anything about Margaret Mitchell?"
Are we missing a word?
If the word was "no", there are many informed posters on this thread [/italic]
Okay.
Now, what if the missing word were "know"?
I love holier-than-thou illiterates.
reply 481
04/25/2009
Let's cast a musical version of "Gone with the Wind" starring current or past American Idol contestants!
I can totally picture a blonde Scarlett O'Hara and think Carrie Underwood would be fantastic in the role. Obviously only taylor Hicks could play her father. Mandessa would be a great Mammy, but I suppose Jennifer Hudson would get the part. I can't think of a perfect Melanie, but let's face it -- Kelly Clarkson can do practically anything. Is she too old, though?
I think Rhett would be the hardest to cast, but I think with a little mustache, Adam could do it.
by Clark Gable
Oh, R482, that's too hard.  Nobody follows American Idol.  (Aside from a few million, I know. . .)
Can we just do singers in general?
In that case, Aretha Franklin for Mammy.  She'll make that headrag into a hat that will live forever.
Hillary Duff for Scarlett.  Under-rated and gay friendly.
Mandy Moore for Melanie.
Harry Connick Jr. for Rhett.  Just needs to slim down again.  He's getting fit-fat.
Madonna for Belle Whatling.  I know I said, "singers" but we'll give her a pass and allow more studio wizardry so we can cast her to type.
Lil' Kim for Prissy. She can rap her "I doan know nothin' bout birthin' babies" line and then put her Dancibg With the Stars" lessons to use to do a tango as she flounces down the stairs of Miss Pittypat's house.
by Clark Gable
reply 483
04/25/2009
R481's ass smells like a dead Conferderate solider who's been lying in the hot sun too long.
by Clark Gable
Too young. Unless she had Scarlett at age 14.
by Clark Gable
reply 497
07/20/2009
Esther Rolle was quickly killed off in the GWTW sequel.  Scarlett arrived at Tara to find that Mammy has been bedridden with illness.  Ever thoughtful, Scarelett cried to her that Rhett has left Scarlett alone, to which Rolle's Mammy memorably quipped, "Miz Scarlett. . .that man doan give a damn. . .damn. . .damn!"
by Clark Gable
07/20/2009
[quote]Crawford would have been interesting as Scarlett's lovely mommie
It's a well-known fact that the tramp was originally cast as Scarlett's mother but deservedly fired when she overacted her scene as a corpse.  Not to mention, those rocket-titties were a bit distracting.
by Clark Gable
reply 504
07/20/2009
Fuck you. Bette Davis is the one who couldn't act. The cunt was so vain she called herself "The Marlon Brando of my generation" wheras all she was consisted of screaming, mugging and being a drama harridan.
by Clark Gable
reply 505
07/20/2009
R505, Marlon Brando was much younger than Davis, he got started in the early 60's while Davis got started in the 30's.  Davis was THE BETTE DAVIS of her generation.  I don't think she would have ever uttered those words.  Can you cite where you got this?
by Clark Gable
reply 506
07/20/2009
Dude, actors in the the Golden Age of Hollywood were muggers, and screamers, and declaimers.  The style was highly melodramatic. It started to change a bit when Ingrid Bergman came along, and also John Garfield and Montgomery Clift.  And then with Brando and James Dean, it turn into something else: equally stylized, but in a different way.
Given the context in which her career took place, Bette Davis was a more subtle and complex actress than many of her "dramatic actress" contemporaries, and she had more wattage than almost all of them.  If you look carefully at some of her scenes in *Jezebel* - the scene where Henry Fonda comes home, for instance, and she falls to her knees to welcome him - you'll see how nuanced and economical she could be.  All her films with William Wyler are impressive - *Jezebel*, *The Letter*, *The Little Foxes*.
And I mean of course she was *big*, she was a *larger-than-life*-type actor, but who isn't?
George C. Scott said Davis was his hero, and of course Scott was a *big* actor, too, but he had enormous craft, and he could really deliver performances about larger-than-life characters.
Davis made everyday ordinary women - housewives, black-sheep daughters, barmaids, small town girls - seem like epic characters, and maybe that's why you hate her: Because her performances suggested that women were ravishing, and compelling, and poweful, and interesting.
by Clark Gable
reply 507
07/20/2009
Well DUH, Davis said this after Brando hit the big time. She always wanted to align herself with hot talents. Brando, then Anna Magnani, then Glenda Jackson, Meryl, Debra Winger, Sissy Spacek....
by Clark Gable
reply 508
07/20/2009
Any one of those "hot talents" would tell you that Davis was their idol.  Glenda Jackson, for instance, said she started acting because of Bette Davis.  Jane Fonda is a big Davis fan.  So is Meryl Streep.
by Clark Gable
reply 509
07/20/2009
Glenda Jackson said she admired the "superb arrogance" of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Now, does this have anything to do with ACTING?
by Clark Gable
Constance Bennett as Melanie would have been fab.
by Clark Gable
reply 511
07/20/2009
First off, she said, "superb," which does suggest approbation.  Secondly, Jackson is smart enough to know that big-time film performers give big performances.  Have you *watched* Jackson?  Would you *call* her a naturalistic performer?  I wouldn't.  Thirdly, what's wrong with arrogance?  Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy Stewart, Jimmy Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Brando, Paul Newman, Sean Penn, De Niro, Pacion: All of them, "superbly arrogant."  Why can't you allow women to be powerful?  Who do you like, June Allyson?
by Clark Gable
reply 512
07/20/2009
Goddard would have been great had Cukor remained director but I'm not sure if she would have succeeded had Fleming replaced him in this theoretical universe.
by Clark Gable
reply 513
07/20/2009
Here's a piece of juicy trivia - when Glenda Jackson won her first lead actress Oscar for playing Gudrun Brangwen (DH lawrence's very own Scarlett O'Hara... for the modernist avant-garde!) in Women in Love, it was BETTE DAVIS who demanded to be the one to call her up in London and be the first to tell her she had secured the award. Sad, really!
by Clark Gable
reply 514
07/20/2009
OF COURSE Jackson is naturalistic!!!! I mean for Christ's sake, she's NEVER started chewing the shaky wallpaper of some early 70s BBC set.....
by Clark Gable
07/20/2009
All you Davis haters:
You haven't looked closely at *Jezebel*.  When Davis comes down the stairs all in white - as if finally to dress the way Henry Fonda wants her to - and then falls to her knees in front of him: That's a wonderful bit of acting.  And then when she finds out Fonda has married a tedious little northern girl who's badly dressed: Watch how Davis plays the scene.
In World War II, there was no more powerful movie star than Davis.  She was called "the fourth Warner Brother."  (Or fifth - how many Warners were there?)  She had a shrewd eye for material: She was forever presenting Jack Warner with novels that she thought would make great films.  And they did!  She helped turn Warner Brothers into a top studio - all the money her films earned.  And she was President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for a hot minute.  During the War, she ran the Stage Door Canteen, where she insisted that black service-people be admitted along with white.  As a presence in Hollywood, as a leading citizen, she was of major importance to the industry.
As an actress: It's easy to look at *Of Human Bondage* now and see how over-the-top her performance is.  But just as no one had seen anything like Katharine Hepburn when *Morning Glory* was released, they'd never seen anything like Davis's performance as Mildred in *OHB*.  What silent actress came close?  Maybe Gloria Swanson.  Davis was the *punk* actress of 1934, she was 25 years old, a D-list contract player at the least glamorous of the major studios, and she got herself loaned out to RKO to play a vicious raging little Cockney tart who called Leslie Howard a "cripple."  Okay, she was all nerves and no technique, but she knew how to get the camera's attention, she was not interested in looking pretty, and she was giving her all for what was basically a character role.
She stuck with that sense of being a character actress who lucked into major roles for her whole career.  An actor like Meryl Streep has a career very much in the Davis mold.
Yes, she's exhausting, sometimes.  It's hard to watch her in, say, *Dangerous* or *Mr. Skeffington*.  But Davis understood herself as a piece of architecture.  She had studied dance with Martha Graham when she was trying to be a stage actress in NYC in her early 20s, and you can see the influence of Graham's movements in all Davis's roles.  She understood how the camera worked, how it moved and what it emphasized, and she knew how to go very small and also how to go big in order to shape a dramatic moment.
I think of Davis as having the profound and epic beauty of a piece of architecture.
I don't think she was naturalistic.
But I don't believe that any acting really is naturalistic.
by Clark Gable
07/20/2009
Hey:
If a post is more than like 5 lines, you queens back away and take your toys off to some post where they're talking dick size.
How come no one on this board is interested in saying anything worth reading?
by Clark Gable
[quote]But I don't believe that any acting really is naturalistic.
That's why they call it acting.
by Clark Gable
07/20/2009
Bette Davis didn't play Scarlett because Bette Davis was not racist.
She knew better than to be involved with the film that would have the reputation of the most racist movie of all time, after *Birth of a Nation*.
by Clark Gable
reply 524
07/20/2009
I've seen lots of Bette Davis movies, and she's had shufflin' black maids in more than one of them, R524.
by Clark Gable
reply 525
07/21/2009
In 2001, Alice Randall wrote an interesting parody of "Gone With The Wind" told from a slave's perspective. It's called "The Wind Done Gone".
by Clark Gable
reply 526
07/21/2009
Wasn't there a lawsuit over that book, R526?  By the way, Margaret Walker's 1966 novel "Jubilee" told the story of the Civil War and Reconstruction South from the point of view of a black woman, a liberated slave.
by Clark Gable
reply 527
07/21/2009
Yes, you're right, R527, there was. According to Wikipedia "the case was settled in 2002 when Houghton Mifflin agreed to make an unspecified donation to Morehouse College, a historically African American college in Atlanta, Georgia, in exchange for Mitchell's estate dropping the litigation."
I think the legal woes overshadowed what was an interesting concept. I can't remember the exact line now, but there was a very intriguing question asking how it was possible that the white slave owners didn't notice the slave hatred permeating the house; hatred smothered on the silverware and other household items.
by Clark Gable
reply 528
07/21/2009
I am so sick of Bette Davis. You can understand why Kate Hepburn would slying change the subject everytime the old bitch was hurled up at her for discussion. Davis was tedious, lacked mystery, vainglorious, self obsessed, highly neurotic and paranoid and deeply repressed.
by Clark Gable
It's not like Kate Hepburn was Dr. Joyce Brothers.
by Clark Gable
reply 530
07/21/2009
[quote]You can understand why Kate Hepburn would slying change the subject everytime the old bitch was hurled up at her for discussion.
Indeed. Kate knew she couldn't compete with Davis's talent.
by Clark Gable
reply 531
07/21/2009
r 515, Davis was the only white performer in a group of black movie actors who entertained black service people during WW II.  The group was organized by Hattie McDaniel.
It's not Davis's fault that Hollywood put subservient black people in so many of its so called "Golden Era" films.  She didn't write the scripts or do the casting or directing.
by Clark Gable
reply 532
07/21/2009
Of course it's her fault. The "better scripts" she demanded of Warner's usually consisted of her being a powerful, dramatic rich girl with a black slave.
by Clark Gable
reply 533
07/21/2009
Okay, she had black slaves, or Asian underlings, in all three Wyler films: *Jezebel*, *The Letter*, and *The Little Foxes*.  That's true.  Also there was a black maid in *Dangerous*.  She had no slaves in *All About Eve*, unless you count Thelma Ritter.  I don't remember and black maids or slaves in *Now, Voyager* or *All This and Heaven, Too* or *Elizabeth and Essex* or *Watch on the Rhine* or *The Man Who Came to Dinner* or *Marked Woman* or *The Sisters* or *Dark Victory*.  Okay, it seems like there would've been black underlings in *Dark Victory*, given that it's about a rich Long Island white girl.
In any case.
What I mean is:
Yes, Bette Davis was part of a racist system, and she colluded in that racism, like all the other white folks.
I don't think she can be singled out, however, as *particularly* racist, especially if you think of the black underling characters who appeared in films with Mae West, Katharine Hepburn, Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, etc., etc.
And I *do* think that Davis - in her limited New Englandy way - made more of an effort to intervene against racism than lots of her white contemporaries.
by Clark Gable
07/21/2009
"Jean Arthur, who is generally wonderful, is awful."
Perhaps because Jean Arthur is totally wrong for Scarlett O'Hara.  As I would add were Katharine Hepburn and a lot of other very talented ladies.
by Clark Gable
hey, it's coming out on Blu-ray!!
by Clark Gable
reply 550
08/11/2009
[quote]It started to change a bit when Ingrid Bergman came along, and also John Garfield and Montgomery Clift.
I love this description of Bergman's introduction to Hollywood via the Selznicks (from Irene Selznick's autobio):
[quote]As David was working that first evening, I took her to a dinner Elsa Maxwell was giving at the Bechcomber, because it was not to large a group. This proved to be a very, very poor idea. The hostess didn't know who she was, and the guests cared even less. It was to be hoped she would fare better at out party. Alas, no. She was being properly introduced, she looked lovely, but she was more or less ignored. The ladies were particularly bitter. Joan Bennet, for one, was heard to mutter in a more than audible tone, "We have enough trouble getting jobs as it is. Do they have to import kitchen maids?"
by Clark Gable
reply 551
08/12/2009
Having seen GWTW over a dozen times, I can't imagine ANYONE but Leigh as Scarlett or Olivia as Melanie.  Perfection, both.
by Clark Gable
reply 552
08/12/2009
There is nothing perfect about GONE WITH THE WIND, except its perfect reflection of the racism that got even worse after the Civil War and lasted well into the 20th Century.
It's an awful movie and all prints should be destroyed.
by Clark Gable
reply 553
08/13/2009
Get over yourself, r553.  Are we supposed to pretend the Civil War never happened, that racism never existed?  Gone With the Wind tells a part of that story.
Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable, and Hattie McDaniel are indeed perfect in it.
Now go take your bitter bile to some other thread, bitch.
by Clark Gable
Sorry.  I know.  But really, she would've been wonderful.
The real tragedy, is that they cast Leslie Howard.
He can't do a southern accent, he looks horrible in the makeup and in many scenes appears to be 30 years older than anyone else in the movie.
by Clark Gable
reply 559
08/13/2009
I think Melvyn Douglas is great in the tests (as Ashley), but Selznick thought he was too big and beefy.  Jeffrey Lynn (in the tests) seems to have the quality of the dreamer that Selznick wanted, so I don't know why he went with Leslie Howard.   It's not that Howard can't do a Southern accent, it's that he DOESN'T do one.  One of his conditions for accepting the film was that he not have to do a Southern accent, and it really ruins the film.  If Leigh did it -- and did it so spectacularly -- I don't know why he couldn't have.
He really only did the film because Selznick agreed to let him make "Intermezzo" and direct it if he did GWTW.  He really is terrible in the film.
And I have to admit that Olivia DeHavilland's performance has not aged anywhere near as well as Leigh, Gable, McDaniel, and Thomas Mitchell.  It feels really phony and "grand lady" to me.  I like Andrea Leeds in the tests, and wish she had gotten the role.
by Clark Gable
But Leslie Howard is waaaaay cuter than Melvyn Douglas (whom I love) and Jeffrey Lynn.
I would've cast Paulette Goddard.  She has a sense of irony - something Vivien Leigh lacks.
No matter, though: It's a horribly offensive racist film and no one should ever see it.
by Clark Gable
reply 561
08/14/2009
Bullshit.  It's a film depiction of a racist time, not a racist film.  And people will ALWAYS see it -- it's being given a big 70th anniversary restoration this year (plus Blue-ray).
And I think Leslie Howard is disgusting.  Cute?  He was nearly 50 at the time and looks every minute of it!  Jeffrey Lynn, who was 29 at the time, is much cuter, and SOOOO sensitive.  Needless to say, he never married, and I think we know why.
by Clark Gable
reply 562
08/14/2009
I had a big crush on Leslie Howard when I was 12.  In retrospect, he was absurd as Ashley, but no more absurd than anyone else in that dreadful film.  Well, I love Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen, they should have asteroids named after them, but still: It's cringeworthy to watch how they are made to cower and blather and dither and suck up to white folks in that movie.
It's a horrible racist piece of garbage.
Admit it.
reply 563
08/14/2009
[quote]It's cringeworthy to watch how they are made to cower and blather and dither and suck up to white folks in that movie.
They were actors playing slaves, you nut. Did you want some empowering "Afterschool Special" type resolution?
by Clark Gable
"She has a sense of irony - something Vivien Leigh lacks."
A sense of irony is what Scarlett also lacked.
by Clark Gable
08/14/2009
You can't have expected a 1939 movie to have been made with a 2009 sensibility.
And while Butterfly McQueen did cower, Hannie McDaniel was one of the strongest characters in the movie -- she doesn't cower, dither, blather, OR suck up to the white people.  And it's clear that she's a mother figure to Scarlett, and that Scarlett can't get by without Mammy.
It was shameful that Selznick's people wrote that "being a credit to my race" line for her to say when she won her Oscar, but her performance is the equal of Leigh's and Gable's as far as holding up today, which can't be said for many of the other performances (except maybe Alicia Rhett).
by Clark Gable
08/20/2009
I would have liked Randolph Scott over Leslie Howard.  Howard is just gross.
Olivia de Havilland.......  How can anyone carp about her "grand lady" performance (a term, by the way, bandied about on DL all the time and one which I completely loathe) when that's what the character WAS and what Scarlett loathed, though she was actually jealous of it?  Olivia fits the book to a TEE!  She IS Melanie.  Anyone else could have only dreamed of coming within a mile of her.  In fact, she really should have won the Oscar over, admittedly great, Hattie.
by Clark Gable
reply 570
08/20/2009
DeHavilland is embarrassing as Melanie.  She may have LOOKED like a Melanie, but her acting style simply hasn't held up, whereas some of the others, like Leigh, look fresh.  Olivia just looks dated.
And the notion that she deserved the Oscar over Hattie McDaniel is ludicrous.
Olivia gave two really great performances that still hold up today - "The Snake Pit" and "The Heiress" (for which she won her second Oscar) -- otherwise her performances are laughable.
by Clark Gable
"Well, I love Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen, they should have asteroids named after them.."
Best line on DL in months...
by Clark Gable
reply 572
08/20/2009
SO SO SO glad people have been called out on the fact that this movie is a big pile of racist crap. I haven't been able to watch it in decades for that reason.  Just skeevy. One long propaganda piece for hate.
Even as a kid, when I was dragged to see this over and over and over again (at the local movie theater that only showed Disney movies and apparently GWTW) I would have much rather seen a hot young Kurt Russell in The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes or The Chimp Is President or whatever the fuck stupid G-rated bullshit was on the marquee. Even though I had about zero awareness about social anything in our all white little town,  I knew on some level this movie was fucked up.
Serious, serious denial going on here. And, no, voting for Obama does not give you a free pass. Love Vivien Leigh all you want. Nothing wrong with that. Talk about the casting. No problem. But seriously, deny the film is racist? Why not stick your big, stupid heads up Cheney's ass or Palin's pussy and start licking and yelling about no single payer health care while your at it? (Blowing air up there might cause an embolism, so something good will at least come out of it).
And the book, as it's been pointed it out, is much worse. I've read it. It was actually assigned to us in our junior high. All 1024 pages in mass market paperback. I actually wrote about how racist it was and got a C-. but my teacher was a republican cunt in a republican town. Not to mention formerly from West Virginia. The same woman who called my parents for a conference because I did two book reports in a row on Agatha Christie novels and she was "concerned" I might "turn bad." I had to get approval for my next book report. So I chose a Wilkie Collins. Also a  murder mystery, but she okayed it because she didn't know who Wilkie Collins was. Ignorant bitch.
by Clark Gable
reply 573
08/20/2009
Oh, please.  Get off your high horse, r573.  You're completely irrelevant. What about every other movie made in the 30s where blacks are subservient maids to the likes of Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn?
What about "Imitation of Life," a really BLATANT racist piece of crap, and yet it's lauded as a camp masterpiece by DL (and yes, I'm talking about the 1959 version which is just as bad as the 1934 version).
GWTW is a film of its time, which depicts a racist time.   How would YOU have filmed about movie about the Civil War-ear Deep South in 1939?   Hmmmm?
by Clark Gable
reply 574
08/20/2009
"I would have much rather seen a hot young Kurt Russell in The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes or The Chimp Is President or whatever the fuck stupid G-rated bullshit was on the marquee."
Your incredible sense of taste just seeps out of every pore, along with your overheated sense of rightousness.  I think your issues go WAY beyond this movie or book and I do hope I'm never in traffic with you.
Just a few chapters in, I knew that GWTW would be the most amazing book I had ever read and it is.  Monumental.  And the book is remarkably balanced in its treatment of negroes when you look beyond the terminology of the day (as well as the era depicted.)  Writing about a character (or characters) who have racially biased feelings does not make a piece of literary work "racist."  We are presented with a scenario and most people (with a brain) can determine the difference between what a fictional character is thinking or saying versus what the facts of the matter are.  Besides that, like it or not, when the book was written and in the era in which it is set, black people WERE second class citizens, so how could someone overlook that and act as if they were not?!  Margaret Mitchell was not Nostradamus.  You do know that the civil rights movement came later and that there wasn't true equality when GWTW was written, right?!
by Clark Gable
reply 575
08/20/2009
If Margaret Mitchell had had an ounce of dignity, she would have had Mammy and Prissy run off to Atlanta and lead a protest march down Peachtree Street in 1859.  And then open a Williams-Sonoma outlet next to Tara after the Civil War.
by Clark Gable
reply 576
08/20/2009
Joan Bennett was fun on DARK SHADOWS, but I don't see any reason to repeat her name all the livelong day.
Vivien Leigh is not an actor.
GONE WITH THE WIND is not a humane or forgivable film.  Just deal with that.
by Clark Gable
reply 578
08/25/2009
Oh, r578 has spoken from his lofty perch on high, so we all must bow down to his pissy opinion.
No one believes you, r578.   Time to go play on the freeway.
by Clark Gable
reply 579
08/25/2009
[quote] If Margaret Mitchell had had an ounce of dignity, she would have had Mammy and Prissy run off to Atlanta and lead a protest march
... before falling in love and forming the first organization for African-American lesbians in the United States.
Tallulah got some of Hattie's hot loving, I'll be Butterfly would have loved it, too.
by Clark Gable
reply 580
08/25/2009
Glenn should have won that role. She was a beautiful 20 year old girl back in 1939.
by Clark Gable
reply 581
08/25/2009
r 579, I *love* playing in the freeway, thanks for knowing that.  I feel so seen!
Bette Davis was the best American screen actress from 1938 to 1942.  Everyone knows this.  She should have won an Oscar every one of those 5 years, and she should have been cast as Scarlett and anyone else she pleased!
Vivien Leigh was never acting.
by Clark Gable
Bette Davis should have played Scarlett *and* Rhett.
A Charles Ludlam-y turn.
And two Oscars for Bette!  Actor and Actress.
by Clark Gable
reply 585
08/25/2009
God, Bette Davis, who always played Bette Davis no matter what she was playing.  She's laughable in "Dark Victory," which was her competing performance for the 1939 Oscars.  Bette's death scene -- hilarious!
Vivien Leigh deserved both the Oscars she won.   Davis SHOULD have won another for All About Eve, in which she is undeniably brilliant, but that's a different matter.
Dangerous is like Butterfield 8 -- a consolation Oscar for a less-than-brilliant performance in a so-so movie.  Even Bette herself felt it was a "make-good" for her being ignored for Of Human Bondage.
Jezebel, she earned.
reply 586
08/25/2009
Some of the names of the girls who tested for Scarlett are hysterical (and I presume would have been changed prior to the film's release.)
Haila Stoddard
Em Bowles Locker sounds like a great name for a P.E. teacher.
by Clark Gable
reply 588
08/27/2009
r 586, Davis sure did earn her JEZEBEL Oscar, and she *should* have had an Oscar for ALL ABOUT EVE, yes, you are right, and I kiss you.  And DANGEROUS is terrible, right again.
Nevertheless:
NO ONE SHOULD EVER HAVE GIVEN VIVIEN LEIGH A PART, MUCH LESS AN OSCAR.
That's just fact.  Google it.
Kisses to you.
reply 589
08/28/2009
You sound a little bit psychotic, r589.  Vivien Leigh was brilliant in two (possibly three, if you count Mrs. Stone) films, and good in all the others.
And THAT'S a fact you can take to the bank.  Just try to find a reputable film historian who would dispute that.  You can't.
And Bette Davis was ridiculous in "Dark Victory."  She didn't deserve the Oscar over Leigh that year.  I mean, no one did, but least of all Davis.
Dangerous is terrible, agreed.  And Davis is mediocre in it.   Give her a script on the level of "Eve" and she soared.  Give her less, and God forbid  a stinker (as she got many times), and she struggled to be convincing.
And she was NEVER anything but Bette Davis on film.  Never.  Even "Of Human Bondage" was simply Davis doing Davis with a cringeworthy Cockney accent.
by Clark Gable
reply 590
08/28/2009
Now, now R590.  I can safely say that Bette was very different in All That Heaven Allows to name one and I'm sure there were others.  It's possible to like both actresses (unless you are R589.)
What floors me is that Tallulah Bankhead was seriously being considered for this role and looked (love her though I do) like a wrinkled hag in her test which was done in 1936!!  Imagine three years later how much even older she'd have looked.  She couldn't even put down the cigs long enough to get through the test.  Amazing.
by Clark Gable
reply 591
08/28/2009
Bumped because TROLL-DAR has made today another tomorrow!  (And confirmed my suspicion that one poster had a whole lotta crazy going on with his racist and anti-Vivien Leigh sentiment.)
by Clark Gable
03/05/2010
Vivien Leigh can't act, dudes.
Just get a load of her performance in THE ROMAN SPRING OF MRS. STONE, you'll see I'm right.
by Clark Gable