Posted on 12/20/2009 4:58:35 AM PST by Homer_J_Simpson
Another chick flick
That probably explains why it remains my favorite movie of all time.
TCM’s trailer is from the 1961 reissue. So I didn’t post it.
Hollywood’s Golden Year. Some of their greatest movies were made in 1939. GWTW even had a part for TV’s “Superman”.
I’ll add to this Stanley Crouch’s latest column entitled, “Shut Up, Scarlett !” more about his indignant grandmother’s uproarious reaction to seeing Vivian Leigh and Butterfly McQueen’s slapfest.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-12-19/shut-up-scarlett
It was eagerly anticipated by 58,000,000 people according to Gallup and few were disappointed. A truly great film set in a lost culture, filmed in a lost civilization.
Florence King, one fiesty Southern lady, had some things to say about the novel and the film. Martha Mitchell was a scrupulous observer and recorder; there is more truth and insight about the era in a page or scene from GWIW than yards of scholarly dissertations or perverse modern characterizations of the antebellum South.
See my #13. I’m very masculine in my tastes and person, but I am in awe of Mrs. Mitchell’s accomplishment.
She sat on her daddy's shoulders so that she could see Leigh and Gable walk into the theater. It was a Big Deal for a little town, as Atlanta was then.
You're thinking of Margaret Mitchell.
I respect Florence King's opinion, but I don't like the book. I wrote my thesis analyzing a Civil War era plantation family and their environment in detail -- and the South was not like that. Mitchell's book details a fantasy of what Southerners -- in the midst of a depression that hit them very hard -- created as a myth of their glorious past.
She does touch on the truth in her characterizations, because many Southern women were as ruthless as Scarlett . . . but most were less obvious and more effective. And many of the other characters hit Southern types off very well -- almost as well as King did in her Southern Ladies and Gentlemen.
Astor with reserved seating
matinee $0.75 to $1.10 which is $11.51 to $16.88 in today's dollars.
evening $1.10 to $2.20(?) -> $16.88 to $33.76 in today's dollars.
weekend matinee $0.75 to $1.65 -> $11.51 to $25.32
Capitol
matinee $0.75 to $1.10 ->$11.51 to $16.88
evening $1.10 to $1.65 -> $16.88 to $25.32
Those were not cheap tickets. Were $0.75 to $2.20 typical movie prices in 1939, or were they higher than normal because the film was so long, it was a "spectacle" and because those were New York prices?
Favorite movie and novel for all time for us “chicks”.
The golden age of Hollywood is long gone.
“I’ll never be hungry again!” is one of my favorite scenes of any movie. Amd Scarlett is one of my favorite characters from any medium, and Vivien Leigh played her perfectly. GWTW is a classic on so many levels. One of my all-time favorite films.
“Another chick flick.”
Uh, no.
bump
She sat on her daddy's shoulders so that she could see Leigh and Gable walk into the theater. It was a Big Deal for a little town, as Atlanta was then.
Did you see this newsreel segment I posted on Dec. 16 after the Atlanta premiere?
My father's family and, in fact, the whole town showed up for the premiere of GWTW at the town's movie house - in 1953, 14 years after the release!
This was in rural Arkansas.... How times have changed!
Thanks, I was just defending GWTW from being characterized as a “chick flick”.
The model dressed as Scarlett tossed aside her cigarette and took her station.
A Cigarette! That's as bad as showing your bosom before three o'clock.
Nice column. Thanks. Stanley Crouch has a good feel for popular culture.
The review and accompanying articles are fascinating.
BUMP!
Of interest to locals is the fact that two of the three radio stations on the mike setup are still around - WSB "The Voice of the South" and WGST (home of Rush Limbaugh).
I can't read the third one in the middle, the last two letters of the call sign are "GA" - but WCGA isn't that old.
Clearly not a chick flick. Scarlett is very unsympathetic. On the other hand, I wanted to take Melanie Wilkes by the shoulders and SHAKE some sense into her head.
People with sense start their wedding before six, so the guests don't have to wear evening gowns and tuxedos.
Have you read the Margaret Mitchell’s biography “Southern Daughter”? It’s well known by we GWTW fans that she spent many hours on her grandfathers lap listening to stories about the antebellum period, the war and it’s aftermath. But the biography goes into much more detail about her life from childhood until her death. It’s a very good bio. Highly recommended by yours truly.
Sorry Oztrich Boy, but GWTW is NOT just "another" chick flick. It's an amazing film with depth of meaning and metaphor.
Some entrepreneur sold the bricks from the Grand. I used to see them all boxed up with certificates of authenticity at a flea market in Chamblee.
At best that supports AnAmericanMother's post about it portraying a created Southern Myth about the GoodOldDays
At worst 
There’s nothing chicks like more than hatin’ on other chicks.
Man, I’m glad I missed that then! I was so interested in horses (and books) in school that all that girl stuff just passed me right by.
I had two sides of the family though. One side were small urban (Charleston, Augusta) tradesmen during and after the War and were determinedly upwardly mobile and urban. They tended to sugar-coat and romanticize the War.
The other side were Alabama plantation owners, but real hardworking farmers, not the effete aristocrats of GWTW legend. Anybody who looked over the plantation account books and property tax returns (as I did . . . to the point of weariness) realized immediately that farming is a business proposition and takes a good deal of talent and skill.
In fact, the topic of my thesis was exploring the difference between the myth and the reality of the experiences of post-War Southern families.
The Margaret Mitchell theory was that the soft, aristocratic Southern planter class was destroyed by the War and supplanted by white trash dirt farmers (the Slatterys) who brought in greedy pursuit of filthy lucre and changed the South forever.
But I found in my research that the families that were wealthy before the War found ways, by hook or crook, to restore their fortunes relatively quickly afterwards. Even if they were completely beggared by the War and Reconstruction. One gg grandfather was left penniless with a wife and three children - he was a lawyer and banker before the War, his money was worthless and he was attaindered because he was a Confederate officer and forbidden to practice law. He used two of his old artillery horses to run a carting and delivery service until he could get the family back on its feet. Eventually, of course, he was back banking and practicing law and prospered until his death in 1917. The other gg grandfather on that side went right back to farming - and persuaded his emancipated slaves to stay on and take a wage to help him make a crop. (All of this can be demonstrated, by the way, from contemporaneous records, not golden-hued reminiscence long after the fact.) He too died very wealthy, although everything was taken from him but his land.
It's the old saw that if you divided all the money in the world up equally, after the passage of a certain amount of time the same people who had most of the money to begin with will wind up with it again. Talent, hard work, resilience, strong moral fiber . . . those people persist and are not wiped out, or not for long.
So really, the true story of the post-War Southern experience is less romantic but much more encouraging than the legend.
It doesn't matter what you've got, SOMEbody at SOME flea market eventually will want it!
How would you know that it was an honest to goodness real brick from the Grand? lol It could be from any old building and he was getting 10-15 dollars a brick.
It - as you must be aware - is "Gone With the Wind", the gargantuan Selznick edition of the Margaret Mitchell novel which swept the country like Charlie McCarthy, "The Music Goes 'Round" and similar inexplicable phenomena; which created the national emergency over the selection of a Scarlett O'Hara and which, ultimately, led to the $4,000,000 production that faced the New York public on two Times Square fronts last night, the Astor and the Capitol. It is the picture for which Mr. Gallup's American Institute of Public Opinion has reported a palpitantly waiting audience of 56,500,000 persons, a few of whom may find encouragement in our opinion that they won't be disappointed in Vivian Leigh's Scarlett, Clark Gable's Rhett Butler or, for that matter, in Mr. Selznick's Miss Mitchell.
(snip)
Anyway "it" has arrived at last, and we cannot get over the shock of not being disappointed; we had almost been looking forward to that.
(snip)
...Technicolor - although we still feel that color is hard on the eyes for so long a picture.
Who signed the "certificate of authenticity"?
(From Wikipedia)
The Music Goes ‘round
The music was written by Edward Farley and Mike Riley, the lyrics by Red Hodgson, and was published in 1935. It was included on the 1961 Ella Fitzgerald album Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie (Verve). The song was recorded by Tommy Dorsey and became a hit in 1936.[1] The song was the musical interlude for the Columbia movie “The Music Goes ‘round” in 1936.
“The Music Goes ‘round” (1936).
Notes for the Record on “Music Goes ‘round,” at the Capitol, and Other Recent Arrivals. New York Times. February 22, 1936.
“If we really wanted to be nasty about it, we could say that this Farley-Riley sequence is the best thing in the new picture. At least it makes no pretense of being anything but a musical interlude dragged in by the scruff of its neck to illustrate the devastating effect upon the public of some anonymous young busybody’s question about the workings of a three-valve sax horn. Like the “March of Time,” it preserves in film the stark record of a social phenomenon—in this case, the conversion of a song hit into a plague, like Japanese beetles or chain letters.”
Having lived in the deep South, which was only decades from the Civil War, as a child, I can attest to the authenticity of much of the film. The culture had not changed all that much except for the absence of slavery and the poverty left by the war. I love the film and the book . They speak to my6 heart because I recognize a part of myself in it. It’s sort of like when people say about Sarah Palin,”She’s like me.” You know what you feel even if you can’t quite put your finger on it.
HJS, thank you for posting this. I loved all the pictures that I had not seen before. Brought back a lot of memories.
I worked in Virginia with a woman from old Virginia stock. Her grandmother told her the story of her great-great grandmother who ran guns across Yankee lines on horseback. When challenged by Yankee pickets she galloped off. They fired, whether into the air or at her in vain is a fact lost to history. Her grandmother ended the story, dripping with indignation at the ungentlemanly Yankees, “... and her a mother!”
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