Gone with the Wind (1939)
Directed by Victor Fleming
The spoiled daughter of a Georgia plantation owner conducts a tumultuous romance with a cynical profiteer during the American Civil War and Reconstruction Era.
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What critics compared Gone with the Wind to
From the first moments of the film — a retro studio logo followed by a heroic theme song and a scrolling red title that evokes the opening of “Gone With the Wind” — we know we are in Tarantino’s universe, where the floss of film history gets spun into gold.
Of course, Spielberg is working in a time-honored tradition: After The Birth of a Nation, with its risible scenes of freed slaves raping and pillaging white Southerners, movies have treated this "peculiar" institution mostly at arm's length, from the happy slaves of Gone With the Wind and Song of the South to the simian allegories of King Kong and Planet of the Apes.
Movies like “Gone With The Wind” give us a much sanitized version.
So after calling out the Nazis and showing what comic figures they truly are, Tarantino is doing the same to the rich, white racists who ran the “Gone With the Wind” South.
There’s a point in “Django Unchained” when its sheer absurdity, luridness and violence pose an inescapable challenge to the skeptical literalists in the audience: Sure, this is an outrageous distortion, the "Django Unchained" movie itself seems to say, but is it any more outrageous than “The Birth of a Nation” or “Gone With the Wind”?
Think of it as Gone With the Wind meets Shaft.
Despite being a southern belle, the inspiration for her character seems to be Butterfly McQueen’s turn as Prissy, the maid in Gone With the Wind who goes to pieces just before uttering the words “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ babies!”
Seventy-one years ago, Hattie McDaniel became the first African-American to win an Academy Award when she took home the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role as the house servant, Mammy, in "Gone With the Wind."
Artistically delivering beyond anyone’s imagination on one of the biggest gambles in Hollywood history, this $330 million masterpiece takes its rightful place among such classics as “The Wizard of Oz,” “Gone With the Wind” and “Lawrence of Arabia.”
But the deleted material will end up on the DVD, and at the end of the day the film magically evokes the impact and spell of the novel -- and the completed trilogy compares with "Gone With the Wind" and "From Here to Eternity" as the screen's most successful literary adaptations.
Granted, music is quite subjective, but I've never found too many period films that are actually underscored by music of their time, anyway, (Was "Tara's Theme" from "Gone With the Wind" really mid nineteenth century?), so it's never seriously bothered me.
Scorsese's film also features a romantic triangle that might cause some viewers to recall that in another civil war epic, "Gone With the Wind" (though this is a much more macho piece).
In quite another sense, Gangs of New York is even more “old-fashioned” in that it takes a tip from that most revered of epics, Gone With the Wind.
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And besides, 12 Years a Slave gives Academy Award voters the chance to scratch an itch that’s been bugging them since the 1960s: It’s an opportunity to “atone” for the 1940 Best Picture winner, Gone With the Wind.
Hollywood movies may have come a long way since the days of Uncle Remus and of Mammy in "Gone With the Wind," but the tacit gentlemen's agreement not to press the issue - not to go too far in rubbing the South's face in it - has kept Hollywood reticent up to the present, much more reticent, say, than Germany has been about its Nazi past.
It's how we get romances — Jezebel, Gone With the Wind, Cold Mountain — that use the antebellum South and Civil War as backdrops but feature either the most entertaining black slaves or almost no slaves at all.
It will be impossible to ever look at “Gone With the Wind’’ the same way after “12 Years a Slave,’’ a brutally powerful and emotionally devastating film that takes great pains to rip any lingering vestiges of romanticism from America’s most shameful institution.
Through this story strand, 12 Years A Slave punctures the romantic myth, perpetuated by Gone With The Wind and its ilk, of the kindhearted slave-owner.
Adapting the memoir by Solomon Northrup, artist-turned-filmmaker McQueen (“Shame,” “Hunger”) and screenwriter John Ridley (“Three Kings,” “Red Tails”) seem determined to obliterate any lingering “Gone With the Wind”-inspired notions that the antebellum South was a place of grace and charm, or that slavery was, in the euphemism of the day, merely a “peculiar institution.”
CAMERON WAS probably trying to make his "Gone with the Wind," but Rose lacks the verve and spirit of Scarlett; Winslet thus is denied any opportunity to do a Vivien Leigh.
Re-watching Titanic 15 years on, there can surely be little remaining doubt that this film ranks alongside Gone With The Wind and Cleopatra as a once-in-a-generation Hollywood epic.
It's a mixed bag, but it won 11 Oscars out of 14 nominations and, despite its monstrous $200 million budget, grossed something like $600 million and beat Gone with the Wind as the most popular film of all time.
At any rate, the film's narrative progression is a hell of a lot closer to a Towering Inferno than it is to the film's most often-cited analogue, Gone with the Wind : that film, like Doctor Zhivago or Reds , follows a single star-crossed couple through years of history, full of different incidents; Titanic takes place over four days, and involves a love affair interrupted by the most famous maritime disaster of the 20th Century.
In " Australia ," the romance between Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman felt obvious, strenuous and unconvincing, on hand for the sole reason that every film trying to ape the style of "Gone with the Wind" needs one.
It is hard to resist the charming appeal of classic storytelling in this dramatic epic that ranks right up there with "Gone with the Wind," "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Titanic."
Perhaps nobody has produced such a juxtaposition of ideas and desires in two films since Victor Fleming made The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind in the same year.
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When Jennifer Lawrence —essential as warrior heroine Katniss Everdeen in Round 2 of this young-adult lit-based enterprise, much in the same way that Vivien Leigh was indispensable in " Gone With the Wind "—suddenly twirls about in her would-be wedding dress during a TV interview meant to distract the downtrodden populace of Panem.
Laurent’s last scenes are so powerful they’re reminiscent of starlets of earlier years who have sacrificed everything to live like Vivien Leigh in Gone With The Wind.