{"id":10920,"date":"2020-09-01T14:34:00","date_gmt":"2020-09-01T21:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=10920"},"modified":"2020-09-14T14:42:26","modified_gmt":"2020-09-14T21:42:26","slug":"gone-with-the-cold-eyed-realism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2020\/09\/01\/gone-with-the-cold-eyed-realism\/","title":{"rendered":"Gone With The Cold-eyed Realism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

from The New Criterion<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Knights & their ladies fair<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

On the cold-eyed realism of Margaret Mitchell\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>Gone with the Wind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

by\u00a0Bruce Bawer<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=9wNc86LpidM\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Just after the opening credits of\u00a0Gone with the Wind<\/em>\u00a0and before the start of the film proper is a title card that reads as follows (ellipses in the original):<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South . . .<\/em><\/p>

Here in this patrician world the Age of Chivalry took its last bow . . .<\/em><\/p>

Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave . . .<\/em><\/p>

Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind . . <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

These are four very important sentences, because they\u2019re intended to shape the way we view the entire 238-minute movie. Down through the decades, they\u2019ve continued to serve that function. But those four sentences were not written by Margaret Mitchell, the author of the 1936 novel on which the film was based. They aren\u2019t even remotely based on anything in the novel. On the contrary, when Mitchell first encountered the title card at the film\u2019s Atlanta premiere, according to her biographer, Anne Edwards, she winced. \u201c \u2018Cavalier,\u2019 \u201d wrote Edwards, \u201cwas not a word she liked associated with the South.\u201d The words don\u2019t appear in the final shooting script, credited to Sidney Howard, or in any of the innumerable earlier versions of the screenplay done by other hands (including F. Scott Fitzgerald). Instead, the title card, along with six cards that appear later in the film, was composed by the prolific screenwriter and playwright Ben Hecht at the last-minute instigation of the movie\u2019s producer, David O. Selznick (\u201ci am certain you could bat them out in a few minutes,\u201d Selznick telegraphed), and was slipped into the beginning of the picture a few weeks after its first sneak preview.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many people who\u2019ve seen Selznick\u2019s movie but who\u2019ve never opened Mitchell\u2019s novel have acquired the impression that the book is just what Hecht\u2019s title-card suggests: a gauzy, romantic take on the pre-war South. In fact, when the novel is mentioned in passing in accounts of the movie, it\u2019s often summed up by a statement to precisely this effect. For example, in a 2005 biography of Hattie McDaniel, who played Mammy in the film, Jill Watts, a professor of film studies at\u00a0csu\u00a0San Marcos, wrote that \u201cIn Mitchell\u2019s view, the antebellum South was an era of greatness.\u201d In 2004, Matthew Bernstein, a professor of film studies at Emory, described the racial politics of Selznick\u2019s movie as \u201cless-than-progressive,\u201d while adding that \u201cthe film is less offensive than Margaret Mitchell\u2019s novel.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[ click to continue reading at The New Criterion<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The New Criterion Knights & their ladies fair On the cold-eyed realism of Margaret Mitchell\u2019s\u00a0Gone with the Wind. by\u00a0Bruce Bawer Just after the opening credits of\u00a0Gone with the Wind\u00a0and before the start of the film proper is a title card that reads as follows (ellipses in the original): There was a land of Cavaliers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art","category-literary-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10920"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10920\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}