When HBO Max went live last month, one of the streaming service’s selling points was its TCM-branded channel of Hollywood classics, including “Citizen Kane,” “Singin’ in the Rain,” “Casablanca” — and “Gone With the Wind,” the Oscar-winning 1939 adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s novel, and, according to the American Film Institute, the sixth-greatest American movie of all time.
But on Monday — amid intense reflections on depictions of race and policing in popular culture after protests about police brutality — the filmmaker John Ridley wrote an op-ed in The Los Angeles Times pleading with HBO Max to remove “Gone With the Wind” from its streaming library. “It is a film that glorifies the antebellum south,” wrote Ridley, who won an Oscar for the “12 Years a Slave” screenplay. “It is a film that, when it is not ignoring the horrors of slavery, pauses only to perpetuate some of the most painful stereotypes of people of color.”
On Tuesday night, the service temporarily pulled the film from its catalog, citing the need for “an explanation and a denouncement” of the movie’s depictions of race relations — presumably something similar to the “outdated cultural depictions” disclaimer offered on some titles on Disney Plus.
In fact, “Gone With the Wind” is no stranger to controversy. Here’s a quick explainer.
I’ve never seen the movie. What’s the story?
As with Mitchell’s best-selling novel, “Gone With the Wind” is set on a Georgia plantation during and after the Civil War. The protagonist is Scarlett O’Hara (Viven Leigh), headstrong daughter of the plantation owner, and the primary focus of the narrative is her romantic exploits. But a fair amount of the film’s leisurely 221-minute running time is spent on the struggle to keep the plantation afloat, and on Scarlett’s relationships with the family’s slaves, including Prissy (Butterfly McQueen), Pork (Oscar Polk) and Mammy (Hattie McDaniel, who won an Oscar for her performance — the first African-American so honored).
What do critics object to?
As Ridley notes, the primary point of contention is the film’s romanticizing of the antebellum South, and its whitewashing of the horrors of slavery. The film presents the region’s pre-Civil War era as a utopia of tranquil living, and the Northern forces as interlopers, trying to disrupt that way of life. The servant characters are written and played as docile and content, more dedicated to their white masters than to the struggle of their fellow enslaved people (and uninterested in leaving the plantation after the war). And, much like D.W. Griffith’s horrifying hit “The Birth of a Nation,” the film casts the freed slaves of the Reconstruction era as morally dangerous and politically naïve.
How was it received when it was released?
Most critics joined in a chorus of praise, and moviegoers flocked to theaters. It remains the top-grossing film of all time, when adjusted for ticket price inflation. The academy was also impressed, giving it 10 Oscars, including best picture, best actress, best director (Victor Fleming) and, of course, McDaniel’s statuette.
So nobody objected in 1939?
Right-leaning pundits have already branded HBO Max’s removal as yet another example of contemporary “woke”-ism run amok, but “Gone With the Wind” has been the object of controversy since its inception. As detailed by Leonard J. Leff in The Atlantic, several groups sent letters to the producer, David O. Selznick, while the film was in preproduction, flagging their concerns with Mitchell’s novel, including its frequent use of racist slurs and characterization of the Ku Klux Klan as a “tragic necessity.” The Los Angeles Sentinel called for a boycott of “every other Selznick picture, present and future.”
Under that pressure, Selznick and his screenwriter, Sidney Howard, ultimately softened some of those elements, and agreed to the N.A.A.C.P.’s suggestion of hiring a technical adviser “to watch the entire treatment of the Negroes.” In fact, he hired two — both of them white.
When the film was released, the dramatist Carlton Moss wrote in The Daily Worker that the film “offered up a motley collection of flat black characters that insulted the black audience,” singling out McDaniel’s Mammy as “especially loathsome.” The Chicago Defender put an even finer point on it, calling the film “a weapon of terror against black America.”
What’s more, according to Leff, demonstrations and protests were held at theaters in several major markets, including Washington, D.C., Chicago and Brooklyn. To some extent, the protests have never stopped; despite the film’s canonization as an American classic, prominent voices from Malcolm X to Spike Lee to Ridley have spoken out through the decades about its troubling themes, characterizations and imagery. And with this most recent flap, it’s become clear that concerns over the film’s representation and context aren’t going away anytime soon.
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‘Gone With the Wind’ and Controversy: What You Need to Know - The New York Times
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