So, I noticed this wasn't here, and when I think of classic movies it is one of the first I think of. I know there are many, and I love several of the movies that are listed in the thread titles here. I guess my fascination with characters and the way they think, are what makes me really like the movie, as well as the book
I think that you would really like the book. There was also a sequel to it that was written by Alexandra Ripley called Scarlett. It is also a really good book, that they turned into a mini-series, which sadly didn't live up to the book in any way at all, in my opinion. Let me know how you like the book and if you find the sequel and what you think of that too I would be interested to know.
I thought Vivien Leigh was the only actor who pulled off the southern accent. Clark Gable did not have to because he was playing an outsider. Some of the themes like a married woman hankering after another man seemed reminiscent of Wuthering Heights.
If you factor in inflation, it remains the biggest grossing film of all time. It's a great romantic movie.
It's weird to drive around this part of Georgia. For a while I was in Fayette county on a regular basis. What has changed since the civil war here is trees. Back then their were far fewer as people used them to cook and heat. Now the trees cover the whole landscape to the point that it's hard to make out the hills and valleys. Over on the west side is a site that's actually called "Hell Hole". Trees hide it well but a century ago it was an obvious feature. As epic movies go, Gone with the Wind is an absolute must-see. For a while in Atlanta Ted Turner had it playing daily at a theater in CNN center. I don't know if that's still the case. These days the long rural drives whilst I get my buzz on have turned into a search for Walking Dead sets. And old railroad trestles.
This movie has so many beautiful songs in it,its a shame they ruined it by DIGITALLY MASTERING it..... (Even CED (videodisc) copies of this movie have digitally enhanced audio) -- No purity @ all left in this beautiful movie and thats sad!!
In the credits of GONE WITH THE WIND the technical adviser is a man named Will Price. He was from Mississippi and a second-rate actor in Hollywood but he had the knack for teaching actors how to speak "southern" for movie roles. He was also married to Maureen O'Hara and was the father of her daughter. Today, Will Price would be called a voice actor for voice overs in commercials and animated programs but they didn't have that kind of acting job in 1939. In her autobiography Maureen O'Hara tells about Will Price.
I agree, but the color on the negatives of all these movies has faded and in many cases, it fades in and out at every turn of the reel. In other cases, the negative has broken down into a crumbling semi liquid state, resulting in having to remaster from a worn positive print. The problem is even worse, since prints prior to 1955 would have been on cellulose nitrate and would be unstable today, bursting into a fireball easily. Remastering companies would never risk running them. You also have to remember that while video adds colors to produce white (RGB), film is subtractive to produce black (YCM). As you can imagine, splitting the film colors, compensating the fade on each (the dyes degrade differently on every make of film), then using a standards converter to convert to RGB, is no easy task. On Gone With The Wind, the color in the cinema would have been very red in 1939, The modern conversions would correct this, shattering your original illusions. Sound is a very different problem. I do not believe that the magnetic 3 track (dialog, music and effects) masters still exist, leaving only an optical track to work from. Like the rest of the film, degradation would leave this sounding as if it was recorded under a waterfall. Sadly engineers would be blind to the original, since few of them were working in 1939. Cleaned up and filtered, accents would have changed drastically.
Speaking of color......................... Hattie McDaniel’s (who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress) wasn’t even allowed to attend the premier of the movie in Atlanta because of the Jim Crow Laws...
Exactly my point - i just can't watch the movie knowing how certain members of the cast were treated.
I knew racism was prevalent back then. I never knew that Hattie McDaniel and the other black stars of GWTW were treated so poorly. Such bullshit..
I seem to remember reading somewhere that when Hattie McDaniel was criticized for mostly playing black maids/servants in movies, her reply was something like she would rather be paid well for playing them in Hollywood movies than being one in real life which, being a black woman of her time, was her only real alternative.
Actress Sue Lyon (LOLITA) was married to a black man. Because of certain laws in the South during the 1960s, theater chains there refused to show her movies after about the mid-1960s. Studios were not going to finance movies with Lyon because they would not play in the South and the studios could not afford to produce a movie that would essentially be boycotted/blackballed in much of the country and therefore doomed to fail financially at the box office. Lyon and her husband moved to Spain for a few years but eventually divorced. She returned to the US in middle age and had a few small roles in low budget movies.