Scarlett Fever (1939-1961)

Gone with the wind are the stars of the film, Clark Gable and Leslie Howard. Ward Bond is dead and gone, and so are George Reeves, Hattie McDaniel, Laura Hope Crews, Ona Munson and ten other members of the featured cast. Margaret Mitchell, who wrote the famous book the movie was adapted from, is dead, and so is Sidney Howard, the playwright who wrote most of the adaptation. Victor Fleming, who directed the picture, is dead too. Hollywood itself is practically dead. But Gone With the Wind goes on forever.

Based on the most awesomely popular novel ever written (total sales to date: 10 million copies), G.W.T.W. was produced by David Selznick for a sum ($3,900,000) that seemed tremendous by the production standards of 1939. He employed 13 scriptwriters, eight directors, four major stars (Gable, Howard, Olivia de Havilland, Vivien Leigh). He took six months to shoot the picture, which ran 3 hrs. 45 min., won ten Academy Awards and made $7,000,000 the first year it was released. In the 22 years since 1939, G.W.T.W. has been showing continuously somewhere in the world. It lasted four years in London and four in Paris, rolled four triumphant times ('39, '40, '48, '54) around the U.S. movie circuits, has been dubbed in five languages and subtitled in 30 others, has pulled 120 million customers through the turnstiles and put $125 million in the till. "Never," brags an M-G-M pressagent, "have so many paid so much to see so much."

Wonderful Flummery. Now, on the anniversary of the first shot in The War Between the States, G.W.T.W. has once more gone into crash release in 200 major theaters across the U.S. To judge from the block-long ticket lines and the weeping, cheering customers, Selznick's epic will make more money this time around than it ever has before. But surely the old warhorse has been spavined by time and enfeebled by continual exposure? Not at all. G.W.T.W. is as great a show today as it was 20 years ago, a magnificent piece of popular entertainment, undoubtedly the greatest soap opera ever written. It has war, rape, murder, conflagration, greed, hate, love, scandal, starvation, childbirth, costumes, nudity, whores, carpetbaggers, slathers of sentiment, dollops of comedy and the burning conviction that all this wonderful flummery is terribly real and exciting and important.

What's more, G.W.T.W. has a grand, simpleminded, 19th century story to tell and a gallery of splendid theatrical caricatures to display. Gable never in later movies topped his performance as Rhett Butler, the man of iron with a heart of caramel. Vivien Leigh, though she seldom shows the tigerish vitality that Author Mitchell wrote into her Scarlett O'Hara, nevertheless makes a fascinating, green-eyed bitch-kitty. And Hattie McDaniel, as Scarlett's hammy old mammy, just about waddles off with the show.

There are, of course, a few anachronisms. The Jim Crow humor, acceptable to most audiences in 1939, will embarrass the average moviegoer today. And there are flaws of style and structure. The second half of the picture tends to maunder a little, and the whole film is afflicted by Producer David Selznick's rather tacky preference for gnarled trees silhouetted against flaming sunsets. The spectator sometimes gets a peculiar sensation that the picture has not really begun--he's still watching the travelogue.

The Platinum Yardstick. Such objections are trifling, and most audiences will not make them. But people who have seen the film before--and some people say they have seen it more than 60 times--may have a more serious complaint: Why has the print been darkened? Every color has been tainted with sepia, and in some scenes the effect is downright morbid. Is this somebody's idea of what DeMille once described as "Rembrandt lighting?" Hardly. The Technicolor elements have aged; their chemical colors have "wandered," as the experts say.

Is the film doomed soon to dry and crumble into powder? Not if loving care can prevent it. In an aluminum can sealed in an air-conditioned, constant temperature vault at MGM's Culver City studios lies one of the most valuable objects of its weight in existence: the master negative of G.W.T.W. Beside it rests the picture's master print, "the platinum yardstick" by which the colors of all new prints are measured. As long as these masters are in reasonably good shape, G.W.T.W. is safe. Prints can be "enhanced," if worst comes to worst, and even if the master negative should deteriorate, film technicians could reconstitute it from one of several sets of the "color strips" stored at widely separated points in the U.S. and Europe. Says an M-G-M executive: "There is no reason to think this film will ever disappear. It will be around as long as people remember the Civil War." Around, and making millions.

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