Movies/Ed Rampell

What About Confederate Movie Monuments — Like ‘Gone with the Wind’?

This year marks the 80th anniversary of David O. Selznick’s epic “Gone with the Wind,” which scored eight Oscars and five other noms and, as previously mentioned, was the very first movie that kicked off the Turner Classic Movies channel’s programming 25 years ago. Although it’s an undeniably well-made, early Technicolor feature, given its touchy antebellum, Civil War and Reconstruction era racially-charged subject matter and setting in the Deep South, the saga of Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh), Rhett Butler (Clark Gable), the Tara plantation, etc., GWTW has become an increasingly sensitive, if not outright contentious topic over the decades as Black pride, consciousness, the quest for historical accuracy and more, have grown.

The TCM Classic Film Festival actually showed this four hour spectacle, still greatly beloved by many fans, at 4:30 p.m., April 14 on the big screen at the TCL Chinese Theatre IMAX. However, it is VERY MUCH to TCM’s credit that shortly before projecting GWTW a panel entitled “The Complicated Legacy of Gone with the Wind” was presented in “Club TCM” at the Roosevelt Hotel. The hour-long discussion was presided over by film historian extraordinaire Donald Bogle, who is arguably the planet’s top authority on the screen image and celluloid stereotypes of African Americans. The discussants included two very knowledgeable, authoritative Black women, producer Stephanie Allain (2005’s “Hustle & Flow,” 2014’s “Dear White People”) and Jacqueline Stewart, Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago, author of 1994’s “Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Urban Black Modernity.” The only Caucasian panelist was esteemed critic and author, Molly Haskell, a Southerner who reviewed cinema for The Village Voice, New York magazine and Vogue and wrote many books, including 1974’s “From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies” and 2009’s “Frankly, My Dear: ‘Gone with the Wind’ Revisited” (Icons of America). Born the year GWTW was released, Haskell co-hosted TCM’s “The Essentials” series in 2006 with the late, lamented Robert Osborne.

Given the controversial, even explosive issues of slavery, racism, the Ku Klux Klan, etc. (hey, it doesn’t get much more inflammatory than that, folks!), the panel managed to be forthright and thoughtful throughout, never shirking their moral obligation to take on what those gals on The View would call “hot topics.” Yet, the three black and one white discussant managed to do so in a dignified way, without blowing their cool, resorting to name-calling, insults or even coming to blows. The same was mostly true of the standing room-only audience’s questions in Club TCM toward the panel’s end.

Giving GWTW its due, Allain gushed that it was indeed, “a great movie, incredible … Scarlett had total agency over her life. She was equal to men.” (The panel pointed out that novelist Margaret Mitchell’s mother Maybelle was a suffragette.) Much of the speakers’ comments dealt with the character of Mammy, brilliantly portrayed by Hattie McDaniel, the first African American to be nominated for and to win an Academy Award (for Best Supporting Actress). “Damn, Mammy is so smart,” Allain insisted. Indeed, at one point Rhett tells Scarlett: “Mammy’s a smart old soul. And one of the few people whose respect I’d like to have.” (Rather remarkably, Rhett gives Mammy a red silk petticoat as a gift.)

Bogle pointed out that Mammy arguably plays the maternal role for Scarlett, noting that her birth mother is often missing in action. (While every GWTW viewer knows, for example, that Ashley Wilkes was portrayed by Leslie Howard, who remembers that Barbara O’Neil played Scarlett’s mom — or that her character’s name was “Ellen”?) Bogle, author of groundbreaking books such as 1973’s “Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks,” insisted: “Mammy really is Scarlett’s mother.” Not only that, but Mammy is also often the arbiter of the proper code of behavior, who frets when Scarlett misbehaves.

Get a load of Mammy’s dialogue at a pre-War plantation shindig: “If you don’t care what folks says about this family, I does! I is told you and told you that you can always tell a lady by the way she eat in front of folks like a bird. And I ain’t aiming for you to go to Mr. John Wilkes’ and eat like a field hand and gobble like a hog!” Later, the House Negro exclaims: “It ain’t fittin’... it ain’t fittin’. It jes’ ain’t fittin’’.. It ain’t fittin.” (Such judgmental bossiness, despite Mammy’s enslavement and eventual postwar servitude!)

The character of Prissy is more problematic. “She’s a complete ninny; a liar, [derived from] minstrel humor,” Haskell insisted. However, the panelists expressed admiration for the acting skill of Butterfly McQueen, who portrayed Prissy, as being “completely unrecognized.” But a panelist pointed out how by “playing dumb and dissembling,” Prissy may have been putting on an act to get out of doing harder work as a slave and then servant.

Bogle, the astute film historian, added that for the most part, GWTW’s black characters did not have a life of their own — they primarily existed when Caucasian dramatis personae were onscreen, in relation to the all-important whites, who they served (first as slaves, then as servants and sharecroppers). While we may see Miss Melanie (Olivia de Havilland - who at 102 is still alive!) and Ashley alone at, say, the Twelve Oaks plantation, we rarely if ever see the Blacks mingling among their selves (a brief exception I can recall may be at a postwar encampment of Blacks where some foul play thwarted by Black Sam occurs). Bogle later added that this same one-dimensional perspective (plus some other factors) led “Don Shirley’s family to object” to the pianist’s depiction in 2018’s Oscar-winning “The Green Book.”

The in-the-know Bogle stated that producer Selznick sought to tone down the more blatant racism of Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize. The cinema historian gave at least two examples of this: Selznick removed use of the “N” word from the movie version, although as I recall the “D” word was repeatedly used. “Darkie” is also a racial slur, but of a different degree from the more derogatory “N” word (unless you’re cable TV’s Issa Rae or Desus and Mero, seeking today’s coveted ethnic demographic, that is). Selznick also had the novel’s reference to the KKK removed, although as I remember Ashley, Rhett, etc., pretended to be drunk at Belle Watling’s (Ona Munson) brothel after staging a violent anti-black incident as what I believe were called “night riders” onscreen.

Was Selznick more racially sensitive because he was a Jew living at a time when the Holocaust was underway - or was the producer being more politically correct to avoid harming GWTW’s box office? In any case, Selznick was not the only one who tried to do the right thing during the making of the extravaganza: When an African American extra informed Gable that the toilets on the set were segregated, the King of Hollywood used his star power to correct this injustice. However, panelists decried the segregated premiere of GWTW in 1939 Atlanta, which McDaniel (and McQueen) could not attend — while Confederate veterans were guests of honor at Lowe’s Grand Theater.

North Carolina-born Haskell ruminated and rued that GWTW “demonizes Reconstruction,” that post-Civil War era of black power, which Haskell added historian “Eric Foner has recently corrected” the record about. Towards the end of his remarks, Bogle thoughtfully asked: “Should we take Southern monuments down? I think they should be.” But does this mean that racist movies such as D.W. Griffith’s 1915 “The Birth of a Nation,” Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 Nazi propaganda chronicle “Triumph of the Will” and “GWTW” should never be publicly screened? Not necessarily — the best way to do so is to show them when accompanied by excellent, thought provoking discussions like TCM Fest’s “The Complicated Legacy of Gone with the Wind,” which provides moviegoers with historical context, insight and accuracy, enabling viewers to better understand and appreciate these challenging works.

Ed Rampell is a film historian and critic based in Los Angeles. Rampell is the author of “Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States” and he co-authored “The Hawaii Movie and Television Book,” now in its third edition.

From The Progressive Populist, June 15, 2019

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