Gone with the Wind (1939)

	Also Known As: -
	Year of first release: 1939
	Director: Victor Fleming (The Wizard of Oz)
	Actors: Clark Gable (Mutiny on the Bounty), Vivien Leigh (Anna Karenina, A Streetcar Named Desire), Thomas Mitchell
	Country: USA
	Genre: Romance, Drama
	Conditions of visioning: 24.05.2015, Blu-ray, Home cinema
Synopsis: In a Southern State of the USA, Scarlett (Leigh) is a young woman full of energy, she likes to dance and get courted by men and doesn't worry about the future. The coming Civil War will put an end to this life and force her to grow up.
Review: I rarely find the time to empty my Blu-ray shelf of some 3- or 4-hour long movies it holds, as this one that has been sitting there for years. Gone with the Wind is a classic, near the top of many lists of best movie of all times. Indeed it shows us a slice of American History from the point of view not of some politician or military man (like Spielberg's Lincoln does) but of a young innocent girl from the South on whom the influence of the War will be very strong. Also the abolition of slavery is not a central theme to the movie, which may be why it was criticized of being pro-South. However it taught me some aspects of the American civil war that I didn't know about, like the Yankee armies pillaging the South or the the so-called carpet-baggers abusing power after the war. 75 years ago the recipe was already known of focusing on a single character to actually tell a story much bigger than him/her. I remember thinking the same about James Cameron's Titanic. The character of Scarlett is touching and her evolution and resolution in life is impressive, although sometimes far-fetched, like when she looses her husband and barely cares (well, this is not the only person that will die in the movie, times were rough). One gets to successively like and dislike her behavior as the movie goes along, but we always understand her motivation. The romance with the men surrounding her (and in particular the one played by Clark Gable, much older) is a bit overdone but nothing surprising for a 1939 movie taking place in the 1860's. The image quality of my Blu-ray edition is pretty good and I loved some scenes in which the characters are silhouettes against the setting sun, a cinematographic choice not common at that period. I cannot deny the cult status of the movie, but as I had already noticed with the other classics Citizen Kane and The Searchers, the topic is not as interesting for me as it is to an American audience, thus I cannot say that it is a masterpiece. I do not have this problem with 2001, A Space Odyssey for example, in which I found the themes more universal.
Rating: 8 /10