Gone With The Wind: Frankly my dear, we DO still give a damn

CRITICS thought it offensive, its stars conducted feuds and its five directors feared it was a disaster. So why, 70 years on, does Gone With The Wind still captivate us?

ICONIC Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh in their classic clinch ICONIC: Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh in their classic clinch

There was a visible glow about Vivien Leigh the morning filming began. In her pretty white layered dress, she radiated a certain smug happiness.

It may have been her great ­satisfaction at having landed Hollywood’s most coveted female role ever but it is more likely that she was still tingling from a marathon love-making session with her future husband Laurence ­Olivier the night before.

Whatever it was, the “look” was ­perfect for the part of Scarlett O’Hara, the sexy, wilful, tempestuous ­Southern belle at the dramatic centre of Gone With The Wind.

The story of that satisfied glow is part of the folklore surrounding the making of what is rightly regarded as the greatest film ever made.

Now a new book about the blockbusting movie reveals extraordinary insights into its making and how, after 70 years, it is still regarded as a symbol of Hollywood’s golden age.

HOLLYWOOD EPIC Gone With The Wind still lives powerfully on HOLLYWOOD EPIC: Gone With The Wind still lives powerfully on

Set in the American South around the time of the Civil War and its aftermath, the film tells of the life, loves and dramas surrounding spoiled beauty Scarlett.

It also established the beautiful (if neurotic) Vivien Leigh as a major star. But there were early problems with casting Clark Gable as the male lead. Not only did he greatly dislike the producer David O Selznick, he also had reservations about the part of the hero, Rhett Butler.

In the film, he is unable to make Scarlett love him – even after he sweeps her up to the bedroom and all but rapes her. This, reasoned Gable, was hardly in keeping with his film idol image.

But the cunning Selznick enlisted Carole Lombard, an actress with whom Gable was conducting an affair, to encourage him. If you cry on screen, she urged him, “women all over the world will worship you until the day you die”.

Casting Scarlett was more difficult. Dozens of actresses were considered, including such established stars as Katharine Hepburn and Norma Shearer. After a two-year search, it came down to Paulette Goddard and Vivien Leigh.

But the British actress’s ability to transform herself into the selfish, determined, sometimes ­venomous Southern belle won her the part. Her very determination to win the role shone through. Totally ­unknown in Hollywood, she left her husband and child in Britain and paid her passage to California where she persuaded Olivier, her enslaved lover, to engineer an introduction to Selznick. The camera just adored her, in ­particular her beautiful green eyes .

Olivier said: “She had an attraction of the most perturbing nature I have ever encountered. It may have been the strangely touching spark of ­dig­nity in her that enslaved her legion of ­admirers.”

Unfortunately, Clark Gable didn’t adore her and it was said that she complained of his bad breath.

The film was based on the 1937 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name by Margaret Mitchell, a former Atlanta Journal reporter. It took her 10 years to produce and has since sold more than 30 million copies. She was a highly strung woman – a “bag of neuroses” according to some – who fled from personal publicity.

Certain incidents in book and film were obviously inspired by Mitchell’s life. Her first husband, a no-good bootlegger, was partly a model for Rhett (although without his rugged charm). He was a violent man who had assaulted his wife. (She kept a loaded pistol by her bed to repel his advances.) Mitchell transformed the assault into the story’s marital “rape” which Rhett claims is a punishment for Scarlett – and one which visibly awakens her sexual desires.

Such an intensely risqué ­element is part of the reason for the film’s enduring appeal. The film broke new and adventurous ground when others provided timid entertainment.

Gone With The Wind broaches subjects seldom touched before and certainly not in such an ­extravagant manner – thorny areas such as the physical side of marriage, race, class and liberated women.

All this is set against the background of an America divided by Civil War and the film’s examination of loyalties (still evident in today’s America) was deep and revealing.

More than that, its collaboration between a dictatorial film mogul (Selznick), a desperately ambitious actress (Leigh) full of pent-up frustration that work commitments meant she couldn’t see more of Olivier, and a rebellious, secretive and controlling author (Mitchell) gave the film a uniqueness that captivates to this day.

And of course what on the surface promises to be an intensely romantic experience is, in some ways, the ultimate anti-romance, an epic in which the heroine never quite grows up, who never melts in the arms of love in the way so many other film heroines of that time did.

But Mitchell was appalled by the film and wanted nothing to do with it. She was killed in a road accident in Atlanta in 1949, having never written another novel and always regretting that Gone With The Wind had been made into a film.

Turning it into that Oscar-­scooping movie – it won 10 – was not without problems. The original screenplay was written by playwright Sidney Howard, whose first script would have required at least six hours of film. He refused to make cuts and Selznick was forced to try out other writers. These included novelist F Scott Fitzgerald who spent much of the time drunk.

Eventually, the famed writer Ben Hecht (who was in the middle of writing a Marx Brothers film) shut himself away and, existing on a diet of peanuts and bananas, wrote the entire screenplay in five days.

The film, like the book, takes a sympathetic view of the South in the American Civil War. Honour and genteel manners are emphasised and, although the Confederacy lost, Gone With The Wind gives them a sense of being right. Mitchell had spent hours as a child listening to the Civil War stories of her uncles and grandparents. Until she was 10, she had no idea that the South had lost the war.

Further problems occurred soon after shooting began on January 26, 1939. Director George Cukor was sacked after three weeks and replaced by Victor Fleming. Secretly, however, Cukor continued to coach Leigh and ­co-star Olivia de Havilland. Three other directors were credited for contributions: Sam Wood, William Cameron Menzies and B Reeves ­Eason.

There were other difficulties for the film’s formidable black cast. Although Mammy, Scarlett’s rotund maid played by Hattie McDaniel, was a strong and positive role, many in the black community regarded the film as “a weapon of terror against black America”.

Even after the actress won an Oscar for her performance (becoming the first African-American ­woman ever to win the award), she and her companion were forced to sit at a separate table at the rear of the awards banquet in Hollywood. But what most lovers of the film ­remember is its dramatic finale, Rhett’s closing line to a distraught Scarlett who is begging him to stay.

“Where shall I go? What shall I do,” she pleads in desperation. With masterly scorn, he turns on her, ­saying quite firmly: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

But the word “damn” was considered a serious swear word in 1939 and a special amendment had to be made to the strict Hollywood Production Code for it to be included.

When filming ended the set was dismantled, leaving only the facade of Scarlett’s home, Tara.

As Selznick observed at the time: “Nothing in Hollywood is permanent. Once photographed, life here is ended. Tara had no rooms inside. It was just a facade. So much of Hollywood is a facade.”

Facade it may have been – but Gone With The Wind lives powerfully on.

To a copy of Frankly My Dear by Molly Haskell (Yale University Press) for £16.99 with free UK delivery, send cheque/PO payable to the Daily Express Bookshop to: Molly Haskell Offer, PO Box 200, Falmouth TR11 4WJ, or phone 0871 988 8367 with credit/debit card details or order online at www.expressbookshop.com. Calls cost 10p per minute from BT landlines.

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