Welcome to Retro Rewind, the TGJ original feature launched to revisit TV and Film’s entertaining yet occasionally difficult past.
Today, we make our back to 1939, the year in which the movie ‘Gone with the Wind’ was released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
In it, we meet the feisty and vivacious belle Scarlett O’Hara, the daughter of a wealthy Irish man whose wealth depends on African-American chattel slavery.
Much to their dismay, their lives are turned upside down when the Civil War strikes the South and eradicates the lifestyle the enslaving and torture of enslaved Africans afforded them.
This forces young O’Hara to find her way in a world that soon becomes cold, dark and dangerous once the North’s efforts to dismantle slavery shatters the cotton-clad fantasy that is her life.
The critic Lou Lumenick had this to say about the problematic yet iconic release:
If the Confederate flag is finally going to be consigned to museums as an ugly symbol of racism what about the beloved film offering the most iconic glimpse of that flag in American culture? It buys heavily into the idea that the civil war was a noble lost cause and casts Yankees and Yankee sympathisers as the villains.
He added:
It goes to great lengths to enshrine the myth that the civil war wasn’t fought over slavery — an institution the film unabashedly romanticises.
Press play to see it for yourself below…
(more…)
