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ON THE SET

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Gone With the Wind, 1939.

This scene with the Tarleton boys, Scarlett O’Hara’s first appearance in the film, was shot multiple times for multiple reasons — because the boys’ first red hair dye looked unnatural, because Selznick wanted a dress for Leigh that came across as more virginal than the one originally chosen.

By the time they got around to doing it for the last time, Leigh looked so worn out from the long production that it wasn’t felt she could play a convincing sixteen, Scarlett’s age at the film’s opening.  So she was given several weeks’ rest and brought back to do it once more after the other principal photography had been completed.

Click on the image to enlarge.

ANOTHER AMAZON CUSTOMER REVIEW

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Fun, weird, wonderful

Really fun! A highly entertaining story which starts off pretty funny and then grabs you by the throat! Mr. Fonvielle is clearly in his element here, which is good news for the rest of us. His detective fiction is every bit as strange, moving, sweet, scary and resonant as his Westerns. A whopping good tale with characters that kick around in your head for a while, and which you know you’re going to miss when it’s all over. I wanted to inhabit the story a little while longer, maybe hang out at The Shipwreck, order a beer, and ask everybody, “What did you guys think of that? Pretty wild, huh?” Instead, I’ll just have to wait and hope the writer sends more stuff like this our way.

For the review and book details go here — Black Pearl.

ESSENTIAL

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It’s hard to convey how good this movie looks on Blu-ray.  Digital technology makes it possible to align the elements of a three-strip Technicolor negative more precisely than was ever possible before, creating a clarity in the image that’s dazzling.

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You can certainly make valid criticisms of the film itself, for its pious romanticizing of the antebellum South and slavery, for its distressing (if well-intentioned) patronizing of its black characters.  What you can’t deny is that it’s one of the grandest entertainments ever concocted by anyone in any medium.

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A fine cast, a literate and amusing script, sure-footed direction and the deployment of studio craftsmanship on a stupendous scale result in a film of breathtaking virtuosity — part soap opera, part melodrama, part epic, part lyrical romance, part tragedy.

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Producer David Selznick put the package together with canny calculation and good taste but director Victor Fleming invested it with life, made the elements cohere into a timeless work of popular art.  His direction of the film ranks among the highest achievements of Hollywood’s Golden Age.

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It’s just the damnedest thing.  The Blu-ray of Gone With the Wind belongs in every civilized home.

Click on the images to enlarge.

NOW AVAILABLE

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. . . on Amazon for the Kindle (or just about any computer or portable device with the free Kindle reading apps you can get here.)

Black Pearl is a lurid pulp thriller with a supernatural edge, set in the South Pacific and New York City. Harry Jakes, an ex private eye from Manhattan, is running a cheap but charming bar on a remote Pacific island and thinks he’s left his gumshoe days behind—until a shady figure walks into his dive in the middle of a typhoon and sets in motion a fantastical chain of events that will embroil him and his two best friends in a web of uncanny terror and suspense. At the heart of it is a mysterious young Polynesian woman who may or may not be a ghost and a priceless black pearl that any number of people are willing to kill for. A spooky, sexy novella from the author of Bloodbath.

Buy it here for only $2.99.