GONE WITH THE WIND

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Gone With the Wind arrived in Wilmington, North Carolina on 26 February 1940.  The whole world was abuzz about the film, which was already on its way to becoming the highest grossing movie of all time, in adjusted dollars.  (The Birth Of A Nation may well have made more money but complete box office records for it have not survived, so we will never know.)

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Nowhere was the buzz more intense than in the South, anxious to experience the romantic vision of antebellum Dixie that lived, however preposterously, in most Southern hearts.  Young Southern women were going to see the notorious Scarlett O’Hara in action, courted by none other than Clark Gable, the screen’s premiere heart throb, as Rhett Butler.

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An advance ad for the film in Wilmington’s The Morning Star read, “Wilmington and East Carolina Welcome Gone With the Wind With Open Arms!”

My mom (pictured today at the head of this post), who grew up in Wilmington, was 14 years-old at the time and she and some girlfriends had plans to go downtown to see the film on its opening day.  It would not be like any other trip to the movies.

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The film was playing at The Carolina, Wilmington’s premiere movie palace, located on the corner of Market Street and Second, just blocks from her father’s, my grandfather’s, men’s clothing store on Front Street.  The Carolina had a marble-faced lobby and a whites-only policy — it was too classy to admit blacks, even in a special segregated section.

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Gone With the Wind would be playing in a modified road-show presentation, carefully negotiated by the film’s producer and part-owner David O. Selznick and its distributor and part-owner MGM.  There would be two “continuous run” showings per day, at 10am and 2pm, priced at 75 cents a ticket, three to five times the price for a regular movie.  (Continuous run meant that you could go into the theater in the middle of the first show and sit through the first half of the second show — the seats weren’t reserved.)

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At night it was reserved seating only, with tickets priced at $1.10.  (These could be bought in advance at a furniture store downtown.)  Because the movie ran nearly four hours, a transportation company had arranged for special buses to ply the regular city routes after hours, picking up patrons in front of the theater at 11:45 at the end of the 8pm show.

It was an event, a big event.  My mom was beside herself with excitement about it.  But the night before the opening, her father decided that he would not allow her to see the movie.  He was a fairly strict Baptist, who would not permit card playing in the home on Sundays and did not approve of movies, even the grand Southern epic that was Gone With the Wind.  My mom was devastated.

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In her 80s she still remembered the moment vividly.  “I went to sleep that night,” she told me, in hushed tones, “thinking I wasn’t going to see Gone With the Wind.”  The dashed dreams of a 14 year-old girl are not small things, and they don’t grow smaller after a mere 70 years.

The next morning, however, her father had changed his mind — he relented and let her go see the movie with her friends, and she became one among millions enchanted by that marvel of popular art when it was brand new.

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Her impressions of that first showing — she’s seen it several times since — are vague, but she always remembered that it had an intermission.  An intermission!

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.

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.

ESTHER WILLIAMS

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. . . in Hawaii (doubling for Tahiti) — Pagan Love Song, 1950.

This was Arthur Freed’s only try at producing an Esther Williams film — his innovation was shooting a lot of it on location.  The film made a little money but not as much as most Esther Williams vehicles, because of the cost of the location work.

Click on the image to enlarge.

SOUTH OF THE BORDER

Ringo Starr said he had no particular interest in music until he heard, around the age of seven, Gene Autry singing this song in a movie.  It left him with a lifelong love of Country and Western music, and he called Autry the most significant musical force in his life.

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The clip at the head of this post is probably the scene he was referring to, from South Of the Border, 1939, though Ringo would have to have seen a reissue of it sometime after WWII.  Discussing it in 1976, he misremembered its details — he thought Autry had slung his leg over the horn of his saddle when singing the song — but he described it as his “first musical experience”, one that had stuck in his brain ever since.

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He added that his bedroom was covered with Gene Autry posters.

WHAT I’M SPINNING NOW

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This double-LP set consists of excerpts from the film’s soundtrack complete with effects and dialogue.  Not the best presentation of the musical score but a fascinating way to study the audio mix of the film, which is very complex and inventive.  The sound effects and the dialogue and the score and the occasional rock songs were all integrated into a seamless “musical” tapestry.

Click on the image to enlarge.