Word: rhett
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...million copies sold and still counting. The 3 3/4-hour movie, owned by Ted Turner since he bought the MGM film library in 1985, has become the eternal flame of popular culture. It is a safe bet that somewhere in the world, day and night, Clark Gable's Rhett Butler and Vivien Leigh's Scarlett O'Hara flicker across a screen...
...mated the War Between the States with the War Between the Sexes. It was a hard act to follow, even for Mitchell, who died in 1949 after she was struck by a car on Peachtree Street. She had steadfastly refused to write a sequel, preferring the icy finality of Rhett's, "My dear, I don't give a damn" (Gable threw in the "Frankly"). Yet Scarlett's final aria, "Tomorrow is another day," left the door open...
...bears watching: the book conceived, produced and marketed like a theatrical property. The deal came first, the writer came second, and then the publicity machine passed them all. The project was draped in a gauze of secrecy that, now removed, reveals no great surprise. The book is a tease. Rhett and Scarlett remain rascals and opportunists. He continues to profit from the defeat of the Confederacy; she shrewdly expands her Atlanta business interests and plots her slippery husband's recapture. For those who were on Mars last week, the most famous bickerers in literature since Petruchio and Katharina get back...
...takes the reader only a few pages to realize that Ripley has had to / forfeit the novelist's right to create her own characters. Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara sprang from everything Mitchell knew and felt about a time that was still fresh in her region's memory. Ripley's self-imposed handicap shows in the dialogue. Mitchell gave her sardonic hero the best lines, hard- bitten and vivid in the Raymond Chandler style. "I've seen eyes like yours above a dueling pistol," he says to Scarlett. "They evoke no ardor in the male breast." Ripley's Rhett...
...laid the foundations for the modern nation-state. Scarlett begins in 1873, during the late Reconstruction. It is not a romantic period. The first half of the novel finds America's original Material Girl, now 30, shopping and socializing in Atlanta, Savannah and Charleston, where she bumps into Rhett Butler, a wealthy scalawag. She still wants what she cannot have: him. He still plays the can't-live-with-'em, can't-live-without-'em game. Following a sailing mishap, they make impetuous love on a beach. He lowers his mizzen and rejects her once again. She soon discovers...